Drawn to Extinction isn't just a book about comics. It's about people, about craft, and about the quiet, relentless labour that turns blank pages into worlds you carry with you for life.
With a foreword by Pat Mills, co-creator of 2000 AD, this book sets its stall out early, not as an obituary, but as a reckoning.
Part love letter, part warning, it traces the history and humanity of comics, from the raw energy of British weeklies to the global dominance of superheroes, and asks what happens next.
Because something is shifting.
As generative Ai tools rise, trained on the very work creators poured themselves into, the line between homage and extraction begins to blur. What once felt like inspiration now starts to look like replication.
Through conversations with some of the industry's most respected voices, including John Wagner, Torunn Grønbekk, Hannah Berry, Ram V, Patrick Goddard, Dan Cornwell, Frazer Irving, Steve McNiven, Dr Julia Round and more, Drawn to Extinction captures the lived reality of making comics today, the passion, the pressure, the community, and the growing sense that the rules are being rewritten in real time.
This isn't a rejection of technology. It's a question of what we value, and what we are willing to lose in the name of progress.
Because the machine doesn't dream, it replicates.
And when replication starts to replace creation, something deeper is at risk, not just jobs or industries, but the human fingerprints that make stories feel like they belong to us.
For longtime fans, curious newcomers, and anyone who has ever felt the pull of a story told in ink and imagination, this is both a celebration and a call to attention.
Read it, then decide what kind of creative future you want to be part of.
"A celebration of comics and a warning, written with intelligence and a deep, deep love of the medium." - John Wagner, co-creator of Judge Dredd, A History of Violence, and Strontium Dog
About the Author :
Pete Trainor is a technologist, strategist, and author working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, creativity, and human experience. With more than two decades spent shaping digital products and leading large-scale transformation programmes, he has built a reputation for translating complex technology into practical, human-centred outcomes.His career spans senior roles across enterprise organisations, including leadership positions in AI, product, and service design. He has worked within highly regulated industries such as banking and healthcare, navigating the realities of deploying emerging technologies at scale while maintaining a strong focus on ethics, governance, and real-world impact. Known for his ability to connect strategy with delivery, Pete has led initiatives that blend innovation with operational rigour, particularly in the field of enterprise AI.Alongside his professional work, Pete is a long-time advocate for creative industries and the people behind them. His writing explores the tension between technological progress and human craft, often focusing on how tools like generative AI reshape culture, labour, and value. His book Drawn to Extinction reflects this perspective, combining industry insight with a deeply personal connection to comics and the communities that sustain them.Whether designing systems, advising organisations, or writing about the future, Pete's work is driven by a simple belief: technology should amplify human creativity, not replace it. Pat Mills (born 1949) is a British comics writer and editor dubbed the "godfather of British comics" for revitalizing boys' comics in the 1970s. Known for anti-authoritarian, violent themes, he created 2000 AD and co-created major characters like Judge Dredd, Sláine, and Nemesis the Warlock. He also scripted the influential anti-war story Charley's War. John Wagner is an American-born British comics writer. Alongside Pat Mills, he helped revitalise British comics in the 1970s, and continues to be active in the British comics industry, occasionally also working in American comics. He is the co-creator, with artist Carlos Ezquerra, of the character Judge Dredd.
Review :
There's a specific kind of book that only gets written by someone who is, as the Americans say, inside the tent. Pete Trainor is a veteran AI practitioner who also happens to be a lifelong, borderline-obsessive comics reader. The kind of person who, as a six-year-old in Somerset, was buying 2000AD with change scraped off pavements. That dual identity is both this book's greatest strength and its most useful complication.
Drawn to Extinction arrives at an interesting moment. The AI and creativity debate has produced a lot of heat and very little light. Most books on the subject are written by either committed technologists who dismiss artistic concern as sentimentalism, or outraged creatives who treat every line of code as an act of cultural vandalism. Trainor, to his considerable credit, refuses both camps.
