Comics and machines: Reframing Ontologies of comic making in the era of AI, or why Zines might just save us all.

<jats:p>Over the course of the 22nd and 23rd of April 2026, the inaugural edition of the Comics and Machines Conference (COMMA for short) was hosted as a joint venture between Uppsala University and KTH (The Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden) and financed by the AI Futures of Culture and Memory (reference number 802)  a WASP-HS national programme led by Uppsala University’s Professor  Anna Foka and KTH’s Associate Professor André Holzapfel. As part of the proceedings, the authors of this article, as attendees, were tasked with implementing this theme of craft and digital entanglement in the form of a digital archival work and selected an academic blog as the ideal platform to do so. From its highly flexible digital integration to the less formal requirements on writing styles, this is arguably the most suitable form of conference documentation for COMMA, with its theme focused on the many and varied means of making comics in the era of automation. On top of that, the team used a combination of photography and live, hand-drawn, comic illustration throughout the conference, with the goal of creating a COMMA Zine (a short-format, independently made amalgam of comics and magazines that offer unfiltered and raw expression of content as a mode of making, critique and even simple process and can include of mix of illustration, photography, prose and design suited to a specific theme) that offers a dual presentation of the subjective comprehension of topics expressed by illustration versus the inherently objective moment capture of photography.</jats:p> <jats:p>keywords: zine, creative research, digital folklore, transdisciplinarity, comic research, ai</jats:p>