How I Became Public Domain

All the latest knock-offs of my Notion illustrations, plus new Terrible Father adventures, and BIG MARKETING GUYS

Today I have the return of the fan-favorite Terrible Father, and a feature presentation of various knock-offs of my day job efforts.

But first, my last book is finally coming out in English, and it’s up for preorder from Fantagraphics! The release date might be wrong, I think it’s meant to come out early next year, but pre-orders apparently do matter, especially since I asked not to send out any netgalley/promo

MORE BIG MARKETING NOW

Anyone who loved my last post can rejoice, because I’ve got more Big Marketing Guys for you. Everyone else can scroll through.

FUNGIBLE ROMANS EVERYWHERE

If you attended/watched the recent Notion conference, you may’ve noticed a familiar character on one of the slides, complete with a unibrow and tie. What’s more, it’s not the closest he’ll ever get to climbing the corporate ladder—stay tuned for TF’s further adventures. I have one for you in this very letter, but first, let’s take a detour into that horrible real world that we live in.

If a Terrible Father sneaks into a tech conference, but no-one there knows him, is he still Terrible?

As some of you may know, aside from my highly unsuccessful graphic novels and animated films, I also developed the illustrations for Notion, which have become very popular, and inspired a wild amount of imitations. I’ve been holding off from writing about this for a while, but recently I decided to google ‘Notion illustration’ and guess what, just ONE of them is mine:

The rest is either copies or Ai slop. Thankfully, I’m not particularly attached to my commercial work, and I know that everything I hate about it is exactly what made it popular, but still, it was done with my hand, and seeing so many knock-offs is pretty bizarre.

All of them make the same mistake of blindly copying the most surface flourishes and bits and bobs, without understanding any of the design or structure that went into my illustrations. It’s like seeing the worst parts of you blown up with anything redeeming completely abandoned

I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but if you look outside the art bubble, you’ll find that people not only have no problem with all this, they also see no significant difference between my work and these imitations, and find any sort of displeasure on an artist’s part to be risible (see the response to the now-ancient Ghibli-GPT-gate).

Normies on reddit find it absurd that anyone would think of this as plagiarism, and yet they have no problem charging money for their shitty replicas, and many of them make way more that I’ve ever made from anything in my entire career, including this job (I’ve looked into it and I’m not exaggerating).

I guess that aspect does make me sigh, considering the sales of my books and the performance of my Substack, not to mention the podcast, which might as well be declared dead. There’s a quite horrible new episode btw that for once is not about the Fall at all:

13. Zoot Suit Riot

I also stretched one of my very sick beats into a preview of ep.11. Just try not to dance along to it, I dare you:

If you need more fake Romans for your unnecessary startup, here’s a full listicle (probably written by Ai) of other places where you can get this slop. And of course it’s been Ai-fied too:

And for the most hellish modern thing, here’s an Ai woman talking about Notion Ai prompts with an Ai-voice and an Ai-script:

Here’s some further reading around Ai and style and other relevant themes:

But enough of that! Back to fun!

YOUNG FATHERING

Here’s a Terrible Father story inspired by one of the letters he received. If you want to ask TF for advice, please do, either in the comments, or by sending me an email through my perpetually-in-progreess website (I’ll pass it along to him, and who knows, maybe your concern will become a new comic). You can read all the previous Terrible Father posts here, and there’s a couple of printed zines you can find at Gosh Comics in that there London.

To answer the last question, we need to go back in time, and meet TF in his relative youth (not that there’s any difference in anything, except for the size of son).

(continued behind the paywall, along with more Big Marketing Guys)