Dream Machine is the result of artificial intelligence set on a collision course with a cartoonist deeply affected by the political, ethical, and ecological state of our times. Created by Appupen (aka George Mathen) in collaboration with French physicist turned AI entrepreneur, Laurent Daudet, the graphic novel unpacks Large Language Models (LLMs) and their implications for the shared future of humanity through a story that features everything from the surveillance-laden dreams of reckless technocrats to a scientist who must risk it all if he has to live up to his fantasies of being a superhero.
Appupen and Daudet are both creators and created in this dance. Daudet inspires the centre of the narrative as the scientist turned inventor Hugo on the cusp of selling his company’s language translation AI model to the Meta-inspired megacorporation, REAL.E. Appupen implicates himself in the tale eventually as one of Hugo’s interlocutors, the political cartoonist Ayyo, a character that has also appeared on many other strips on his online platform, Brainded. Peppered in here are touches that mark it as the work of an artist pulling disparate threads from his oeuvre together to challenge the expectations his work has created over the years.
The trick of his form is in realising that there already exists a dialogue between the Appupen who makes short, thinly veiled political satire for social media and the draftsman who has been publishing stories set in a sprawling universe of his own making in the rarefied format of the graphic novel. In other words, Rashtraman has always been in Halahala.
A comic book artist draws AI
The narrative is Sandman-simple: Hugo must make a decision. He has to figure out whether or not to throw in his lot with the corporate industrial complex threatening to not only automate away jobs but fundamentally increase inequality between his fellow human beings in the process. This is development driven by shareholder ideas of progress and growth. They reduce the value of the individual to just a faceless consumer, existing only to be harvested for measurable metrics. Hugo’s decision may not ultimately affect this chain of events but, ethically, it makes all the difference.
The history of LLM-based technology like ChatGPT that the book charts in the process is rooted in the nonfiction tradition of Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe comics and Icon Books’ “Graphic Guide” series that began with the publication of Richard Appignanesi’s English translation of legendary Mexican cartoonist Rius’ Marx para Principiantes (Marx for Beginners) in 1976. The other major influence is the French artist Jean Giraud, the creator of Azrach and Incal, famous for creating expansive imaginaries much like Appupen. Giraud’s chosen name was Moebius, which perhaps inspired Appupen’s choice of his own pen name. But it is his debt to the writer-artist duo Schuitten and Peeters and their intricate attempts to explore the Kafkaesque architecture of magic realism and control in the fables of Les Cites Obscures that is particularly relevant to Dream Machine’s mode of storytelling, a DNA it visibly shares with what we have seen so far of filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming masterpiece, Megalopolis. The book shifts scale seamlessly between the one and the many; the fantastic and the draconian; the individual and society; the government, the corporate, and the environment; a life of solipsism and comfort, and the legacy of human civilisation.
In doing so it takes the lead from both the hybrid, experimental nature of Moonward (2009, his debut full-length album, republished last year) and the readership he has built across platforms over the years. Satire and caricature come together with acerbic mythopoeic world-building to create a sense of continuity and rootedness rarely found in Indian comics since the heyday of Amar Chitra Katha in the late 1980s. The pitfalls of publicly pursuing cartooning as political critique also bend the imaginary and nonfictional into one another. The commission of his European publishers (Flammarion, who first published the French edition in late 2023) and the framing of the story from a continental perspective allows Appupen the rare opportunity to be blunt with his censure of Indian polity. Ayyo bears witness to its complicity in enabling corporations to take over both the private and the commons. The history of the comics chart easily anticipates the uncritical manner in which AI is being marshalled and controlled in India, alongside its human and natural costs, inevitably borne by the Global South.
This direct questioning of the extractive and consumptive design of modern society also makes an exacting demand of Hugo. He has a scientific obligation to take his work to its logical conclusion for the potential benefits it may bring to medical and other research. The proposed collaboration with REAL.E, its totalising bottom-line masquerading behind free internet Third World schemes and the smokescreen of AI avatars, creates a quandary that requires him to take account of both the history of AI and the extent to which humanity has approached it ethically. His imaginary fantasy of himself as SuperHugo in short strips that occasionally interrupt the main narrative, starts with the innocent energy of Bill Waterson’s Spaceman Spiff but finds itself moving perilously close to Appupen’s despotic superhero, Rashtraman.
It is also important that we do not see these self-insertions as autobiography, where the mere act of confession or the retroactive construction of diasporic identity in North American comics supersedes and displaces other political concerns. It is not the charged autobio comics of Malik Sajad’s Munnu (2015) either, where the historic pain of so many is filtered through the existence of one who struggles to bear witness. There is a Socratic charge to the way Appupen stages the discussions as historically contingent speech acts that no longer have the luxury of neutrality. The stakes have never been higher. So much so that the unusual economy of dialogue he otherwise maintains completely goes for a toss. Excess dialogue routinely spills over into subsequent panels, attributed to objects in the background, as it becomes reportage. The world of inanimate objects follows AI here in staking a claim to cognition. And thereafter, a fair hearing.
Artificial intelligence, prompted through comics
The creators also, for their part, refuse to reduce themselves to Scott McCloud-like tongue-in-cheek presenters who spout facts and add in a quip or two from the gutter. Instead they become active participants, insecurely working to understand the cycles through which such algorithmic natural language processing tools have progressed to command such attention – even if the content they generate remains mired in questions of repetition, misinformation, surveillance, and the appropriation of artistic labour.
Hugo makes a decision. Appupen and Daudet provocatively take their concerns head-on in a final section that reads as a fun gimmick, unless you are a fellow artist. Hugo’s choice splinters the ending into an AI-generated choose-your-own-adventure story. The Midjourney image generation model, trained on Appupen’s art from the previous pages, is quick to rise to the opportunity to conjure a sense of everything from zombie apocalypse to global harmony. Each panel here has its own caption, produced separately by ChatGPT. The layouts may be as formally rigid as the chapters that precede it, but are oblivious to the romance of the gutter. They fail to extend the collaboration between Appupen and Daudet that allows for such uneasy complications.
The act of working together is a gesture that goes against both the computational logic of generative AI and the solitary draftsmanship of the graphic novelist producing a singular work they have full control and authorship over. Comics have always been a participatory medium, owing to the labour-intensive – almost assembly line – mode of production that has enriched the art created as a result. It is why Amruta Patil’s collaboration with corporate mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik on Aranyaka (2019); Sumit Sarkar’s comics on Kashmir for Newslaundry; Arghya Manna’s current partnership with mathematician and biophysicist Lydia Bourouiba on the transmission of diseases; or Sarnath Banerjee’s ongoing work with the economist Abhijit Banerjee on exploring environmental crises through theatrical comics are promising, insofar as they challenge the authority of the cartoonist as they speak to the world through other ways of seeing.
Appupen’s own career has mirrored and, in some instances, explicitly gone against the grain of the mismatched puzzle that university syllabi and the trade publishing industry have helped establish and sell in our subcontinent–the graphic novel. The triumph of Dream Machine is in its making of this contest between the medium of the comic book and the format of the graphic novel visible while also expanding the horizons of what comics are capable of in India. Lettering and colours – as I have bemoaned here before – still remain either subsumed by the artist’s function or are regarded as freelance editorial services that are deprived of authorial claims. The aura of the graphic novel in India still requires to be challenged, for comics to become more open and inclusive to these divisions of labour.
Indian comics criticism, where art thou?
Comics reviews in Indian media, however, are rarely incentivised to take such concerns into account, let alone question them. In the process we risk losing important contexts informing comic book artists and the creation of their oeuvre incubated in the history and culture their works are produced in. How else do we attempt to understand Appupen’s creation of extensive worlds whose logic and politics his art can play around with without being limited by expectations of resolution, form, or dialogue? The comics he has made in the last decade and a half have embraced different distribution systems, genres, and art practices. He has been as comfortable drawing entire volumes of silent comics as he has been prolific with his extremely enjoyable political cartoons. His is a body of work that began with exquisite hand-lettering that embraced its function as painted text, became minimal when required, and, as in Dream Machine, gave in to standardised typesetting for publication in three different languages. The strong presence of rhythm (Mathen is a trained musician) in his comics has been as evident as his interests in both fine art and advertising techniques.
One wonders if Dream Machine can be discussed in such detail in a review of books only because it is considered a graphic novel first. Would such a review still exist if the same comic book were a) serialised in chapters by b) an (imaginary) independent comics publisher in India with reach and distribution not unlike Chacha Chaudhury’s Diamond Comics? The task of assessing the value of such a book and examining–as the film critic Pauline Kael put it–how the artist gives “form to his experience” becomes difficult in a public sphere where a culture of public-facing comics criticism has gone missing in recent times.
Indeed, how well do we know our comics? Reports from the “Comics in Bengal” Exhibition from my hometown Kolkata and IIT Gandhinagar’s Comics Conclave 2.0 earlier this year only highlight the lack of a coherent modern comics scene which has a sense of its own history. The Tintin translations heralded the end of this pulpy, homegrown, “golden age of Bengali comics”, book historian and Director of Jadavpur University’s School of Cultural Texts and Records, Abhijit Gupta said in his opening remarks at the former event. The latter too, despite the considerable amount of programming that went into it, remained a space primarily for conversations between artists and comics studies researchers.
In Appupen’s own city too – aside from the attention bookstores like Blossom’s lavish on them – “cartooning” is largely limited to a similar celebration of memory through the Annual issues of CartoonistsIndia. It is published in Bengaluru by the Indian Institute of Cartoonists (founded in 2001), who also started the Indian Cartoon Gallery there in 2007. Their substantial efforts have mostly focused on charting the history of the satirical political newspaper cartoon alongside highlighting the careers of artists like RK Laxman, Ajit Nanan, Anant Pai, and even the younger Bal Thackeray. In the midst of all of this, another Indie Comix Fest has come and gone in Delhi, with few people any wiser about platforming the work that is produced there.
Dream Machine takes the auteur's concerns serialised in his Halahala books and parodied in the Rashtrayana strips with inaccessible structures and societies of control from their mythical subtext into our current collective fantasy of AI and its continuing rise to prominence. These signatures become the pivot on which the book oscillates between providing a fascinating history of AI and ethically judging its value for humanity. It becomes difficult to critically assess the book beyond a point without addressing the vacuum its ambition is produced in. This also means a reckoning with how comics criticism in India has been left grasping for a sense of context and continuity. The only way to produce this is for both comics and their readers to demand it.
Dream Machine: AI and the Real World, Appupen and Laurent Daudet, Context/Westland.
