Haunted Comics: The indeterminate craft of prompting

This paper explores how generative AI reshapes the early stages of comic book creation, focusing on the interplay between visible outcomes and unrealized possibilities embedded in production materials like sketches and layouts. Through a case study of Fastwalkers—a synthetic comic co-created with AI in 2020—the research investigates how algorithmic feature spaces function as conceptual terrains for iterative prototyping. By training models on domain-specific datasets such as Danbooru, the creators engaged in an evolving dialogue between human intent and machine-driven variation. This iterative, AI-assisted process revealed latent aesthetics and speculative narrative structures, complicating traditional notions of authorship, intentionality, and materiality. The paper frames these dynamics through the lenses of explainable computational creativity, arguing that AI introduces a spectral dimension to comics production. Ultimately, it suggests that generative systems amplify the indeterminacies of multimodal craft, prompting a redefinition of what constitutes a comics object in the era of synthetic media.