Schedule*

09:00-09:30

Coffee and registration

09:30-10:30

Welcome by Dr Ernesto Priego, City St George’s University of London.

Opening Keynote: Dr Eduardo Alonso, Professor in Artificial Intelligence and the Chair of the AI Research Committee at City St George’s University of London: GenAI 101 for Comics.

10:30-11:30

Dr Gareth Brookes, graphic novelist and comics scholar: Truth Claims and Trace: The Autographic Witness in the Algorithm

Dr Giorgio Busi Rizzi, FWO senior post-doctoral fellow and adjunct professor at Ghent University: AI, comics, and creativity: or, why are we talking of ghosts in the machine again

Chair: Dr Francesca Benatti (The Open University)

11:30-11:45

Coffee break

11:45-12:45

Dr Julian Lawrence, Senior Lecturer in Comics and Graphic Novels at Teesside University: Fun with AI: Digital Technology Through a Lens of Comics-Based Research

Dr Per Israelson, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication at Linnaeus University, Sweden: Speculative Affect and Generative AI: Reading Ilan Manouach’s manga Fastwalkers (2021)

Chair: Dominic Pates (City St George’s)

12:45-13:45

Lunch

13:45-14:45

Dr Linda Berube, Visiting Lecturer in Computer Science at City St. George’s, University of London: “Intense Routes to Knowing”: Intersections between the Digital Sociology of Comics and AI

Dr Aaron Humphrey, Senior Lecturer in Media and Digital Humanities at the University of Adelaide: Tracing nationalist legacies of generative AI

Chair: Dr Ernesto Priego

14:45-15:45

Dr Despoina Farmaki, Lecturer in Law at City St George’s, University of London: The Ink Was Never Human: AI, Copyright, and Comics

Karrie Fransman, comics creator: Creating IRL Comics for an AI Future

Chair: Reed Puc (City St George’s/The British Library)

15:45-16:00

Coffee break

16:00-17:15

Jasleen Kandhari, doctoral researcher, University of Leicester: Drawing the Line: AI & Ethics in Comic Book Character Design

Jane Burns, doctoral researcher and Director of Education & Public Engagement at the Technological University of the Shannon, Ireland: Comics & AI: The Intersection with Social Innovation Education

Viraj Joshi. Designer, Technologist, and Futurist: Speculation as Resistance: Mundane machine intelligence, a narrowing of futures, and plural counter narratives

Chair: Dr Linda Berube (City St George’s)

17:15-18:15

Closing Keynote: Dr Ian Hague, Associate Dean of Research at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London: Beyond #NoAI: How Accepting AI Might Change Comics

Closing panel: Linda Berube, Ed Alonso, Francesca Benatti, Ernesto Priego, Paul Gravett.

End

*Information subject to change.

Abstracts & Bios

Dr Eduardo Alonso

GenAI 101 for Comics

From copying styles to prompting stories, Generative AI (GenAI) has taken the creative sector by storm. Yet, few people in the “art-world” properly understand how GenAI algorithms work. In the proposed talk, we will explain in layman’s terms where GenAI comes from, the difference between discriminative and generative models, and the fundamentals of generative architectures such as Autoencoders, Generative Adversarial Networks, Diffusion models and Transformers that underly Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, ChatGPT, DALL-E and other text-to-text and text-to-image applications. We will also clarify some misconceptions about GenAI, for instance the black box myth (that we don’t understand them and can’t foresee their outputs), and the delegation of control, that have resulted in a false debate on AI autonomy and AI creativity. We will continue with a brief historical review of GenAI in the creative sector, from Obvious’ Portrait of Edmond de Belamy to Jason Allen’s Space Opera Theater, and the challenges they pose on authorship, on copyright law in particular –which can be tracked back to 1960s computer art and A. Michael Noll’s Gaussian-Quadratic. Finally, we will reflect on how these can affect comics, as an intersection of textuality and image.

Dr Eduardo Alonso is Professor in Artificial Intelligence and the Chair of the AI Research Committee at City St George’s University of London. He specializes in agent-based AI (now rebranded as Agentic AI) and in the philosophy of AI, including ethical and legal considerations and the socio-economic impact of both symbolic and connectionist models (now as GenAI and LLMs). He is a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College and the university’s academic liaison with the Alan Turing Institute, United Kingdom’s National Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. He is particularly interested in the intersection of AI and creativity and collaborates with AI artists, curators, and gallerists on a regular basis.

Dr Linda Berube

“Intense Routes to Knowing”: Intersections between the Digital Sociology of Comics and AI

AI research and development is often characterized by its emphasis on the quantitative and the “large”: large language models (LLMs), large datasets, large user cohorts, and so on. While sentiment analysis or emotion AI applied at scale can “bring rich fruit” (Benatti, 2024), qualitative research offers the potential for deeper insight through “surprising and unexpected discoveries” (van Voorst & Ahlin, 2024). Embracing qualitative research as an essential approach to understanding AI and emerging technologies, however, requires a willingness to value small samples and cohorts.

Recent years have seen an interest in smaller-scale qualitative approaches to AI research, particularly rapid ethnography (van Voorst & Ahlin, 2024). This method supports a model of development in which people remain central to technological innovation—ensuring that those involved act in service to society.

In this presentation, I will review findings from my doctoral research, Digital Comics Ecosystems: Investigating creation, publishing, consumption, and communication practices. This work illustrates how digital comics serve as a gateway to understanding the lived experience within digital ecosystems. Through the use of rapid ethnography and small qualitative samples, the findings provide what Pink and Morgan (2013) call “intense routes to knowing” how comics, specifically through platform algorithms, are experienced in the digital ecosystem. These findings and methods also demonstrate how AI and emerging technologies are, or may be, incorporated—or actively resisted—within these lived experiences.

Dr Linda Berube, Visiting Lecturer in Computer Science at City St. George’s was an AHRC Collaborative Partnership doctoral researcher investigating user interaction with devices, platforms, and digital publications through UK digital comics creation, production, and consumption processes, supported by the British Library and the Human-Computer Interaction Department (HCID) at City St. George’s, University of London. She has worked in the public sector developing web-based services and has researched and published on user interaction with comics, comics archives, and nonprint legal deposit collections. She is the author of Do You Web 2.0? Public Libraries and Social Networking (Elsevier, 2011).

Dr Gareth Brookes

Truth Claims and Trace: The Autographic Witness in the Algorithm

Graphic memoir has emerged as a powerful tool of advocacy and journalism, theorised in comics scholarship through notions of graphic witnessing authenticated by the drawn line conveying the subjective experience of the artist.

This paper will consider ideas of witnessing, truth claims and memory in graphic memoir at a moment when AI image generation tools are undermining the connection of drawn traces to their indexical origins in time, space, materiality and the body.

Through a comparison of Joe Sacco’s graphic reportage with recent AI images of conflict and history, and a consideration of computational and algorithmic processes considered broadly, the paper considers how the truth claims of graphic journalism may be affected by generative AI models.

Comics scholarship has been slow to critically respond to the digital nature of contemporary comics practice and the task of disentangling the human/nonhuman in ontologies of trace is now compounded by drawings which represent the outcome of archival reappropriation defined by opaque algorithmic parameters. This paper will explore theoretical assumptions around authenticity and truth claims in analogue, computational, algorithmic and generative drawing practice, and ask what kinds of approaches are appropriate if graphic memoir is to endure as documents of personal and political memory.

Dr Gareth Brookes is a graphic novelist and comics scholar. He gained a PhD from Central Saint Martins, UAL, in 2024 with a thesis entitled Embodied Responses to Materiality in the Making and Reading of Comics. He has published four graphic novels, including The Dancing Plague and The Compleat Angler. He has contributed scholarship to the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Studies in Comics and ImageText.

Jane Burns

Comics & AI: The Intersection with Social Innovation Education

AI and Comics provide a different approach to the complicated space of AI applications in Education. In many ways we are moving in unchartered and disconnected territories. Comics as a medium has the capacity to make complex, intricate and even emotional concepts accessible.

Comics like AI have can interpret complicated subjects in accessible ways. This presentation will reflect on the role of comics and AI in the development of Social Innovation Education.

In today’s complicated world, teaching about social innovation is not just a forward-thinking educational approach—it is a necessity. From a local perspective, it empowers young people to recognize and respond to the needs of their immediate communities.

At the core of social innovation is community and connectedness. Young people who learn about social innovation in the context of their local environment have the potential to see themselves as agents of change capable of addressing issues such as inequality, environmental sustainability, and community well-being. This local grounding fosters empathy, critical thinking, and a proactive mindset—skills that are essential for lifelong civic engagement. Using AI tools alongside the medium of comics can help enable future generations positively.

Jane Burns, MBA, MLIS, MPhil, FLAI, is the Director of Education & Public Engagement at the Technological University of the Shannon, Ireland. Jane has a wealth of employment experiences from a number of Irish Higher Education Institutions, Research Bodies, the Private Sector In 2018 Jane made the move to Academic Management at TUS. She is an experienced Librarian, University Lecturer and CPD facilitator. Her research and personal interests include an obsession with Comics! Jane is currently a PhD candidate at Dublin City University where she is exploring the areas of Graphicacy & Graphic Medicine in Education.

Dr Giorgio Busi Rizzi

AI, comics, and creativity: or, why are we talking of ghosts in the machine again

This paper discusses how the use of generative AI in comics production entails foregrounding the non-creative, aleatory, and plural aspects of the creative process.

The argument moves from aesthetic (Perloff 2010; Goldsmith 2011) and cognitive (Boden 2010; Kaufman et al. 2019) premises, but also from recent technical studies in the very functioning of LLMs (Kamb and Sanguli 2025). It argues that we must branch out authorship into a range of human and nonhuman actors and influences pointing to a plural, networked, and somewhat more opaque idea of creation, which I call algorithmic co-creation (Busi Rizzi 2024, 2025). This better reflects the impact materiality has on creative processes (both digital and analogue), particularly considering the contemporary postdigital condition and its effects on comics production.

While itself not new, unthinkable nor unheard of, this position destabilizes a consistent part of the current discourse around creativity, which, much in reaction to the AI surge (and in a misdirection from some of is most concerning issues, such as infrastructure inequalities, extractivist logics, dataset biases, or copyright lobbying), mostly focuses on the intangible quid – often identified as the “soul”, or the “effort” – that purportedly differentiates human and AI creation in radically irreconcilable manners (see Wingström, Hautala and Lundman 2023; Garcia 2024; Sueur et al. 2024).

The present contribution proposes instead a broader understanding of artistic creativity as a collectively, historically grounded act, where the novel element is always based on processes of assimilation, reproduction and deviation from the existent. To do so, it discusses a batch of AI-generated graphic novels – llan Manouach’s Fastwalkers (2022) and Out Side (2024, with K Allado-McDowell); Dave McKean’s Prompt: Conversations with AI (2022); Carson Grubaugh’s The Abolition of Man (2022); Thierry Murat’s Initial_A (2023); Rootport’sCyberpunk: Momotarō (2023) – as well as original creations realized on Midjourney and ChatGPT.

Dr Giorgio Busi Rizzi is FWO senior post-doctoral fellow and adjunct professor at Ghent University, teaching the Comics and Graphic Novels and English Literature courses. His current project investigates authorship in postdigital comics; his previous research analyzed nostalgic aesthetics and practices in comics, and experimental digital comics. He holds a PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies with joint supervision by the Universities of Bologna and Leuven. His contributions have appeared in The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Studies in Comics, European Comic Art, the Cambridge Companion to Comics and The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia.

Dr Despoina Farmaki

The Ink Was Never Human: AI, Copyright, and Comics

‘Create a short comic book story concept with visuals similar to Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. The style should be dark, gritty, with a bold noir aesthetic’: generative AI tools are rapidly transforming comic production, enabling creators to generate entire visual narratives with minimal human input. Yet these advancements expose foundational gaps in copyright law, particularly regarding the authorship of AI-generated outputs.

This paper critically examines two core issues: (1) the legal implications of training data composed of copyrighted works, and (2) the ambiguous authorship of resulting works. Does scraping protected visual works for model training infringe the reproduction right or do exceptions apply? Simultaneously, the output’s eligibility for copyright protection is contested—given the absence of human creativity as traditionally understood. The conception of creativity (both external and subjective) will also be discussed.

Through a doctrinal analysis, I argue that comics, with their hybrid visual-verbal structure and serialised storytelling, magnify these tensions. The paper concludes by advocating for a copyright model that balances technological innovation with artistic integrity and creator rights.

Dr Despoina Farmaki is a Lecturer in Law at City St George’s, University of London. Her teaching expertise spans Intellectual Property Law, Internet Law, and Contract Law. Despoina is also the Chief Academic Officer at Esports Legal News and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her research focuses on the intersection between Intellectual Property and Technology, with a particular focus on the video game industry. She has published in prominent journals and edited books and is a qualified lawyer in Greece.

Karrie Fransman

Creating IRL Comics for an AI Future

Experimental comics creator, Karrie Fransman discusses her project ‘Creating IRL Comics for an AI Future’ (funded by an Arts Council England DYCP grant and the Stephen Herbert Award). Fransman explores creative responses to AI and how comics creators can protect their comics from AI by engaging audiences ‘in real life’ (IRL) without a screen between them and the art, centralising the human experience. Fransman’s research takes her back in time to a period of great technological innovation, pre-cinema in the 18th and 19th century, before screens began to dominate our interaction with art. She explores a host of forgotten sequential art mediums from magic lanterns to polyorama panoptiques and panorama scrolls to cantastorie/‘story singers’. Her research also looks to the present and future to explore what lessons modern, digital visual storytelling has taught us about immersion and interactivity from VR and AR to AI. This research forms the bedrock for Fransman’s current work-in-progress. The ‘Tale Spinner’ is a 3D, performed comic that is immersive, revolving around the viewer’s head, and is described as ‘Un-AI-able’. In it, Fransman spins a story about global warming, AI, pricked fingers, motherhood, ghosts in nurseries and our fear of an unknown future.

Karrie Fransman is a comic creator whose comics have been published by The United Nations, The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph and The British Red Cross. She is currently The Royal Society of Literature’s Artist in Residency. She has published 4 books: ‘Gender Swapped Fairy Tales’ (2020) and ‘Gender Swapped Greek Myths’ (2023) with Faber & Faber, both co-created with Jonathan Plackett and two graphic novels: ‘The House That Groaned’ (2012, Penguin Random House), and the award winning ‘Death of the Artist’ (2015, Jonathan Cape). She created an installation for the British Council and Southbank Centre and was commissioned to make a ‘Selves Portrait’ for an exhibition with Manchester Art Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. She is Creative Director at PositiveNegatives.org who uses comics and animation to amplify academic research. She is a founding member of The Comics Cultural Impact Collective (CCIC) that aims to raise awareness of the value of comics in the UK. You can find more of her work at https://karriefransman.com/ .

Dr Ian Hague

Beyond #NoAI: How Accepting AI Might Change Comics

When ArtStation refused to ban content produced using AI in 2022, it was met with a flood of protests from users in the form of images accompanied by the hashtag #noai. Although it is somewhat simplistic, this framing points to common debates around AI in the contemporary comics landscape, which sets communities into ostensibly clear “pro AI” or “no AI” positions.

In this paper, I outline some of the key arguments currently being advanced against AI around the themes of intellectual property and the automation of labour, show how these arguments relate to comics, and how they might be mitigated. Next, I consider three arguments in favour of AI in comics: that AI might serve a superhuman function, that it might serve a compensatory function, and that ultimately a social approach to AI may validate AI art. Here I demonstrate that viable positions against the “NoAI” arguments are not only rooted in commercial or practical concerns, but in social and ethical ones as well. Ultimately, I argue that AI is likely to prevail. Finally, I turn to the question of what types of works might become available in comics if AI is widely accepted. Moving on from the #noAI debate would, I suggest, allow us to truly understand what the shape and scale of AI’s impact will be.

Dr Ian Hague is the Associate Dean of Research at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. He is the author of Comics and the Senses (Routledge 2014) and The Materiality of Digital Comics (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming), and the founder of Comics Forum, https://comicsforum.org/.

Dr Aaron Humphrey

Tracing nationalist legacies of generative AI

This paper examines how generative AI can be used to interrogate historical databases of comic art, using a case study drawn from nineteenth century cartoons published in The Bulletin a weekly illustrated newspaper from New South Wales that became the leading voice of Australian nationalism. The Bulletin was one of the first periodicals to be digitised by the National Library of Australia, and it occupies a unique place in Australia’s history and data ontologies.

Since mass digitisation of images is key to the training of generative AI models, this paper also explores the ethical and policy implications of national digitisation initiatives. Such initiatives are widely lauded for making historical periodicals like The Bulletin available to researchers and to the public. However, what does it mean when historical images, which are often deeply problematic to modern audiences, become part of a generative AI training model?

Ultimately this paper argues that studying the legacy of nationalist images, through historical research into periodicals like The Bulletin, is vitally important in the age of generative AI, because these images are often the building blocks of the libraries such systems are trained with.

Dr Aaron Humphrey is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Digital Humanities at the University of Adelaide. His research on comics has been published in journals including The International Journal of Cultural Studies, The International Journal of Comic Art, a/b: Autobiography Studies and The Comics Grid. He is also a cartoonist and has published peer-reviewed research comics in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Persona Studies and Composition Studies. He is writing a book about comics, displacement and transnationalism.

Dr Per Israelson

Speculative Affect and Generative AI: Reading Ilan Manouach’s manga Fastwalkers (2021)

Large Language Models (LLMs) train on multidimensional material. The deep learning of neural networks, stochastically following probabilities rather than symbolic orders, operates on what Gilbert Simondon would understand as the realm of the pre-individual (Simondon 2020). Instead of conceptual hierarchies, LLMs construct meaning through probabilistic relations and intensities, in a sense functioning on what Brian Massumi and Mark Hansen would describe as the realm of affect. Tentatively then, we could approach LLMs as affective machines, generating meaning from multidimensional training material. The following paper will test this highly speculative proposition in a reading of the conceptual artist Ilan Manouach’s 2021 manga Fastwalkers.

Manouach’s book was made by fine-tuning an LLM on material from the Danbooru repository of fan collated hentai anime and manga images, resulting in a model capable of producing a certain form of manga images. The material structure of the narrative – grid layouts, speech bubbles and panels – were also made with AI-tools, as was the textual material, which was produced by feeding the introduction of Manouach’s doctoral dissertation into a GPT3 model.

While Fastwalkers is organized as a manga narrative, and can be read as such, it is not a reading that easily lends itself to a symbolic form of meaning. The book is not structured as a coherent, meaning making system. Rather, it could be described as an emerging system, performing a complex coupling of many different systems, in a sense performing the stochastic learning process of an LLM.

Dr Per Israelson is a senior lecturer at the Department of Media and Communication at Linnaeus University, Sweden. Israelson’s work centers on media ecology and participatory culture. In his dissertation, Ecologies of the Imagination (2017), Israelson presented a posthumanist theory of the participatory aesthetics of the fantastic. His postdoc project investigated Nordic postdigital comics. He has written extensively on comics, genres of the fantastic and children’s literature, both as critic and researcher, and is currently part of a research project on generative AI and cultural memory funded by the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg foundation.

Viraj Joshi

Speculation as Resistance: Mundane machine intelligence, a narrowing of futures, and plural counter narratives

Eliza – The Ghost in Every Machine is a speculative design and fiction project (2021–) that questions the inevitability of our current technological trajectory to provide constructive, plural, more-human, and more-than-human alternatives. Eliza is an allegorical figure that lives in technology since the first human-made tool.

What began as a weekly digital cartoon is now a printed speculative comic anthology, with new volumes due in autumn 2025. Emerging from Speculative and Critical Design perspectives, Eliza has featured in Design forums (including Milan Design Week 2023) and comic spaces (Gosh! Comics, and UK conventions).

In this session, I will do comic excerpt readings, share my speculative design and fiction process, and provide analytical reflections on these themes: Critiquing the Status Quo; Creating Better Alternatives; Reflections on three approaches towards AI – collaboration, resistance, and indifference.

Eliza offers a mode of practice that holds all three: how comics can work with aspects of AI, against aspects of AI, and regardless of aspects of AI.

Viraj Joshi (MA, Royal College of Art; MSc, Imperial College London) is a designer, technologist, and futurist based in London. He works as a Service and Experience Designer, and leads Design Futures practice at Fjord (now Accenture Song). He is also a Visiting Tutor in Speculative and Human-Machine Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. Viraj is the creator of Eliza – The Ghost in Every Machine (https://www.virajvjoshi.com/eliza) a speculative comic exploring alternative relationships with technology. His work has been exhibited at the Science Museum London, United Nations DPPA, Milan Design Week, London Design Festival, and comic conventions across the UK.

Jasleen Kandhari

Drawing the Line: AI & Ethics in Comic Book Character Design

The consumption of AI tools in the process of character design generates moral and ethical questions of representation, authenticity and cultural sensitivity that require scholarly attention (Charles, D.R: 2025).

I shall explore the ethical challenges introduced by artificial intelligence in comic book character design and examine the ethical dilemmas of bias in algorithmic design of AI-generated identities, ownership of digital personas, and the problems of cultural appropriation through automated remixing of data sets.

Controversies that have arisen in AI-driven character creation shall be highlighted as areas of debate in a rapidly evolving field where technology meets inclusive and responsible design, and artistic innovation must be balanced with ethical accountability in the use of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research for sustainable Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI).

Jasleen Kandhari is a graduate from the University of York (Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence) and a doctoral researcher at the University of Leicester (Visual Culture). She contributed the entry ‘Religious Comics’ to Key Terms in Comics Studies (2022) and champions Equality, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) in academia and creative practice. As an artist, her debut solo exhibition opened at the National Museum of Kenya in Mombasa (2024).

Dr Julian Lawrence

Fun with AI: Digital Technology Through a Lens of Comics-Based Research

In this presentation, I explore the historical and ethical undercurrents of digital technology through comics-based research and artistic inquiry by asking “how does AI participate in shaping historical narratives, and what role can comics play in resisting this mediation?” I utilise a mixed research approach by shaping and analysing data into hand-drawn sequential visual narratives and presenting findings in the form of a comic. As an artist, researcher, and educator actively engaged with contemporary media, I respond to the pervasive culture of uncritical techno-optimism and digital dependency. I propose that comics offer a method for critical and embodied engagement with digital histories, challenging dominant narratives and fostering alternative ways of knowing.

Beginning with Neil Postman’s warning that society has transformed into a “totalitarian technocracy… [where] Adolf Eichmann becomes the basic model and metaphor for a bureaucrat in the age of Technopoly,” I trace lesser-discussed origins of computing, including the Nazi use of early digital systems and IBM’s wartime technologies in German concentration camps. While investigating these narratives using AI tools such as ChatGPT, I encountered significant resistance: evasive responses, sanitised histories, and algorithmic gatekeeping. This experience raises critical questions about how AI mediates historical truth and cultural memory. In response, I embrace Barbara Bolt’s call to “give pre-eminence to the material practice of art… in place of the ‘technologisation’ of thought.”

Dr Julian Lawrence is a Senior Lecturer in Comics and Graphic Novels at Teesside University, specialising in comics-based research. Dr Lawrence has 40 years combined experience as a comics artist, researcher and teacher with a BA in Media Studies from Emily Carr University, an MA in Art Education from the University of British Columbia, and a PhD in Art and Design from Teesside University. As a professional comics artist, he has worked for Fantagraphics, Cartoon Network, the NFB, and others. He currently edits a series of educational comics distributed in the UK and Europe called Green Kid Adventures (www.greenkidcomics.com), and he is writing a book titled “Making Comics, Collaborative Practice and Critical Pedagogy” published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2026.

Final Roundtable Participants include:

Paul Gravett is a comics activist promoting the global medium in Britain and abroad for over forty years through books, exhibitions, events and media. Currently he is co-curating two exhibitions to open London’s Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration next year and advising on the North American tour of The Barbican’s ‘Asian Comics’ exhibition.

Dr Ernesto Priego is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design, and a co-director of the Data, Policy and Society MSc at City St George’s, University of London, and editor and founder of The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship. As a researcher he has explored the role of comics as narrative, conceptual and speculative design tools and applies user-centred, participatory co-design methods to the creation of comics within public health or social interest domains. Ernesto led the “Parables of Care. Responses to Dementia Care” project (2017-2021), which explored the potential of comics to enhance the impact of dementia care research.

Dr Francesca Benatti is Senior Research Fellow at The Open University, where her research interests range from book history to comics to hypertext to nineteenth-century Irish literature and periodicals. She uses digital approaches to study the Humanities and investigate digital cultures, texts and hypertexts through Humanities perspectives. She is the author of Innovations in Digital Comics (2024).