Image Comics co-founder and Spawn creator Todd McFarlane is getting heat from comic book professionals and fans for allegedly letting an AI-generated entry win a recent Spawn art contest.
In January 2024, Todd McFarlane launched "Spawnuary", a promotional event inviting artists to submit speculative cover artwork for his Spawn comic book series. The challenge promised that selected entries would feature as variant covers for published issues. Among the winners was artist Luis Ruiz, known as @robot9000 on Instagram, whose victory stirred controversy due to suspicions of AI involvement in his submitted artwork.
Ruiz's entry showcased imagery resembling the iconic character Gunslinger Spawn, a creation associated with McFarlane's Spawn universe. Another entry is supposedly Violator, though the image itself has very little resemblance to Spawn's longtime adversary.
Despite Ruiz's assertion that his submission was solely the product of his artistic prowess, scrutiny arose when it was discovered that similar images attributed to Ruiz appeared in his Midjourney gallery, a platform known for showcasing AI-generated artwork. Notably, these images bore prompts referencing another artist, Ashley Wood, who has contributed to Spawn comics in the past. On X (formerly Twitter), Devrim Kunter shared the discovery via a tweet.
