Comics built a culture. Generative Ai wants to inherit it without earning it.

Drawn to Extinction is part cultural autopsy, part love letter, part rallying cry. Pete Trainor spent years inside the world that comics made, collecting, obsessing, arguing in convention halls and staring at covers that dared him not to look away. Then he watched that world begin to hollow out from the inside, as the tools of automation arrived dressed in the language of democratisation, and the people who built the medium started to disappear from the credits.

Through first-hand conversations with creators including Pat Mills, Grant Morrison, Ram V, Hannah Berry, John Wagner, and Frazer Irving, alongside academics, lawyers, and industry figures who would rather not be named, Trainor traces the moment curiosity hardened into policy, and play became erasure. This is not a book about how Ai works. It is a book about what it costs. About who pays. And about why the struggle, the paper cuts and the deadlines and the decades of patience, is not a problem to be solved but the very thing that makes the work matter.

The machine doesn't dream. It replicates. And in that difference is the whole reason this book exists.

With a foreword by Pat Mills, creator of 2000 AD and Judge Dredd.