The Real Story Behind Our Comic Universe

If you've spent time on our Instagram, you've probably noticed our team doesn't always look like our team. Alyssa's been drawn with bold ink outlines and Ben-Day dots. Rex Hallow and Vivienne Hallow, the closest thing our page has to actual villains, only exist because we built them. None of that is a photo. It's comic book art, and most of it started with AI.

We want to just say that plainly instead of dancing around it, because we think the real reason is a better story than people assume.

When we started building POW's comic universe, the whole idea was "everyday superheroes," normal people doing exceptional work, drawn like they belonged in an actual comic. We didn't have a budget for a full-time illustrator to hand-draw every panel of every series, and honestly, the appeal was never really about production value in the first place. It was closer to the impulse behind ElfYourself back in the day, that same "let's see what this looks like" energy.

We took photos of our own team and ran them through AI to see what they'd look like as comic book characters, and it was genuinely fun. We had Christine, Summer, Kindell and Annie suit up as superheroes to save a food drive.

We welcomed a new account manager Alyssa to the team with her own mini series. Where instead of a normal announcement post, she became a five-foot-nothing athlete-turned-account-manager who took down a corporate villain across a 16-post series.

None of it needed to happen. We just thought it would be fun, and it was.

We're not going to pretend every AI-generated image is a masterpiece, and we're not going to pretend AI as a category hasn't earned a lot of the skepticism it gets right now, for real reasons. A recent industry study found that 42% of consumers feel negatively toward a brand when they see it next to low-quality AI content, and in the UK that number climbs to nearly half. That's not just a vibe shift, that's a measurable trust cost.

There's also a part nobody talks about enough: UN research has found that generating a single AI image can take over a thousand times the energy of a simple text task, and the water and power AI data centers are on track to use by the end of the decade is genuinely hard to justify for a comic panel.

We're a people-first company. That's not a tagline, it's how we actually run things: in-office, hands-on, real conversations over automated ones.

Once we actually looked at what these images cost, both in trust and in resources, they stopped feeling like a fair trade for a fun Instagram series. So going forward, we're stepping away from building new comic series this way. It was a fun chapter, and we don't regret a single panel of it, but it's not where we want to keep putting our energy.

What we're not going to do is scrap the comic universe we've already built. Alyssa, Rex, Vivienne and everyone else in The Villa exist now. People know them. Deleting all of that because the tool that helped make it has a complicated reputation this year would mean throwing out something real to make a point that doesn't need making.

The characters aren't going anywhere. How we build the next ones might look a little different, and we're fine with that.

If you've been curious how we made our comics, now you know. And if you've got a favorite panel or character, we'd love to hear which one.