I’ve always loved comics. There’s something magical about writers and artists bringing a story to life with writing and drawing. It’s one reason I’ve always been skeptical of the idea that AI-generated images could replace human artists, no matter how high quality. So I had my doubts when I opened Pocket Toons, an app full of comics made with the assistance of AI. But, the app exceeded all my expectations for lifeless, slightly eerie characters, dull, repetitive backgrounds, spiced with awkward and sometimes offensive stories.
Pocket Toons was created by Pocket Entertainment, best known for its audiobook platform Pocket FM. The app promises it can revolutionize the comic industry by using AI to pump out episodes 20 times faster and at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. Pocket Toons uses an AI system called Blaze! to automate backgrounds, set up scenes, color the pages, and perform “quality control” to keep every character on-model.
It supposedly allows human artists to focus on storytelling and character development. That sounds impressive on paper. In reality, the results look like what happens when you ask an AI to “draw a cat,” and it spits out a creature with five legs and no soul. Some of it positively burns the eye when you gaze upon it.
AI art fail
The art is dull, robotic, and aggressively uninspired. Every character has a few expressions they repeat over and over, much like the copy-pasted backgrounds. Entire chapters of the comics felt like an infinite loop of déjà vu. And let’s not even get into the occasional bizarre hands. Forget low effort; this was no effort. This could only appeal to people who have never seen comics or any drawing.
Artists have been sounding the alarm about AI-generated art for a while now, and honestly, they’re right to be mad. The reason great comic book art succeeds is because actual people put their creative stamp on it. AI, on the other hand, is all about mimicking patterns, which is why Pocket Toons’ art feels like a parody of itself. Imagine someone feeding a million pages of manga into an algorithm and sucking out everything that made them enjoyable. It raises questions as basic as “What’s going on?”
Writing from the asylum
If this were just bad art, that would be one thing. But the “writing,” is just as bad if you can even call it that. If the spam links about weird tricks and aging celebrities at the bottom of many websites came to life, they would still have more solid plotting than some of these comics.
I’d love to be able to blame AI for the scripts, too, but as far as I can tell, AI is only responsible for the images. I hesitate to blame the named authors for them, either. They feel like someone blended Wikipedia summaries of popular books and comics with an SEO tool. Every so often, a comic tosses in a moment that almost makes sense, like a boy pining for a girl he likes who ignores him, and you think, “Oh, maybe this one is different.” Then, two panels later, she is assaulted by a gang of goons in front of him, and he just sadly goes home without doing anything about it.
That’s bad enough, but I became genuinely angry when another comic opened with a woman discovering that she’s pregnant and claiming she’s never been intimate with a man despite being married to one for several months. That was strange, but I almost threw my phone across the room when the doctor proceeded to claim that because her health wasn’t great, she couldn’t have an abortion and would have to give birth. I’m not a doctor, but I checked with a couple just to confirm that this is quite literally the opposite of what a qualified doctor would tell someone with health issues early in a pregnancy. The awful art didn’t help make the story better.
I really wonder, why make an app like this? If it was to prove that AI can replace human creativity, it has done the opposite. If it was to flood the internet with thousands of cheap, empty, nonsensical comics for the sake of pure content volume, mission accomplished. If someone told me it was designed to use AI to make people hate comics, art, and stories, I would believe it.
The worst part is that Pocket Toons keeps bragging about how much content it’s churning out. New episodes every day! A faster production pipeline than ever before! It’s like a version of that old joke: The food is terrible! But at least the portions are large!
Art attack
Art is not meant to be squeezed out of a machine at high speed like some kind of nightmare assembly line. Comics are supposed to feel alive and vibrant. Even bad comics usually have something valuable within them, even if it’s only a single interesting idea or well-drawn panel. Pocket Toons is mostly empty when it’s not full of garbage.
I’m not against using AI as a tool in art in any form. AI can assist in tedious tasks, allowing creators to focus more on imagination and craftsmanship. But Pocket Toons doesn’t use AI to aid an artist; it just turns out mush in the vague shape of artwork. If aliens came to Earth and were told this is what we chose to do with some of our most sophisticated technology, I’d be hard-pressed to argue against them wiping us out.
The good news is, for now, AI comics aren’t taking over. Pocket Toons is proof that when you strip all the humanity out of the creative process, what you’re left with is nothing of value artistically or commercially. Marvel, DC, independent artists, and anyone who’s ever scribbled a stick figure on a napkin have to stay vigilant against those with more money than artistic sensibility deciding they’re equally worthwhile, but I’d be as shocked at these becoming at all popular as the pregnant woman who never learned basic biology.
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erichs211@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
