Comics are simultaneously a popular medium, a publishing infrastructure, a graphic system, and an industrial form. That density makes them unusually rich research objects. Questions that are abstract elsewhere become concrete in comics: what does generative AI do to authorship when authorship is already distributed across writers, pencillers, inkers, colourists, and letterers? What does accessibility look like in a medium built on the visual? How does cultural work circulate when its publishing infrastructure changes? Comics force these questions to take material form — pages, panels, files, archives — where they can be tested rather than only theorised.

Comics have always been a computational medium, long before computation in the contemporary sense. The morgue files of mid-century cartoonists were image datasets. The page grid was a standardisation protocol. Distribution networks for newsprint and floppies prefigured the platform economy. Studying comics today is a way of studying how creative labour, automation, and industrial form have been entangled for over a century — and what changes, and what doesn’t, when machine learning and generative models enter the field. Comics are not a marginal site for these questions. They are where the questions show up earliest and most clearly.