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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 41.7 ms ] thread
I'm intrigued... not only did I love Calvin and Hobbes, but the plot sounds really cool.
I really miss Calvin and Hobbes… I was a lot like him as a kid. Now I try to be his father.
He's NOT the illustrator of the book. THAT'S interesting.
It could be his name is being used, but he's famous for not going commercial, so I suspect there's more to the story.
Watterson is really interesting. Some of his C&H collection books have short essays, and some have original poetry--"Nauseous Nocturne" is great--and of course he wrote all of the strip's dialogs. He's certainly a good writer.

The fact that Watterson held firm and never licensed his creation, and also stood up to the newspaper conglomerates to ensure C&H got printed adequately is fascinating. I have a lot of respect for him.

Love this so much - that a cherished creator can detach for years then drop something they’ve been working on. And likely not a book tour in sight!
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Who's next? Jeff Keane? Jim Davis?
Do the sample images look kinda ... AI generated to anyone else? This sentence hints at something: "Both artists abandoned their past ways of working, inventing images together that neither could anticipate—a mysterious process in its own right."
Could be both the text and art that are generated. Weird. If it was closer to April 1, I think I'd understand better what's going on.
Hmmm... you may be on to something there. I certainly can't disprove your theory based on the samples. It's not completely out of spec for what human illustrators sometimes do, but there are some things that seem a bit... odd.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/710rEGCuE-L.jpg - the hand in the center of the image seems a bit off, like it was replaced later.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/71vW6lumrpL.jpg - text in the book is suspiciously like what some of the AIs generate, although I don't recall that I've ever seen it projected onto an object quite like that; people who have more experience with it than me care to pipe up?

On the other hand, I can't say it's obviously AI either. It's hard to tell when someone who knows what they're doing may also be doing exactly the same analysis I'm doing here, and cleaning up the tells. If you pick up any illustrated book and stare at it hard enough for AI tells, you'll probably find some.