Ilan Manouach & Benoît Crucifix
Publications
Synthetic Comics
Reader
Synthetic Comics: Computation, Standardization, Automation, eds Manouach & Crucifix (De Gruyter, 2026). Eleven essays tracing comics’ long entanglement with computation and industrial automation.
Edited by Ilan Manouach and Benoît Crucifix, Synthetic Comics: Computation, Standardization, Automation gathers eleven essays on the long entanglement between comics and computational practice. Forthcoming from De Gruyter in 2026, the volume argues that the integration of generative AI into contemporary comics production is not a rupture but a continuation — comics have always been an industrial medium structured by automation, standardization, and the systematic management of visual information.
De Gruyter (2026). The publication of this volume was supported by the University of Cologne, KU Leuven, the University of Liège, and Echo Chamber.
Index
Introduction
Unboxing Morgue Files. Towards a Media Genealogy of Synthetic Comics
Felipe Muhr & Benoît Crucifix
01
“You Wouldn’t Steal a Comic.” Rhetorics of piracy and the evolution of comics scanning
Kalervo Sinervo & Amanda Dunbar
02
Medium vs. Form as Rhetorics and Aesthetic Affordance. Digital Comics and the Ambivalence of the Interface
Lukas R.A. Wilde
03
Traces of the Combinatorial in Comics
Sébastien Conard
04
Without Meaningful Recourse to Trace. Grennan & Sperandio’s Digital Drawing in the 1990s
Simon Grennan
05
Deskilling and the Dataset. On the Antagonisms of Automating Diegetic Representations in Comics
Keith Tilford
06
The Auteur as Algorithm. Subjectivity, Trace and Automation in Comics Self-Publishing Practice
Gareth Brookes
07
AI in Comic Creation. Navigating the Latent Space
Francesco D’Isa
08
Ontogenetic Machines. The Transindividuation of American Superhero Comics
Per Israelson
09
Slow-Reading Fastwalkers
Pedro Moura
10
