Lee Hyun-se (19459041) is a legendary South Korean comic book artist best known for his seminalseries A Daunting teamand a 1983manga on the coming of age of heroic underdog ball players. “I’ve still joined hands with AI in order to immortalize my characters Kkachi Umji and Ma Dong Tak.”
Lee is charting a creative frontier for South Korea’s web-comic industry by embracing generative AI. Since comics magazines began to fade at the turn-of-the-century, web comics–serialized comics read from top-to-bottom on digital platforms- have become a global entertainment powerhouse, attracting hundreds of millions of viewers around the globe. Lee has been pushing the boundaries of his art for many years.
Lee took inspiration for his renegade avengers baseball team from the Sammi Superstars – one of South Koreaās first professional baseball teams whose perseverance captured a country stifled under military dictatorship. The series was a hit with readers who were looking for a creative escape to political repression. They were mesmerized by the bold brushstrokes and cinematic arrangements that defied conventions of cartoons.
Kkachi is the rebellious hero in A Daunting Teamand an alter ego to Lee himself. He is a scrappy outcast, with untamed hair and a brave conscience. He appears in Lee’s signature paintings, each time painted with a different layer of pathos. A supernatural warrior saves Earth from alien attack inArmageddon (19659007) and a rogue cop fighting a powerful criminal gang in Karon’s Dawn (19459044). Kkachi, a South Korean cultural icon for decades, has become a symbol of the country. Lee is worried about Kkachiās future. “In South Korea, a comic character’s grave is also buried with the author when he dies,” he says. He draws a contrast to enduring American characters like Superman or Spider-Man. Lee is obsessed with artistic immortality. He wants his characters not only to live on in the minds of readers but also their web comic platforms. “Even when I die, I would like my characters and worldviews to resonate and communicate with people in a new age,” he says. “That’s what I want.”
Lee is convinced that AI will help him achieve his vision. In partnership with Jaedam Media in Seoul, an online comics production company, he created the “Lee Hyun-se AI Model” by fine-tuning Stable Diffusion, the open-source AI generator developed by Stability AI, a UK-based startup. The model is based on a set of 5,000 comics that Lee has published in 46 years.
Lee is preparing his first AI-assisted comic this year, a remake from his 1994 manhwa, Today’s Dawn. Writers from Jaedam Media have adapted the story to a modernized crime thriller starring Kkachi, a police officer of present-day Seoul, and Umji, his love interest. Students at Sejong University where Lee teaches comics are creating the artwork based on his AI model.
There are several stages to the creative process. Lee’s AI model first generates illustrations using text prompts and reference pictures, such as 3D anatomy models or hand-drawn sketches, which provide cues to different movements and gestures. Lee’s students curate and edit illustrations, adjusting characters’ poses and facial expressions and integrating them in cartoonish compositions. AI cannot engineer this. After many rounds, Lee orchestrates the final product and adds his unique artistic edge.
AI firms envision that artists can automate the gruntwork of drawing and focus their creative energy on storytelling and art direction.
He says that under his direction, characters might have sad eyes when they are angry or ferocious when they are happy. “It is a subversive expression and a nuance which AI struggles to capture.” “Those delicate details I have to direct myself.”
In the end, Lee wants to create an AI system that embodies her meticulous approach to human emotions. The grand vision for his experimental AI project was to create a “Lee Hyun Se simulation agent” – an advanced generation of his AI that replicates Lee’s creative mind. The model will be trained using digital archives of Lee Hyun-se’s essays, interviews and texts from his Comics – the subject of a National Library of Korea exhibitlast year – to encode his philosophy and values. “It will take a very long time for AI (artificial intelligence) to learn all of my worldviews, because I have published so much,” he says.
A digital clone would create new comics using Lee’s artistic intuition. It would perceive its environment and make creative choices the same way he would. Perhaps even publishing a far-future series featuring Kkachi Lee asks, “What kind of comics would Lee Hyun Se create fifty years from now if he could see the world then?” “The question fascinates”
Lee is seeking a lasting artistic heritage as part of a larger creative evolution driven by the technology. Since their inception, web comics have revolutionized the art of storytelling. They offer an infinite digital canvas, integrating music, animation, interactive visuals, and new tools such as automated coloring programs. AI is a catalyst for the next wave of innovation. As it opens up new creative possibilities, AI also fuels anxieties about authorship and artistic agency.
Last Year, the South Korean startup Onoma AI named after the Greek for “name”(as a signal of their ambition to redefine creative story-telling), launched a AI-powered web comic creator called TooToon The software allows users create storyboards, characters and synopses using simple text prompts. Users can also convert rough sketches into polished illustrations reflecting their own artistic style. TooToon claims that it can streamline the laborious creative process by reducing the time between concept creation and line art to just two weeks.
Companies such as Onoma AI promote the idea that AI is a tool for anyone to become an artist, even if they can’t draw and can’t afford to hire a team of assistants in order to keep up In their vision, artists will become directors of their AI-powered solo studios. They will automate the grunt work that is drawing and focus their creative energy on storytelling and art direction. They say the productivity breakthrough would help artists come up with more innovative ideas, tackle large-scale productions and disrupt studio monopolies. Oh Hye-seong, the protagonist of the South Korean cartoonist Lee Hyun Se’s “Karon’s Dawn” AI-assisted series of web comics that will be released this year, is an AI-assisted version
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Song Min, founder and CEO of Onoma AI, says that AI will expand the web comic eco-system. Song describes the industry in South Korea as a “pyramid”–powerhouse platforms like Naver Webtoonand cocoa webtoonat the top, followed by big-shot studios, where artists collaborate to mass-produce web comics. He explains that “the rest of the artists outside the studio system can’t create on their own.” “AI will empower more artists to become independent artists.”
Onoma AI partnered last year with a group of web comic artists to create Tarot: A Tale of Seven Pages, a mystery thriller that unravels the twisted fate Song uses feedback from the artists to improve TooToon. Even as a proponent of AI-generated artwork, he still questions whether “it’s a good thing for AI” to be perfect. Just as engineers must keep coding in order to hone skills, he also wonders if AI
He says that AI is a tour de force. However, for now, there are still some challenges in terms of artists’ perceptions and copyright. Onoma AI developed Illustrious (19459041), the large language model that powers TooToon by fine-tuning Stable Diffusion using the Danbooru2023 data set a public image database Stable Diffusion and other popular image generators based on the model have been criticized for scraping images from websites without permission, resulting in a barrageof lawsuits. Artists who are concerned that their work is being used to train the programs have a backlash against web comic generators.
“Can you create without a soul? Who knows?ā
As companies silo their training data, artists and readers have launched a digital campaign to boycott AI-generated web comics. In May 2023, readers bombarded The Knight King Returns with the Gods on Naver Webtoon with blazingly low ratings after discovering that AI had been used to refine portions of the artwork. The following month, artists flooded the platform with anonymous posts protesting āAI web comics created from theft,ā sharply criticizing Naverās contract policy requiring artists who publish on the platform to consent to having their works used as AI training data.
To settle the standoff, the Korea Copyright Commission issued a set of guidelines in December 2023, urging AI developers to obtain permission from copyright holders before using their works as training data; articulate the purpose, scope, and duration of use; and provide fair compensation. A year later, amid growing calls from AI companies for access to more data, the South Korean government proposed carving out an exemption to copyright laws that would allow AI models to be trained on copyrighted works under the doctrine of fair use. But no legislation or regulation has yet established a clear legal framework, leaving artists in limbo.
While seasoned artists like Lee embrace the technology as a tool to expand their legacy, wholeheartedly licensing their intellectual property to AI, younger artists see it as a threat. They fear that AI will steal their artwork and, more important, their identity as artists.
āDrawing is the most difficult and the most fun part of making comics,ā says Park So-won, a young web comic artist based in Seoul. Park grew up dreaming of becoming a cartoonist, watching her mother, an animator, bring characters to life. After years of juggling gigs as an artist assistant at a web comics studio, interrupted by a brief creative hiatus, she made her breakthrough on the platform Lezhin Comics with Legs That Won’t Walk,a queer romance noir about a boxer who falls in love with a loan shark chasing after him over his alcoholic father’s debt.
Park is a self-employed artist who works constantly. She publishes an episode every 10 to 14 days and often pulls all-nighters in order to produce 80 drawings, even with assistants who handle background art and coloring. She sometimes finds herself in flow states, where she works for 30 hours without taking a break.
Park, who sees her drawings as the heart of her work, can’t imagine outsourcing them to AI. “The drawing is the crux of any comic, no matter how important the story. If the story was written in words, wouldn’t people have read it? “The story is only a thought, and the execution is the drawing,” says she. Giving up her drawing would be like giving up her artistic agency.
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Park believes algorithmic art is soulless, like “objects that are in a vacuum” and doesn’t care if AI can draw better. Her drawings have evolved with her changing outlook on the world, and she has broken new ground in the process. She believes that an algorithm trained to mimic existing works would never be able to make such a progression. She says, “I will continue to chart new territory as an art while AI will remain the same.”
For Park, art is a supreme indulgence. “I’ve come so far because I love drawing.” What would I do if AI took away my favorite thing in the world?
Other comic artists who are strong in storytelling welcome the innovation. Bae Jin Soo was a screenwriter who turned into an artist in 2010 on Naver Webtoon. Bae taught himself how to draw by taking photos of different compositions, then tracing the lines on paper. He thought, “I can’t write so I’ll bet my writing.”
AfterFriday: Forbidden tales became a hit, Bae rose in stardom with three-part series, Money Game,Pie Game, andFunny Game –brainy, psychological thrillers with plot twists, witty, thought provoking narratives, about a group playing eccentric games for a cash prize. The series has even inspired a popular Netflix version,The 8 Show.
Bae says, “I have so many stories I still want to tell.” He is a prolific writer who keeps a running notepad of new ideas, including genre-bending plots that span horror, politics, black comedy, and more. To bring his ideas to life, he would need a studio that could create the illustrations. Bae believes that an AI-powered generator of web comics could be a game changer. “If AI could handle the artwork, I’d create an endless flow of new comics,” says Bae.
Bae also wants to explore AI’s potential as a “backup for story ideas”like a writer assistant. To maintain his position as an artist, Bae plans to delve deeper into his imagination in order to come up with original and experimental ideas. “That’s [human] the domain of creators,” he said. Bae is still unsure if his creative edge will slowly fade with extensive collaboration with AI. “Would the colors in my comics start to fade?” (19659044]Meanwhile students at Sejong University, Seoul, are learning how to integrate AI into their toolkits. The budding artists will be trained as “creative codes” who will turn comic strips into data sets, meticulously annotating the content. They will also be trained as prompt engineers to guide AI in producing characters that match their aesthetic sensibilities.
Han Chang-wan is a professor at Sejong University who teaches a course on AI-generated web-comics. He says that creativity takes time to reflect and contemplate your work. Han Chang-wan says AI will give his students the time they need to “create more diverse comics, more kaleidoscopic stories, and more eclectic styles” that challenge the formulaic ones mass-produced by studios. He hopes that they will “tap into a completely new readership”
as artists navigate this uncharted world. Generative AI is raising profound question about what drives creativity. Shin Il-sook is the president of Korea Cartoonist Association, and the renowned cartoonist who created the historical fantasy romance The Four Daughters of Armian (19659047), which follows a brave princess exiled from her matriarchal country as she embarks upon a journey of self-discovery and survival through war, love and political power struggles. She wonders, however, if AI will be acreative companion .
Shin says, “Creativity means creating something that has never been seen before and being driven by the desire to share it.” “It is deeply intertwined in the human experience and its afflictions.” She says that an artist who has experienced life’s sufferings and honed his or her craft produces remarkable work. “Can you create if you don’t have a soul?” Who knows?
Michelle Kim, a freelance lawyer and journalist based in Seoul.
