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The Abolition of Man: The Deluxe Edition
Conceived of and executed by fine-artist/educator/philosopher turned Eisner Award nominated cartoonist, Carson Grubaugh, The Abolition of Man Deluxe Edition collects all five issues of the groundbreaking series of the same name, the first comic series in history to be entirely illustrated by an Artificial Intelligence.
In a series of four interwoven experiments, Grubaugh used Midjourney AI to interpret an essay by renowned thinker, C.S.Lewis, imagine a satirical dystopian future, illustrate an AI generated script, and finally, to produce graphics for an essay provided by Oxford Philosopher of Information and AI & Data Ethics policy advisor to the EU, UK, Google, etc., Luciano Floridi. All of these strands, alternately hilarious and terrifying, weave together to give a chilling peek into the world of the future, where humans and their most treasured passions have lost all purpose.
This deluxe hardcover edition contains loads of exclusive content, including a reprint of the extremely rare Dall-E 2 variant edition of The Abolition of Man #1, in which the entire interior of issue #1 was re-illustrated using Dall-E 2. The collection also includes two pieces of philosophical writing produced by Grubaugh between 2007 and 2018 that were the source of inspiration for this project. These essays included predictions about the banal, content apocalypse AI is now making a reality.
Also accompanying the Abolition of Man project are a series of long-form discussions about the ethics and impact of AI art with superstar guests Dave McKean (illustrator), NFN Kalyan (fine artist), John Mahoney (concept designer, filmmaker) and Luciano Floridi (Philosopher of Information, Data and AI Ethics policy maker). These are posted to Living The Line's YouTube channel and linked in the book.
This singular project will hold an important place not only in the history of comics but in the history of art as it is the first of its kind to engage with the most important moment in the history of art since some wasteful cave-person blew juice at their hand on a wall instead of drinking it.
In a series of four interwoven experiments, Grubaugh used Midjourney AI to interpret an essay by renowned thinker, C.S.Lewis, imagine a satirical dystopian future, illustrate an AI generated script, and finally, to produce graphics for an essay provided by Oxford Philosopher of Information and AI & Data Ethics policy advisor to the EU, UK, Google, etc., Luciano Floridi. All of these strands, alternately hilarious and terrifying, weave together to give a chilling peek into the world of the future, where humans and their most treasured passions have lost all purpose.
This deluxe hardcover edition contains loads of exclusive content, including a reprint of the extremely rare Dall-E 2 variant edition of The Abolition of Man #1, in which the entire interior of issue #1 was re-illustrated using Dall-E 2. The collection also includes two pieces of philosophical writing produced by Grubaugh between 2007 and 2018 that were the source of inspiration for this project. These essays included predictions about the banal, content apocalypse AI is now making a reality.
Also accompanying the Abolition of Man project are a series of long-form discussions about the ethics and impact of AI art with superstar guests Dave McKean (illustrator), NFN Kalyan (fine artist), John Mahoney (concept designer, filmmaker) and Luciano Floridi (Philosopher of Information, Data and AI Ethics policy maker). These are posted to Living The Line's YouTube channel and linked in the book.
This singular project will hold an important place not only in the history of comics but in the history of art as it is the first of its kind to engage with the most important moment in the history of art since some wasteful cave-person blew juice at their hand on a wall instead of drinking it.
- GenresGraphic Novels
228 pages, Hardcover
Published July 25, 2023
24 people want to read
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February 5, 2023Like so many of the debates of the day, the AI art row has swiftly reached a point where I find both of the entrenched factions as annoying as each other. So thank heavens for Carson Grubaugh, whose work I first encountered when he attempted to create some manner of ending for Dave Sim's fascinating, deranged The Strange Death Of Alex Raymond. Clearly attracted to the unsound, perhaps wondering whether he could ever again put out something that likely to leave readers asking 'What the fuck did I just read?', here he attempts to make use of the one capability of AI art which I don't think either side could gainsay: right now, it's extremely good at making images which look really creepy. Now, obviously even there plenty of people are just saying they want it to generate them David Cronenberg's Sesame Street and then kicking back like a Star Trek writer who's written '[Tech stuff here]' for the little people to finish, but Grubaugh has a more interesting idea: feed it CS Lewis' The Abolition Of Man, a defence of natural law and objective values which is as deeply annoying as such projects tend to be. And yoking the two together, feeding Midjourney* a sentence at a time of Lewis, no further refinement, and only using one of the top four images generated each time, turns out to have that quality of nightmare squared which always looms when I contemplate the Nazi-Soviet Pact: I knew you were both the absolute worst, but I at least thought I could rely on you to be at each other's throats, not working together. Which, I know, is being harsh on Lewis, some of whose stuff I love, with reservations – but when he's in his infuriatingly sententious mode, it's precisely that ability to write so seductively that makes him so dangerous. "It might be going too far to say that the modern scientific movement was tainted from its birth, but I think it would be true to say that it was born an unhealthy neighbourhood and at an inauspicious hour." Such a pleasing sentence that you could almost not notice the way it wants to take us back to the Dark Ages. And as for the image Midjourney renders from that...well, at least it lacks the seductive aspect, I suppose. I never want to see this issue again, but at the very least the idea of doing it feels like it counts as art, even if the actual working out of that idea is almost a by-product, and possibly one I'd have preferred not to ingest.
All of that in the first issue! The next two are more conventional; a story about a future where humans are casting around for something to do with themselves which machines can't do better, so go to offices and find ways to process forms which are uniquely human, like putting the forms in their shoes and seeing how high they can jump, or filing them by the distance they fly as paper aeroplanes. Which, frankly, sounds about as worthwhile as many present-day jobs. The curious thing is that while this reads as if a) it's a recent response to the whole AI art debate and b) it's being rewritten to suit the weird results the AI spits out for the art, neither of these is true; the first half at least is something Grubaugh has had knocking around for years, the script as it stood, right down to the toothpaste worms (the second, concluding it, is by his publisher, just to add a further complication). Also of interest; they note that the first issue often came out looking a lot like the cover work of Dave McKean, an artist happy to chat to them for the bonus material, and who has said elsewhere that, considered as a tool for artists rather than their replacement, he finds AI interesting. What isn't noted is that, even after trying to get clearer narrative comics work by specifying "pen and ink, black and white", part of a general process of refinement in which Grubaugh points out he often thought how much easier it would be just to draw the damn comic himself,, the results in issues 2 and 3 still look an awful lot like McKean interiors.
The fourth issue saw Deep Story AI given the prompt 'The Abolition of Man'. Resulting in a synopsis, included here, that Midjourney understandably refused, and whose publication would likely be illegal if it hadn't. Even the toned-down version it ultimately processed – dialogue, of course, courtesy of yet another system – is horrific, and baffling, yet somehow less so than the work derived from Lewis' Abolition Of Man. Which goes to show something, though I don't really know what.
Finally, philosopher Luciano Floridi weighs in. It says a lot about modern philosophy that seemingly it can only provoke AI to what looks like anodyne, if unhelpful, airport signage. And of course, if modern philosophy isn't quite the field in which an AI first managed to publish a paper, the two do share a porous boundary. Indeed, Florid's opening is to take his definition of human dignity from, of all things, GDPR – which instantly led me to assume that, if not a machine, he was probably American, because surely nobody who actually has regular dealings with the damn thing would consider that a strong opening. I was incorrect; he's at Oxford, philosophers are just like this. He runs through many of the field's usual moves, so he insists that we can no longer consider humans as 'superior', but it's fine to consider them 'strange', which in practice seems to amount to much the same thing apart from enabling the dreadful coinage, instead of anthropocentric, of 'anthropo-eccentric' DO YOU SEE? There's the odd solid point buried amidst the beige verbiage – "'my' in 'my data' is not the same 'my' as in 'my car', it is the same 'my' as in 'my hand', because personal information plays a constitutive role of who I am and can become". But all it ends up with is the unobjectionable, unexciting "call to ground morality in an ethics of care", which makes you wonder why we bothered. Still, I suppose it's better than that nitwit from the field who recently wrote similarly deathly prose on his way to the conclusion that it was immoral to offer loved ones advice. Ah, I suppose philosophy has always been prone to ending up stating either the obvious or the obviously stupid, but at least back in the day they'd sometimes come up with a few decent turns of phrase along the way.
And then there's essays, alternative versions and the like in the backmatter. Very much an interesting curio rather than a must-read, but I'm still mostly glad I did, I think, and I'd like more partisans in the debate – on either side – to do likewise.
*A few pages from a Dall-E version are also included. This is considerably less disturbing, so you can see why they went with the maximum headfuck take, even if it does maybe skew the argument.
(Edelweiss ARC)
All of that in the first issue! The next two are more conventional; a story about a future where humans are casting around for something to do with themselves which machines can't do better, so go to offices and find ways to process forms which are uniquely human, like putting the forms in their shoes and seeing how high they can jump, or filing them by the distance they fly as paper aeroplanes. Which, frankly, sounds about as worthwhile as many present-day jobs. The curious thing is that while this reads as if a) it's a recent response to the whole AI art debate and b) it's being rewritten to suit the weird results the AI spits out for the art, neither of these is true; the first half at least is something Grubaugh has had knocking around for years, the script as it stood, right down to the toothpaste worms (the second, concluding it, is by his publisher, just to add a further complication). Also of interest; they note that the first issue often came out looking a lot like the cover work of Dave McKean, an artist happy to chat to them for the bonus material, and who has said elsewhere that, considered as a tool for artists rather than their replacement, he finds AI interesting. What isn't noted is that, even after trying to get clearer narrative comics work by specifying "pen and ink, black and white", part of a general process of refinement in which Grubaugh points out he often thought how much easier it would be just to draw the damn comic himself,, the results in issues 2 and 3 still look an awful lot like McKean interiors.
The fourth issue saw Deep Story AI given the prompt 'The Abolition of Man'. Resulting in a synopsis, included here, that Midjourney understandably refused, and whose publication would likely be illegal if it hadn't. Even the toned-down version it ultimately processed – dialogue, of course, courtesy of yet another system – is horrific, and baffling, yet somehow less so than the work derived from Lewis' Abolition Of Man. Which goes to show something, though I don't really know what.
Finally, philosopher Luciano Floridi weighs in. It says a lot about modern philosophy that seemingly it can only provoke AI to what looks like anodyne, if unhelpful, airport signage. And of course, if modern philosophy isn't quite the field in which an AI first managed to publish a paper, the two do share a porous boundary. Indeed, Florid's opening is to take his definition of human dignity from, of all things, GDPR – which instantly led me to assume that, if not a machine, he was probably American, because surely nobody who actually has regular dealings with the damn thing would consider that a strong opening. I was incorrect; he's at Oxford, philosophers are just like this. He runs through many of the field's usual moves, so he insists that we can no longer consider humans as 'superior', but it's fine to consider them 'strange', which in practice seems to amount to much the same thing apart from enabling the dreadful coinage, instead of anthropocentric, of 'anthropo-eccentric' DO YOU SEE? There's the odd solid point buried amidst the beige verbiage – "'my' in 'my data' is not the same 'my' as in 'my car', it is the same 'my' as in 'my hand', because personal information plays a constitutive role of who I am and can become". But all it ends up with is the unobjectionable, unexciting "call to ground morality in an ethics of care", which makes you wonder why we bothered. Still, I suppose it's better than that nitwit from the field who recently wrote similarly deathly prose on his way to the conclusion that it was immoral to offer loved ones advice. Ah, I suppose philosophy has always been prone to ending up stating either the obvious or the obviously stupid, but at least back in the day they'd sometimes come up with a few decent turns of phrase along the way.
And then there's essays, alternative versions and the like in the backmatter. Very much an interesting curio rather than a must-read, but I'm still mostly glad I did, I think, and I'd like more partisans in the debate – on either side – to do likewise.
*A few pages from a Dall-E version are also included. This is considerably less disturbing, so you can see why they went with the maximum headfuck take, even if it does maybe skew the argument.
(Edelweiss ARC)
February 13, 2023
This is marketed as the first comic book illustrated by an AI. That makes it a very different beast from the usual graphic novel or comic book, and it means the purpose for reading it is entirely different. If I were to rate this for someone who wanted to read an entertaining story (the usual purpose of a graphic novel,) I would rate it “horrible,” “worst-ever,” “unreadable,” – zero stars. However, if you bothered to read the book blurb, you probably aren’t still considering this book for the purposes of entertaining story.
What other reasons might one have for reading this book? I can think of two: one major and one minor. The major purpose is to see what an AI does with illustrations, how it “thinks” (for lack of a better word,) and how it fails. For this purpose, I’d say the book was fascinating to peruse. As a complete neophyte to both AI and graphic arts, I was struck by the “glimpse-comprehensible / close look-grotesque” nature of the illustrations. That is, if one just took a quick look, there tended to be something that felt like it made sense in the panel, but then when you looked closer it was a cabinet of curiosities freak show.
The minor reason for reading this is because one has an interest in the philosophy of mankind in the modern world, a topic that informs the first and last issues (or the philosophy of information, which informs the appendiceal essays.) In this regard the book made some thought-provoking points.
The base text the AI was fed to come up with illustrations varied across the five issues. The first was the eponymous C.S. Lewis book -- i.e. “The Abolition of Man.” While this didn’t present the Lewis text word-for-word, it was certainly the most readable portion of the book. The second and third comics drew on text from a comic written by Grubaugh. I assume the AI processed this text somehow because the text presented was often incomprehensible, was full of typos (or what seemed like them,) but had a couple amusing lines by virtue of what I can only assume was unintended sexual innuendo. The fourth issue is almost textless, but what few text bubbles exist were supposedly composed by AI (they don’t have much information value.) [FYI- this penultimate issue is the stuff of nightmares. In places, it looks like a guide to fatal birth defects.] The final issue is a philosophy essay on the role of human dignity in privacy expectations. It’s an interesting enough read, but the graphics are like a PowerPoint by someone who took, but failed, a course on PowerPoint graphic design.
If you’re curious about how close AI is to drawing graphic novels and have an interest in philosophy of humanity and / or information, you’ll find this book to be a worthwhile read. If you’re expecting an interesting story, you’ll be sadly disappointed. If you’re a budding Andy Warhol, looking for a way to make the next artistic breakthrough requiring little effort or creativity on your own part, you might see the next big thing.
What other reasons might one have for reading this book? I can think of two: one major and one minor. The major purpose is to see what an AI does with illustrations, how it “thinks” (for lack of a better word,) and how it fails. For this purpose, I’d say the book was fascinating to peruse. As a complete neophyte to both AI and graphic arts, I was struck by the “glimpse-comprehensible / close look-grotesque” nature of the illustrations. That is, if one just took a quick look, there tended to be something that felt like it made sense in the panel, but then when you looked closer it was a cabinet of curiosities freak show.
The minor reason for reading this is because one has an interest in the philosophy of mankind in the modern world, a topic that informs the first and last issues (or the philosophy of information, which informs the appendiceal essays.) In this regard the book made some thought-provoking points.
The base text the AI was fed to come up with illustrations varied across the five issues. The first was the eponymous C.S. Lewis book -- i.e. “The Abolition of Man.” While this didn’t present the Lewis text word-for-word, it was certainly the most readable portion of the book. The second and third comics drew on text from a comic written by Grubaugh. I assume the AI processed this text somehow because the text presented was often incomprehensible, was full of typos (or what seemed like them,) but had a couple amusing lines by virtue of what I can only assume was unintended sexual innuendo. The fourth issue is almost textless, but what few text bubbles exist were supposedly composed by AI (they don’t have much information value.) [FYI- this penultimate issue is the stuff of nightmares. In places, it looks like a guide to fatal birth defects.] The final issue is a philosophy essay on the role of human dignity in privacy expectations. It’s an interesting enough read, but the graphics are like a PowerPoint by someone who took, but failed, a course on PowerPoint graphic design.
If you’re curious about how close AI is to drawing graphic novels and have an interest in philosophy of humanity and / or information, you’ll find this book to be a worthwhile read. If you’re expecting an interesting story, you’ll be sadly disappointed. If you’re a budding Andy Warhol, looking for a way to make the next artistic breakthrough requiring little effort or creativity on your own part, you might see the next big thing.
February 4, 2023
A book for which "interesting failure" seems pre-written as a response, but where the interest is definitely high, and the failure not so great as foreseen. This is the first book whose whole visual has been AI-generated. The title piece is the CS Lewis essay, about how power in men is power over men, and – well, I'm not a hundred per cent sure what, as it does go on a bit. And anyway, it is the visuals this book is here for – seeing what a AI could come up with, when fed the essay one single sentence at a time. It comes up with a lot of surprisingly varying imagery for 'man's conquest of nature', especially when any mention of power gets us a hyper-muscled humanoid figure. Elsewhere it stumbles understanding the text, as you might expect – "bear" is in the script as a verb, in the visual as a noun; something that is over-arching is definitely seen with an arch above it, and so on. The interest is throughout, however – where a large chunk of sentence can produce something just as worthwhile as the shortest ("this will be changed"), and how CS Lewis (on this evidence) predicted what Putin looks like.
The creators close it out by revealing the AI always gave four images and the most fitting was used, and how they think Dave McKean clearly has a cyber-cousin. I found Shaun Tan in some of the more generic, fantasy-based art at times, but the fact remains some looks like Soviet propaganda, some looks like antique prints of dissection, and so on, and the fact remains that no, no human would ever have made the script look like this. For good or for bad.
We then have a two-part story, where the creators reveal the pains involved in getting from the AI what it was they wanted to illustrate the text with. With an entirely different look, this shows an absurdist office, unrequited love, a knicker fixation and a too-good-to-be-true rookie. Following that, a piece where the text as well as the imagery is down to machine-learning and AI. And it's completely grim (some of the lighter scenes are where kids carry guns around), and seemingly non-linear, and embodies the charge of this being an interesting failure the greatest.
Finally, a chunk where a professorial type goes somewhat and somewhere to conclude the themes of the whole book, but I was soon lost, finding the style distracting from any meaning I might have got – in clearly being more journalistic and more sort of info-graphiccy and less interpretative, there was still so much busyness from the visual side of things this could only remain hard work. Bonus extras include reports from ongoing works along these lines, a look at the Lewis with a different AI in charge, which takes the text away from the speech-bubbles directed from semi-human things at best to birds and a rhino, and some essays.
I don't think this much of a failure, all told, for it showed the benefit and the ordeal in getting something really artistic from an AI, let alone anything fully coherent. The visual generator still mistakenly goes down an Escher route, where what appears to be two human arms are really three elephant trunks, and so on. You can argue the toss over whether this is academic (ie important, educative and progressive) or academic (ie irrelevant and theoretical). It's not something to turn to for lols, but given any serious interest in graphic novels, and/or the creations of software circa summer 2022, this will be a purchase of much eye-opening worth.
(The above was, by the way, written by a human – but then perhaps an AI would say that...)
The creators close it out by revealing the AI always gave four images and the most fitting was used, and how they think Dave McKean clearly has a cyber-cousin. I found Shaun Tan in some of the more generic, fantasy-based art at times, but the fact remains some looks like Soviet propaganda, some looks like antique prints of dissection, and so on, and the fact remains that no, no human would ever have made the script look like this. For good or for bad.
We then have a two-part story, where the creators reveal the pains involved in getting from the AI what it was they wanted to illustrate the text with. With an entirely different look, this shows an absurdist office, unrequited love, a knicker fixation and a too-good-to-be-true rookie. Following that, a piece where the text as well as the imagery is down to machine-learning and AI. And it's completely grim (some of the lighter scenes are where kids carry guns around), and seemingly non-linear, and embodies the charge of this being an interesting failure the greatest.
Finally, a chunk where a professorial type goes somewhat and somewhere to conclude the themes of the whole book, but I was soon lost, finding the style distracting from any meaning I might have got – in clearly being more journalistic and more sort of info-graphiccy and less interpretative, there was still so much busyness from the visual side of things this could only remain hard work. Bonus extras include reports from ongoing works along these lines, a look at the Lewis with a different AI in charge, which takes the text away from the speech-bubbles directed from semi-human things at best to birds and a rhino, and some essays.
I don't think this much of a failure, all told, for it showed the benefit and the ordeal in getting something really artistic from an AI, let alone anything fully coherent. The visual generator still mistakenly goes down an Escher route, where what appears to be two human arms are really three elephant trunks, and so on. You can argue the toss over whether this is academic (ie important, educative and progressive) or academic (ie irrelevant and theoretical). It's not something to turn to for lols, but given any serious interest in graphic novels, and/or the creations of software circa summer 2022, this will be a purchase of much eye-opening worth.
(The above was, by the way, written by a human – but then perhaps an AI would say that...)
July 28, 2025
I'll be real - I didn't read half of this.
"The Abolition of Man" is the first AI illustrated graphic novel. Basically, a book that took the authors like a month to "make." They claim it isn't a cash grab, but an "experiment" but it reads like a cash grab. The first, and longest, section is literally C.S. Lewis' essay accompanied by AI illustrations. ZERO WORK.
Using AI to persuade people not to use AI could work, but these guys failed. Simply a messy, boring, confusing work.
"The Abolition of Man" is the first AI illustrated graphic novel. Basically, a book that took the authors like a month to "make." They claim it isn't a cash grab, but an "experiment" but it reads like a cash grab. The first, and longest, section is literally C.S. Lewis' essay accompanied by AI illustrations. ZERO WORK.
Using AI to persuade people not to use AI could work, but these guys failed. Simply a messy, boring, confusing work.
September 6, 2025
An interesting concept for a graphic novel, but the deluxe edition doesn't add as much value as the original comic book issue #1. But as a whole it's clever and makes you think. I wrote a full 13,000 word review of the whole thing here: https://andresmorales.substack.com/p/...
November 12, 2023
This book is the quintessential comprehension of ‘meta’ in the graphic novel medium, where the exploration of the removal of humanity is explored in the written essays of thinkers, which is then run through AI to generate the imagery. And for that level subversion I’ll give it two stars, this serves to prove its point incessantly, by showing that AI can remove the humanity from artwork, and thusly reduces hollow, the words contained within the essays written by the hands of humans.
Don’t recommend this book in the slightest, especially one that charges money for the work performed by an artificial intelligence and the collation of the generated imagery into a book. Avoid.
Don’t recommend this book in the slightest, especially one that charges money for the work performed by an artificial intelligence and the collation of the generated imagery into a book. Avoid.
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