Picking up my Hartwell comic work again

I’ve been wanting to write a final post in my series on using generative AI to create my Hartwell comic series — see Part 1: The Family Writing Contest and Part 2: How I Used Generative AI to Create My Comic, Hartwell — but I’ve been struggling for months to finish that final post. I think it’s because I was writing this series as if my work on the comic was done. Now, I’m not so sure.

It’s not that I didn’t want to keep working on the comic. Of course I did. It’s just that I thought it’s life as a gen-AI prototyped comic was done. It started life as a proof of concept for the family writing content, After that, I thought I would use the pages to find an artist to work with me on the series. But then that never materialized either.

Finding an artist seems like the thing I ought to do. I want to support comics artists, and it's how proper comics are made. But it's hard to find an artist to work with, and the economics just don't make sense for a tiny web comic. I'm also really slow at working, juggling this as a side project.

There's also this – I really enjoyed working on Hartwell as a self-produced comic.

I feel bad about that. I don't want to live in a world where generative AI tools take work away from real comics artists. I'm also super conflicted. I think using generative AI tools can lead to new kinds of work and also empower slightly artistic folks like me to realize our dreams of making our own comics. I'm really interested to see where this kind of tooling and art can go.

So all that to say, I'm going back to working on Hartwell as a comic I make fully myself with the help of generative AI tools. I know there could be some controversy in this, and likely some folks will be disappointed I've made this choice. But I also just really want to get back to work on my comic. Let's just see where it goes from here.

This is the the third and final post in a series on the origin story of my comic Hartwell. The first one was about our family writing contest, which lead to the creation of the comic. The second one was about how I used generative AI to create the comic.