I’ve mentioned that I’ve been drawing a lot of comic book style art lately. And I’m always talking about the notion that computers and robots will soon be taking away a lot of people’s jobs. Today I woke up and found myself thinking about how software could allow non artists to render decent looking comic book art.

We all know computers are great at numbers and calculations. So the question is, can we turn a scene in a comic book world into numbers and calculations? That is exactly what happens with the kind of 3D animation so prevalent in movies (and there we have the added complication of motion.) Basically, any object—a box, a cat, a person, a spaceship—can be reduces to a series of lines and curves and these can be rendered as numbers. So I can envision a software where you basically say, “show me an office space (basically the interior of a box) and put inside it a desk and a guy in a business suit.” Then you could rotate the scene around or move the guy, or move his arms at the joints (like and action figure etc.) From there the software could apply different styles to the way the lines are drawn (using a thin or thick pen for example, or using different kinds of shading techniques.)

This would go a long way towards allowing dilettantes to produced decent looking comic books. But would it also put real comic book artists out of work? I dunno… probably. At least it would make the job market tougher. I suspect what you would start to see would be more of a hybrid approach where some of the art is produced by software and some by an artists.

I’ve also mentioned the idea of software writing stories. I wonder if we will see in my lifetime the first comic book fully created by computer. At point we will know computers are our masters.