BRUSSELS — The home of animated heroes from Tintin to the Smurfs, Brussels boasts its cartoon heritage by displaying mammoth murals that turn stately streets into commedia dell’arte scenes. But all is no longer well in the self-dubbed capital of comics.
It’s now European cartoon artists who find themselves in a real-life fight, fending off a new and faceless adversary: AI—in an industry in which, quite literally, epic battles between super-heroes and arch-villains are routinely depicted by animators.
Such art generated through AI presently resides in a legal gray area, promising novel intellectual property disputes in this fast-growing, ever-changing field.
Since EU copyright laws do not explicitly cover AI-generated art, many artists are now asking whether AI is going to help or hinder creativity and raise the question of whether low-cost AI tools will eventually replace a human artist.
Litigate or licence
While artists spend years developing their craft, generative AI tools – such as MidJourney – could be cranking out pictures in minutes, using a machine-learning algorithm trained on the images of artists.
In what has amounted to a “complete rejection” of AI by the European comic-book industry, Gauthier van Meerbeeck, editorial director at Le Lombard, said artists will not back down on this issue.
His company is the publisher of the legendary tales of Tintin, an adventurous boy-reporter who now verges on almost a century old.
Conceived and written by the brilliant artist Hergé, Tintin gained wide fame with his blonde quiff, floppy plus-fours, and faithful canine companion, Snowy, and he stands as an icon in what is today literally an international business.
“This art is generated by stealing from artists. So morally I could never get involved in that,” said van Meerbeeck.
AI in the dock
Across the Atlantic, Disney’s use of AI-generated images last June 2023 in Marvel’s “Secret Invasion” caused a stir. Then there’s the generative AI boom that has spawned a raft of similar lawsuits in the United States.
Major tech companies, from Microsoft-backed OpenAI to Meta Platforms, have been hit by copyright lawsuits from artists claiming that AI profited from their work without permission or compensation.
With the new EU rules slated to take effect in mid-2025 under the AI act, European comic book publishing houses are preparing for lawsuits—making tech firms liable and transparent over training inputs, expose those to potential copyright lawsuits.
“It’s enormous for publishers,” says Quentin Deschandelliers, legal advisor at the Federation of European Publishers, in an interview with Context. “If you want to litigate, you need to know what’s under the hood.”
He said that incoming law may push tech firms towards licensing agreements to compensate artists if their work is used to train a generative AI model.
With the increasing scrutiny over copyright, big tech companies have already signed content-licensing deals for the AI they have trained using others’ output, like OpenAI with the Financial Times and Google with NewsCorp.
Now, according to Deschandelliers, some publishers are wary of “giving away the keys to the kingdom” and allowing markets to be flooded with AI-generated works.
Art, soul and bots
But artists are also struggling with a question that has nothing to do with courtroom battles: whether to embrace or shun the new tools.
Marnix Verduyn is a Belgian comic book artist who goes by the pseudonym NIX. He describes himself as a computer engineer who “accidentally became a comic book artist.”
He decided to train a generative algorithm on his own comics. He said he did this in part as a kind of fantasy, so that he could replace himself and go sit on the beach.
But his fellow comic artists didn’t find that so funny, particularly when the generative AI model Dall-E came out in 2021. It was a sort of breakthrough.
“It was kind of a shock how powerful it was,” he told Context. “That’s where I thought a lot of people aren’t going to have jobs in the future.”
According to European Commission business statistics, the cultural sector employed 7.7 million in Europe in 2022, with a net turnover reaching around 448 billion euros ($481.51 billion) in 2021.
NIX argues that his use of AI—taking on low-skilled, repetitive tasks—is “gently disruptive” and necessary to keep up with Japanese and U.S. comic-book powerhouses.
Recent fine arts grads are enraged by entry-level jobs they might once have filled now being done by machines.
“It’s cheap, fast, no humans needed, and it kills any kind of artistic endeavour in the industry,” said Sarah Vanderhaegen to Context.
She described a brush with AI during an internship that had left her crushed, forcing her to reconsider options—and ultimately pivot to an archeology degree.
Now working on a comic book in her spare time, she views AI as just a spurious crutch powered by an algorithm that can never hope to match an artist’s ability to translate emotions onto the page.
Something artists and publishers can agree on.
“AI-generated images, I can spot them straight away,” noted van Meerbeeck, who thinks comics are safe for now, as storyline, text, and images remain too complex for the current crop of generative AI to create.
For NIX, the human remains the boss, AI—a mere tool.
“It’s just a cocktail of ideas stolen from somebody. I see the mathematics—including, of course, AI—so there is no soul in the mathematics.”