Make Art or Fix a Flat Tire?

Dean Haspiel & Michael O’Shea talk about AI

Jan 03, 2026

Detail from “Covid Cop Insurrection” debuting in ANTIMATTER #1

In September 2025, I enjoyed a long conversation about Artificial Intelligence with my pal/filmmaker, Michael O’Shea. See his movie, The Transfiguration (it’s sublime).

Here is that conversation as edited by Mike (and possibly, AI — with light edits by me) for his private newsletter (of which he gave me permission to repurpose). I’m sure half of it is already outdated, and some of it is clearly obvious, but there are some good bits of discussion buried within.

(Note: Mike’s side of the discussion is italicized).

Do you pay for AI, Dean?

I do not pay for AI that I know of.

Although sometimes when I criticize it, I do realize we absolutely live in a digital world, right? And so how many years have I been using Photoshop. Is that considered AI? I don’t think so. I consider it more like a calculator. You could do math by hand, but I’m not sure I know math very well anymore because I have a calculator, you know? So that technology has made me dumber.

That’s how I worry about these tools. That they are helpful, but at the cost of making us dumber, less self-sufficient.

Do you have the latest Photoshop? Because the latest Photoshop has a lot of AI elements in it.

I have an earlier version of Photoshop that doesn’t use AI tools, but that’s the word I was going to use: tools.

When I was writing a short film about how much I hated AI, and I made AI the villain, it didn’t work because AI is not a villain, it’s people. I realized, oh, this is just a tool. It’s how you use and or abuse the tool.

People can roll their eyes and say, “oh, does everything need to be authentic?”

I do draw with pen on paper and then I scan it in, and then I color my comics in Photoshop, and I often letter my comics in Photoshop. But I don’t think I’ve ever even typed the word ChatGPT in my own computer, because I’d rather just write my own shit and figure it out on my own.

But I also respect and understand that there’s a lot of people who use it to do initial kind of passes and or edits or whatever, you know. So again, it’s a tool. And I guess for me the question is authenticity. And then I think about, well, who gives a shit? You can sell stuff as authenticity or artisanal or whatever. And some people like that.

But I think ultimately a lot of people just like to see the thing and they don’t care how it’s made.

When you say some people are using it do you mean other cartoonists and illustrators are using AI? For first drafts?

Well, in reading your discussions about AI, I was discovering that some people seem to, like, want to write a prompt or an idea. It’ll spell it out, and then there’ll be a first draft of something.

That you can then edit and toy with.

I have a manager here at the studio I work at who knows I have a character called The Red Hook, and he decided to have some fun with me, and he put in the plot synopsis of my character that I had written that’s online. And he generated a few songs, a rock and roll song, a folk song, and something else. And then he sent it to me, you know, just thinking it was funny.

But I didn’t think it was funny because number one, I didn’t know yet if I was trying to write a song for my character. Right? So I was like, wait a second, what if you’re stepping on my toes here? It felt intrusive, even though I know that what he was trying to do was something funny, I felt upset because, let’s say I was trying to make a song of my Red Hook character or a movie or an animation or whatever. And now it seems like with these AI tools, you can do a version of that just by typing in some prompts and feeding it some information and data and images and whatnot.

And I don’t really know how I feel about that. And he kept saying to me well, don’t you want to produce more comics? You can just use AI and it can be like all your assistants and you can produce like 100 pages a month if you wanted to.

I was like, that’s not the point of what I do. You know I need to live with what I make and how I make it. But, you know, other people might debate that and say no, just create content, you know?

We used to draw on walls, right? On cave walls, before we had ink and pen and paper and pulp and all. Now we have pixels, and I do employ pixels in my work. So it is an odd space to debate and fight this stuff.

But just today, I got an email from a publisher that I did a comic for, and he knows that I’m going to be doing a Kickstarter. And he wanted to know if he could bring his comic to my Kickstarter and vice versa, to cross promote.

I said sure, until I actually saw what the comic was, and I swear it looks like it’s all AI generated. And I don’t feel comfortable hitching my wagon to his project because it just seems super AI. And also, I don’t even like the way those AI images look right now. I mean, they all are pretty easy to spot.

If you go in the subway, you’ll see ads on the walls and they’re like these Skechers ads. Sneakers or something. And they’re clearly AI generated. And there’s a lot of companies right now using AI. And you know, I’ve had incidents as far back as 3 or 4 years ago where I lost a $20,000 job because I called out a CEO and shamed him for trying to show me a project that he wanted me to draw by employing AI and basically having it all completely drawn and written already. And he was like, “No, no, no, I just wanted to show this to you, to inspire you.”

I bet that’s what’s happening every day now. I’m sure this is happening every day now.

I want to ask you a question, but first tell a story. I was hearing this famous lady writer speak. She has controversial political opinions. An audience member asked if she felt canceled. She said it’s impossible to know if she’s old and irrelevant or actually canceled. That’s true for freelancers and all of us as we age—we wonder if it’s our opinions, our content, aging.... It’s this paranoid feeling we get of feeling things may be slowing down but not knowing why.

For you, not asking if you’re canceled, but do you have these feelings if work has slowed? Or do you feel work has definitively slowed because of AI?

Yes, I definitely know things have gotten slower specifically because of AI, but also I’ve become allergic to pitching to publishers because of the the way the system works in publishing these days, where basically you don’t get an advance, they’ll put it out, the printer gets paid, distribution gets paid, the publisher gets paid, and you’re the last person to get any kind of money in the back end. Which is why I’ve started to crowdfund my own comics since 2023, because at least I have full control and I can reap the most benefits from any profits that might be made from that.

As for the aging out thing. I’m 58. In 2023, I was 56. And I was already feeling, you know, that I was aging out, as it were. But also I put myself there because I decided to “lean into Dean,” where I was carving my own niche path where you can only get what I do from me, whatever that means, you know? And part of my philosophy is I’m creating something you didn’t know you wanted. So the whole idea is to try to get you to know about it, and it’s not about money anymore. It’s about time. It’s about stealing people’s time. A few minutes here or there once in a while to to woo you into at least checking out a teaser for what I’m doing. And then hopefully that would then create interest in a sale. Right? Right. So that’s kind of the place I’m in right now, And it’s fucking hard because I’m not doing — like I’m not dancing on TikTok. I occasionally show up on Instagram and Facebook, that’s how I get out there. And then I hear how people don’t go to Facebook anymore and people are getting tired of Instagram.

And so now I have a Substack, that I try to engage with people. And those are the tools I’m using right now. That’s the social media I use.

But if I’m going to be serious, I need to work with retailers again because, right now you can either pre-order my comic that I mailed to your doorstep or you get my comics at a comic con or some kind of pop culture event, but I’m not showing up randomly in the store.

But then I start to question, where are those stores? Show me the comic shop. There’s like a handful in New York. Does it matter? I don’t know, are we becoming our own stores? Eventually, I think so.

Yeah. I mean, obviously I know nothing about comics, but I feel the way all art, the way the bend of all art currently is… is that your comics just exist for you to sell t-shirts and tote bags.

You mean like art just exists for the merch aspect? Yeah. So?

So you should be in those stores. Not for the actual sales, which will give you $70 a month, but just for the exposure of the brand the red hook, to then sell t-shirts of it.

Optics to get optics, to remind people you exist. Yeah. I think that’s important too.

Sell a t shirt instead of a comic.

Right. Because people don’t read anymore and they can barely watch a movie.

I mean Ted Hope recently wrote, I think on Substack; he wrote something like that the future of indie film is merchandise, which I think is kinda silly as it relates to indie film But at the same time I get where he’s coming from.

It’s true that the only monetization for any art right now is merchandise. For example bands now get their money on touring from selling albums and t shirts at the venues. Because no one’s paying them. Because they’re getting fucking $0.20 to stream on Spotify.

The other thing is, the people that are actually interested in physical media are probably older; older people like us who still covet physical items. Even though we don’t have space in our homes anymore to store them or to even look at them. And yeah, I guess at the end of the day, what people ultimately want is a token of of the thing that they like, you know because people are now being fooled into thinking that they can watch any movie at any time, which is not true. But it does feel like that, you know, or you can just type in something and you can go to not necessarily the dark web, but you can pirate most anything and get it for free as long as you have a phone, you don’t have to buy anything. So as a freelance artist that’s trying to make something that means something, you’re basically trying to create collector’s items or luxury items.

I did hear a hint of something in one of your answers, which was you were pointing out that Photoshop is just a tool. It’s not a cheat, to you. It’s a tool for the artist to use to help them to get from A to B. It sounds like you’re starting to consider AI could also be a tool for an artist to get from B to C. Is that something you’re considering?

I think if I was going to be honest with myself, I’m sure that someday I’ll delve into that.

But I’m actually looking right now at a Cintiq that I bought used for $400 about eight, nine years ago that I opened up once and never used.

Even though I’m using Photoshop, I’m still using a Wacom tablet with a pen, so it’s not entirely on the screen, though it feels ancient.

But yes, I get that it’s basically a production tool, so the same thing would be true for AI. It’s just that when you find out that, like, AI is stealing art, or is being used for training with your literal art. Which it did, by the way. Somebody looked up my name and they said, yeah, AI was training itself with your art.

And on the one hand, I feel so complimented. You know, but no, I shouldn’t feel that way because they don’t pay. They don’t ask. What they’re doing is just taking things that are online, like random or whatever, and it’s messed up. Listen, if you’re a lawyer writing some kind of, like, dissertation or something that you’ve done a million times, go ahead, use AI. I get it. You know, you’re not writing a novel. So I get that it’s useful in those ways.

I guess for me, when I think about AI, I think about, again, I cringe when I say the word, but authenticity. I think some people’s authenticity is using the tools and seeing what happens.

It reminds me of a spin wheel that you throw colors into, and it makes a splatter effect that you had no real control over. You just chose the colors while it was spinning, and then it just came out the way it came out, this abstract piece of art. And then you were involved in that, sure, but I wonder if if that’s what AI is kind of doing with people right now. They’re like literally throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the wall just to see what happens and what comes out of it, and they think it’s their art when it’s really not, it’s someone else’s art that was stolen and is now being fed back to them.

And they literally made a lying machine. Inherent to the experience is the thing just lies with confidence mixed in with true information, which is just so ridiculous in terms of a product. And also they claim with one hand that they give a shit about misinformation but with the other hand they promote these fucking things that are just literally misinformation machines.

Exactly. And we’re kind of, and I know this is an old term, but we’re kind of at a Mexican standoff with the truth right now and what we’re being asked to do is homework all day long. Just to find out the truth. And I don’t have time to do homework. I can’t even look at the New York Times every couple of hours to see the new headlines, because then I have to do all this homework to understand what is real and true about it.

And we did this to ourselves. The fact that these skewed slightly to heavily partisan headlines that exaggerate facts in a direction that will outrage you or will reaffirm you on either side. We click on those headlines more. So newspapers made more and more of them. Wrote articles more and more like that. Because we liked reading that, clicking on that. So we did it to ourselves.

And it becomes a rabbit hole. I had a friend who, like, denies all these things that I kind of believe in.

You live in kind of different realities. That’s common nowadays.

Yeah. She went off the rails a little bit, and then she found something to support her narrative online. And said, “Here, see? Look at this!” And, she was trying to bash whatever I used to look at for truth online. I said, “Well, you’re doing the same thing I’m doing. So who knows what’s right anymore?”

And this is now true for AI as well. I’ll connect this to AI as well. It used to be you grew up in a town and you announced that you think the world is flat, right? Everyone else just goes, “You’re a fucking moron.” And the difference with the internet now is you can go online and search “I think the world is flat.” And you’ll be served up a community of 50,000 people that also agree with you that the world is flat and you’re suddenly getting reaffirmed. This is true for everything. And AI is now just an agentic expression of that search engine that leads you to people who will reaffirm any crazy shit you believe. these chat bots first and foremost want to reaffirm whatever you are typing into it. so it’s gonna help us just delve even further into our own kinda reinforced micro-realities.

I mean, listen, AI has been a question ever since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, right? So we’ve been talking about it forever, and I think people are fucking lazy. I’m lazy, I get it, there’s some things I don’t want to work hard to do.

I just wrote a first draft of a play called “The Flat Tire,” about four artists in a car who get a flat tire on the side of a highway. No one knows how to fix a flat tire, but they’re really good at making movies and drawing comic books and making music and pictures, but you realize — what’s more important? Making art or fixing a flat tire?

When do you become useless?

So, I don’t know, I think AI’s become a crutch in some ways. And it’s a dangerous crutch. Just like, again, the way I use the calculator as an example: the calculator has ruined my ability to count or subtract, but at the same time, it’s not the tool. It’s not the calculator’s fault. It’s the people and how they use the tool and that’s where the judgments can come in. People are going to ruin their ability to think and create using this stuff, is I think the danger. But your criticisms and your mileage may vary.

Gil Roth invited me and 25 other authors to weigh in on the books we read in 2025 on his podcast, The Virtual Memories Show #668. I realized after I submitted my embarrassing answer that I forgot to mention that I had read Jonathan Ames’ Karma Doll, and Whitney Matheson’s The Feeling, both of which I absolutely loved.

Listen HERE.

Meanwhile, Gil has gone on a much needed indefinite hiatus and I wish him the best.

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Heidi MacDonald asked comix makers questions for The Comic Beat’s 2025-2026 Creator Survey Part 2: What to look forward to in ’26.

Excerpt:

What will be the biggest comics industry story in 2026?

Auteur autonomy. The expanding culture of indie/alt creators and the downsizing of corporate produced comic books. When the pandemic forced a remote lifestyle, it helped shave overhead costs but it also galvanized freelance cartoonists to take more self-publishing risks and find new ways of distribution (see: Power Pulp for a curated group of independent creators and distribution). A hearty deluge of autonomous, albeit, target-based newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube channels has become necessary as Patreon and crowdfunding platforms continue to help underwrite our efforts between creator and customer. The comic shop remains a crucial intersection for cultural optics and book sales, but it will have to bend some of the rules when it comes to alternative comix. And, unless the world renegotiates its relationship with money, readers will have to pay more for the privilege of truly alternative fare. I have made a Marvel comic book but my self-published “Deep Cuts” aren’t Marvel Comics. If you’re looking for new ideas and characters not beholden to popular trends, corporate mandates and Hollywood streaming, follow the footsteps of Michel Fiffe, who self-published 50+ issues of his creator-owned series, COPRA. And look no further than the likes of Russ Kazmierczak, Nicholas Forker, Dan Goldman, and Mahdi Khene, for regular grass roots efforts. I predict anthologies will make a comeback, too. Bring back DC Comics Presents, Marvel Team-Up, Marvel Two-In-One, Dark Horse Presents, and Joe Pruett’s Negative Burn already!