Generative Palimpsests: The Feature Space of Synthetic Comics

In the heart of craft traditions lies a tension between, on the one hand, the actual, material manifestation of a comics object and, on the other, the suppressed ideas, the paths not pursued, and the discarded elements that are not directly visible in the final work. These hidden aspects, however, are well documented in a wealth of preliminary production materials and prototypes, such as sketches, pencils, and page layouts, which serve to refine a work's visual and narrative elements incrementally. As more comic artists are invited to leverage the possibilities of generative AI, the present paper examines the transformative effect of emerging computational technologies on this conceptual divide, potentially altering our understanding and interaction with the initial stages of comic book production. It attempts to give an expression to the dual nature of comics objects and to dive into the "feature space" of algorithmic models, defined as the underlying abstract space that contains all potential configurations and states that an algorithmic model can represent or generate and which are not directly observable or experienced— the indeterminate wanderings, the ghostly presences and the infinite possible configurations that are inherently potential within computational systems. It also reflects on how the unrealized possibilities haunt the computational evolution of comics, continually reshaping and redefining the categories of materiality, time, space, and sensory modalities.