Lee drew inspiration for his renegade baseball avengers from the Sammi Superstars, one in all South Korea’s first skilled baseball teams, whose journey of perseverance captivated a rustic stifled by military dictatorship. The series gained a cult following amongst readers searching for a creative escape from political repression, mesmerized by his daring brushstrokes and cinematic compositions that defied the conventions of cartoons.
Kkachi, the rebellious protagonist in , is an alter ego of Lee himself. A scrappy outcast with untamed, spiky hair, he’s a fan favorite who challenges the world with unrelenting passion and a brave conscience. He has reappeared throughout Lee’s signature works, painted with a brand new layer of pathos every time—a supernatural warrior who saves Earth from an alien attack in and a rogue police officer battling a robust criminal syndicate in . Over a long time, Kkachi has develop into a cultural icon in South Korea.
But Lee worries about Kkachi’s future. “In South Korea, when an writer dies, his characters also get buried in his grave,” he says, drawing contrasts with enduring American comic characters like Superman and Spider-Man. Lee craves artistic immortality. He wants his characters to remain alive not only within the memories of readers, but in addition on their web comic platforms. “Even after I die, I would like my worldviews and characters to speak and resonate with the people of a brand new era,” he says. “That’s the type of immortality I would like.”
Lee believes that AI can assist him realize his vision. In partnership with Jaedam Media, an online comics production company based in Seoul, he developed the “Lee Hyun-se AI model” by fine-tuning the open-source AI art generator Stable Diffusion, created by the UK-based startup Stability AI. Using a knowledge set of 5,000 volumes of comics that he has published over 46 years, the resulting model generates comics in his signature style.
This yr, Lee is preparing to publish his first AI-assisted web comic, a remake of his 1994 manhwa . Writers at Jaedam Media are adapting the story right into a modernized crime drama starring Kkachi as a police officer in present-day Seoul and his love interest Umji as a daring prosecutor. Students at Sejong University, where Lee teaches comics, are creating the artwork using his AI model.
The creative process unfolds in several stages. First, Lee’s AI model generates illustrations based on text prompts and reference images, like 3D anatomy models and hand-drawn sketches that provide cues for various movements and gestures. Lee’s students then curate and edit the illustrations, adjusting the characters’ poses, tailoring their facial expressions, and integrating them into cartoonish compositions that AI can’t engineer. After many rounds of refinement and regeneration, Lee steps in to orchestrate the ultimate product, adding his distinct artistic edge.
AI firms envision that artists could automate the grunt work of drawing and channel their creative energy into storytelling and art direction.
“Under my direction, a personality might glare with sad eyes even after they’re indignant or ferocious eyes after they’re joyful,” he says. “It’s a subversive expression, a nuance that AI struggles to capture. Those delicate details I want to direct myself.”
Ultimately, Lee wants to construct an AI system that embodies his meticulous approach to human expressions. The grand vision of his experimental AI project is to create a “Lee Hyun-se simulation agent”—a complicated generation of his AI model that replicates his creative mind. The model could be trained on digital archives of Lee’s essays, interviews, and texts from his comics—the topic of an exhibit on the National Library of Korea last yr—to encode his philosophy, personality, and values. “It’s going to take an extended time for AI to learn my myriad worldviews because I’ve published a lot work,” he says.
