Anger over the use of AI in art heated up over the weekend after Adi Granov called out DC cover artist Francesco Mattina for using AI in a variant cover for Superman #18.
Granov – a star artist perhaps best known for his Iron Man work – posted the cover in a Facebook post which pulled no punches – especially in relation to the wonky looking S-shield – and even used the H-word.
When image generators first came to prominence the first person who came to mind was the serial plagiarist Francesco Mattina as I thought he’d think all his Christmases have come at once. If you don’t remember, he made a whole career out of photobashing other people’s art (mine included) into whatever you want to call his “work”. I don’t post about artists I dislike, but I neither consider him an artist nor can I hide my dislike for the continued blatant plagiarism. Anyhow, here’s his new cover. Not only is he a hack, but he’s not even good enough to hide the glaring mistake on one of the most iconic symbols in all of pop-culture.
Granov continued in a comment:
It’s fair to say that this error-ridden image fired up a lot of simmering rage that artists are feeling over the use of AI art instead of human effort. Among the more than 300 comments Bill Sienkiewicz, Mico Suayan, Meghan Hetrick, Duncan Rouleau, Jill Thompson, Billy Tucci, Emanuela Lupacchino and many more pros sounded off with brutal put downs.
The original comment was also shared on facebook nearly 400 times…prompting another post by Granov:
As Granov indicated, Mattina has a long history of being accused of swiping – Alex Garner called him out for swiping a fee years ago, as did artist Lee JeeHyung. And that’s not all. There’s a long Twitter thread also enumerating many times when Mattina was accused of swiping – including by an art director at Sideshow Toys.
A thread documenting how Francesco Mattina keeps getting work at DC Comics despite having been caught tracing art SEVERAL times, and is now generating variant covers with AI 🧵 pic.twitter.com/KE8a3giocN
— Neb | 🏳️🌈 (@NebsGoodTakes) June 15, 2024
Years back when I was still at Marvel, CB comes into a meeting with a printed out gallery of Mattina’s work. And one of Marvel’s lead cover artists at the time had circled specific portions of every cover, to go on the record with what he thought Mattina had swiped from him, and sent that to CB to print out. Mattina had sent Marvel and the artist apologies already before that review, but he didn’t get cover work with Marvel for years after that, maybe not since then. Surprised he actually still does with anybody. And this was in 2010.
Starting with a niggling detail, as far as that Superman symbol goes, not only does it have two tails, but the thing that bothers me about it is that it’s way off center – it seems to be floating off Superman’s chest, and the tail is pointing to his right hip, not his belt buckle. Here’s a photo of Henry Cavill where you can see the S-shield does shift a bit…..but not that much. As Granov points out, the way all the elements of the image are constructed they just don’t fit together.
Next, it’s rare to see such a unified outpouring of frustration from the comics industry on any topic. Publishers have been hiring known swipe artists (cough Greg Land cough) for years, but the current onslaught of AI – bringing with it layoffs of actual humans – has created a fraught atmosphere of anxiety. AI is still pretty bad at search, but it’s pretty good at generating pretty images, and improving all the time. But as Granov put it, it’s “selling you a flashy piece of trash created without any care, skill or honesty.” When something like this slips through, it’s concerning.
And how did this slip through? Mattina’s rep is no secret, are editors at DC really that desperate?
Just guessing here, but…..they probably are. Take a look at the September solicits. So many variant covers. So many pin-ups. So many, many pin-ups. I doubt we’ll ever go back to covers like this,
but it would be a bit harder for AI to churn out these kinds of images. (Or maybe not.)
Having once, long ago, been a monthly comics editor, I’m sympathetic to the looming terror of the empty page. Mattina is probably always on time and a heck of a guy….so he gets work. To my very untrained eye, these covers look blatantly AI-generated – maybe not the whole thing but at least parts of the image composition. But if I were on a tight deadline, I might not look as closely as I should.
So what happens next? A few months ago, DC pulled some covers by artist Daxiong after he was accused of using AI. (And those covers were way better than the Mattina ones.) I expect we’ll soon hear the same about these Mattina covers. Clearly, more oversight or quality control is needed as AI-generated images become more and more prevalent. Some people have called for the return of an Art Director at DC, a position once held by Mark Chiarello, before he was removed in one of DC’s endless rounds of layoffs. There is, sadly, only one Chi, but even so, that kind of position might not even work in today’s comics world – especially at DC which is still running with a cut to the bone staff.
The things is…there are so many talented human artists out there. I saw some kids at an SVA event last month who could do better, fresher, more interesting covers than Mattina’s. Scrolling through this months solicits, I see some striking work by top-notch creators. And I see a few pot-boilers. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
The issue of AI-generated art is certainly not going away, and it’s cropping up everywhere. Who knows, maybe AI will create jobs…finding people who can spot it and call it out when the results are as sloppy as this.
Even if I was ignorant of the use of AI in the image, it’s not that great of a cover anyhow. Not sure what the other cover choices for this issue are, but this would probably be last on the list if I was choosing.
Even without the glaring AI flaws, it’s a horrible cover.
Right? I know the question being asked is, “How does someone with this behavior get work?” but it should be “How does someone who produces stuff like this get work?”
Nothing ‘alleged’ about it. Its pretty blatant usage.
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