Lee drew inspiration for his renegade baseball avengers from the Sammi Superstars, one in every of South Korea’s first skilled baseball groups, whose journey of perseverance captivated a rustic stifled by navy dictatorship. The collection gained a cult following amongst readers searching for a artistic escape from political repression, mesmerized by his daring brushstrokes and cinematic compositions that defied the conventions of cartoons.
Kkachi, the rebellious protagonist in A Daunting Group, is an alter ego of Lee himself. A scrappy outcast with untamed, spiky hair, he’s a fan favourite who challenges the world with unrelenting ardour and a courageous conscience. He has reappeared all through Lee’s signature works, painted with a brand new layer of pathos every time—a supernatural warrior who saves Earth from an alien assault in Armageddon and a rogue police officer battling a robust legal syndicate in Karon’s Daybreak. Over a long time, Kkachi has turn into a cultural icon in South Korea.
However Lee worries about Kkachi’s future. “In South Korea, when an creator dies, his characters additionally get buried in his grave,” he says, drawing contrasts with enduring American comedian characters like Superman and Spider-Man. Lee craves inventive immortality. He needs his characters to remain alive not simply within the reminiscences of readers, but additionally on their internet comedian platforms. “Even after I die, I would like my worldviews and characters to speak and resonate with the folks of a brand new period,” he says. “That’s the type of immortality I would like.”
Lee believes that AI may also help him notice his imaginative and prescient. In partnership with Jaedam Media, an internet comics manufacturing firm primarily based in Seoul, he developed the “Lee Hyun-se AI mannequin” by fine-tuning the open-source AI artwork generator Steady Diffusion, created by the UK-based startup Stability AI. Utilizing a knowledge set of 5,000 volumes of comics that he has revealed over 46 years, the ensuing mannequin generates comics in his signature fashion.
This 12 months, Lee is getting ready to publish his first AI-assisted internet comedian, a remake of his 1994 manhwa Karon’s Daybreak. Writers at Jaedam Media are adapting the story right into a modernized crime drama starring Kkachi as a police officer in present-day Seoul and his love curiosity Umji as a daring prosecutor. College students at Sejong College, the place Lee teaches comics, are creating the paintings utilizing his AI mannequin.
The artistic course of unfolds in a number of phases. First, Lee’s AI mannequin generates illustrations primarily based on textual content prompts and reference photographs, like 3D anatomy fashions and hand-drawn sketches that present cues for various actions and gestures. Lee’s college students then curate and edit the illustrations, adjusting the characters’ poses, tailoring their facial expressions, and integrating them into cartoonish compositions that AI can’t engineer. After many rounds of refinement and regeneration, Lee steps in to orchestrate the ultimate product, including his distinct inventive edge.
AI corporations envision that artists may automate the grunt work of drawing and channel their artistic power into storytelling and artwork path.
“Below my path, a personality may glare with unhappy eyes even once they’re indignant or ferocious eyes once they’re glad,” he says. “It’s a subversive expression, a nuance that AI struggles to seize. These delicate particulars I must direct myself.”
Finally, Lee needs to construct an AI system that embodies his meticulous method to human expressions. The grand imaginative and prescient of his experimental AI venture is to create a “Lee Hyun-se simulation agent”—a complicated technology of his AI mannequin that replicates his artistic thoughts. The mannequin can be educated on digital archives of Lee’s essays, interviews, and texts from his comics—the topic of an exhibit on the Nationwide Library of Korea final 12 months—to encode his philosophy, persona, and values. “It’s going to take a very long time for AI to be taught my myriad worldviews as a result of I’ve revealed a lot work,” he says.
