#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
HYPERGAMOUSE Episode 101: Euphoric Enlightenment
FRANKENSTEIN – THE RETURN Episode 14: Terror Under Trance
HAMMER OF FREEDOM 2 Episode 23: You’re Freaking Me Out
FAIRY DOOR Episode 56: The Fading Man
CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: ADVENTURE Episode 102: The Brigand
BEN GARRISON Episode 123: Godspeed, Tucker
ALICE IN WONDERLAND Episode 5: The Mouse
三更战 Episode 11: 我们闯入！
STONETOSS Episode 244: Chewsy
A new episode of the late Osamu Tezuka’s Give My Regards to Black Jack has been created by a Japanese team with significant AI assistance:
A new episode of Osamu Tezuka’s famous “Black Jack” manga made with the help of artificial intelligence was unveiled Monday, with the creators saying that while the work reflected the spirit of the late legendary manga artist, its ability to depict human feelings remains an issue.
“We are happy that a very Tezuka Osamu-like work has been created,” said Makoto Tezuka, son of the late artist and director at Tezuka Productions Co, one of the organizers of the project, which was launched to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the medical drama about an unlicensed genius surgeon.
The latest 32-page episode will be published Wednesday in the weekly comic magazine Shukan Shonen Champion and will feature a female patient who has had a transplant for what was supposed to have been a “perfect” AI-made artificial heart. The magazine ran the original Black Jack series from 1973 and 1983.
“The new episode contains the sanctity of life as a theme, and raises issues posed by advanced medical technology in modern society,” Makoto Tezuka told a joint press conference alongside project team members in Tokyo.
The team used generative AI models that learned from some 200 episodes of “Black Jack,” another 200 short-form manga works by Osamu Tezuka who died in 1989, and 20,000 pages of his manga characters’ facial image data.
Under the project, which was officially launched in May, the team input plot ideas into the AI and requested it to come up with a full story for a new Black Jack episode. Interacting with the AI model enhanced creativity, and generated text was adjusted to better reflect the team’s vision of the story in a way readers could easily understand, the team said. The AI models used in the project were ChatGPT’s advanced GPT-4, and Stable Diffusion, an image generator.
New Tezuka ‘Black Jack’ manga episode created using AI unveiled, JAPAN TODAY, 16 November 2023
Once it becomes possible to create stable and reliable characters, AI will revolutionize the industry. It’s going to supercharge the abilities of prolific authors like Chuck Dixon and John C. Wright, and give a significant boost to genuinely creative writers like Gene Wolfe and Roger Zelazny. And it’s going to seriously harm the industry gatekeepers, the unoriginal hacks, and the expensive artists.
Most of all, it’s going to reduce the influence of Hollywood, which has utilized its monopoly on distribution and expensive art production, by reducing the cost of what has always been the most expensive part of video production. So, I see it as a very good and literally pro-creative technological development.
Needless to say, Arkhaven is actively embracing the use of AI on Arktoons, although almost entirely on the visual side instead of the written side.
CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 316: Rehab is for Quitters
THE SIDEWINDERS Episode 46: The Price of Madness
WARDOGS INC. Episode 33: Cemetery Hill
GIVE MY REGARDS TO BLACK JACK Episode 32: Even if You’re Right
GORGO Episode 33: The Return of Gorgo
TREASURY OF TALES Episode 27: The Golden Goose
THE LOST ERA TRANSCRIPTS Episode 24: The Deep Dark Hole
REBEL DEAD REVENGE Episode 89: The End of a Blood-Soaked Day
RIOT TOWN, USA Episode 37: La Haine pour Lahaina
STONETOSS Episode 243: Gay Bashing
COSMIC HORRORS Episode 4: The Temple
PAPER DOLL VERONIKA Episode 86: One side will make you
SHOTGUN SAMURAI Episode 22: Shotgun Samurai
FULL OF EYES Episode 57: We Shall Again Praise Him
BOVODAR & THE BEARS Episode 22: To the Squabble Pit!
AESOPS FABLES Episode 22: The Fawn and His Mother
THE SAGA OF THE NANO TEMPLAR Episode 8: Escape Attempt
PAPER\ DOLL VERONIKA
QUANTUM MORTIS Episode 55: Nice Setup
WOLFRAN THE KNIGHT AVENGER Episode 12: When Titans Fall
RIOT TOWN, USA Episode 36: Reading the Rainbow
THE CHRONICLES OF THE ADVENTURE, HUNTING, AND LIQUIDATION COMMITTEE Episode 24: The Witch’s Honey Trap
THE WISE OF HEART Episode 49: A Premature Conclusion
FAIRY DOOR Episode 55: Mists of Memory
FRANKENSTEIN – THE RETURN Episode 13: Terror Under Trance
THE SIEGE OF THE BLACK CITADEL Episode 17: The Roof of Hell
CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: ADVENTURE Episode 101: The Brigand
三更战 Episode 10: 亡已呼召
BEN GARRISON Episode 122: Guilty Until Proven Innocent
STONETOSS Episode 242: Malpractice
ALICE IN WONDERLAND Episode 4: The White Rabbit
CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 315: Beside Himself
Die by the Big Two. My sympathies for the self-reported decline of the Comicstorian are rather limited:
In a bombshell video this weekend, Ben Potter revealed that his channel has been losing money for some time now, which might come as a shock to viewers who have been watching his content, which highlights the best of Marvel and DC’s major events over the years and distills the books in easy ways for viewers to catch up on storylines…
Comicstorian caught lightning in a bottle as these superhero movies propelled interest to new cultural heights. His high production value offerings gave casual fans the background they needed on the characters to have a deeper understanding of Marvel and DC.
That all changed in 2020, according to Potter’s new video. COVID hitting slowed the production of films and ground the comic industry to a halt. It made the content harder to produce, and the offerings of Marvel and DC garnered fewer clicks than the previous content. He said the channel hoped to ride out the slowness of content and was kept alive by an angel investor who believed in his work.
But those funds eventually dried up, and as Marvel and DC began to push more woke content with their films and comics, interest in the Comicstorian content began to drop along with the companies’ properties.
Now, why would anyone involved with independent comics give a damn about this channel? When has he ever paid any attention to the considerable amount of content being produced by anyone outside the Big Two?
It’s really rather remarkable how the comics media would observably prefer to go down with the Marvel-DC ship than actually devote any attention to the space where all the action is. And I’m not just talking about the industry’s staunch refusal to pay any attention to Arkhaven Comics or Arktoons, because they also refuse to devote any to the successful products developed by independent creators like Razorfist, Eric July, Ethan van Sciver, and most of all, the massive Webtoons platform.
In fact, the comics media barely pays any attention to the long-established Japanese manga industry, even though it is bigger than Marvel and DC combined. It is essentially a collection of parasites that refuse to adapt, therefore they will die alongside their hosts.
UPDATE: In related news, the Dark Herald reports that Comixology is dead.
Amazon has finally and officially pulled the plug on the Comixology app.
ComiXology used to be something halfway decent back when the Big Two were halfway decent. It started life as an online community that would spot interesting upcoming releases and build pull lists for the brick-and-mortar comic book shops back when they existed.
It also had some tools for the aforementioned brick-and-mortar comic book shops to help raise their online presence. Then around 2009 ComiXology went one step better and launched a digital comic book reader and a digital comic book store. For a while it was looking like this was the future of comic books.
Project Asteroid strikes again. Arktoons is inevitable.
STONETOSS Episode 241: Out of Season
A MIND PROGRAMMED Episode 41: Galactic Stakes
REBEL DEAD REVENGE Episode 88: Run Yankee
HAMMER OF FREEDOM 2 Episode 22: Take a Look at Those Red Areas
RIOT TOWN, USA Episode 35: A Uniform Response
THE LOST ERA TRANSCRIPTS Episode 23: The Deep Dark Hole
COSMIC HORRORS Episode 3: The Temple
THE SIDEWINDERS Episode 45: No Backing Down
GIVE MY REGARDS TO BLACK JACK Episode 31: Eiroku Grad
GORGO Episode 32: The Return of Gorgo
TREASURY OF TALES Episode 26: The Golden Goose
CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 314: Missteaks Were Made
Sometimes slower, sometimes faster, but Arktoons just keeps growing. Keep an eye out for some interface changes soon, as well as the return of a few of our more popular comics and the introduction of some new ones.
There are three ways to support Arktoons. First and foremost, find a series that is a daily read. Our creators, both Arkhaven and independent, are putting out 4-8 new episodes every single day. There are now literally thousands of episodes available. And for the fiction readers, there is at least one text episode every day – Mondays feature Chuck Dixon’s The Sidewinders, for example.
Second, back our crowdfunding campaigns. We don’t have any running right now, because we’re working on fulfilling our existing ones, but we’ll launch another one once we get a few more of these omnibuses out, including both Midnight’s War and AH:Q. And third, subscribe to Arktoons.
Congratulations to everyone involved, from the authors to the backers, the creators, the devs, and the production team.