Stardust the Super Wizard: How the Eisners' First AI Nominee Came To Be
- Luke Henderson
- Jun 24
- 8 min read
The 2026 Will Eisner Awards have already become one of the most memorable in recent years. Three women were nominated for best writer for the second time in the Award’s history (and within three years of the last time it happened in 2024). One of those women, Stephanie Williams, is also the first black woman ever nominated. In addition, smaller publishers, such as Mad Cave Studios, seem to be on the rise. Unfortunately, just hours after the nominees were announced, news broke that the Eisners have reached another milestone: their first nomination, including an AI-generated comic.
The news broke by Graphic Policy that one of the nominees for Best Anthology, a Stardust the Super Wizard collection edited by DC Comics veteran Van Jensen, included a one-page comic by Michael Todasco under his “AI persona” Alex Irons. A maudlin story about the power of memory and the public domain, the work was generated on a model trained with Stardust creator Fletcher Hanks’ artwork and story structure, with seemingly little to no human intervention.
Granted, the Eisners (as of writing) have no policy against AI-generated work being eligible for nomination, but the question must be asked: how did this situation emerge in the first place?
Who is Stardust?
Fletcher Hanks’ Stardust the Super Wizard is a bit of an oddity in comics history. Born in 1889, Hanks’ mother paid for him to attend the W.L. Evans School for cartooning (whose alumni list features the creators of Popeye and Dick Tracy) at the age of 21 and bounced around various arts jobs, such as drawing furniture for President Roosevelt’s Federal Art Project and painting murals for the wealthy. Reportedly, Hanks was an alcoholic and would spend all of his money from these projects, chasing his indulgences and leaving his son, Fletcher Jr., to support the family.
Following the success of Action Comics in 1939, Hanks took up the mantle of cartoonist and created 50+ comics over a two-year period, including Stardust the Super Wizard. Originally published in Fox Feature Syndicate’s Fantastic Comics, the stories featured strange, stiff, and sometimes surreal art and stories where the titular Stardust has seemingly limitless powers. His villains often face brutal, poetic defeat at the hands of the Super Wizard, which some critics have described as “Old Testament”.
For unknown reasons, Hanks left the comics industry in 1941 and disappeared from the historical record. He was found in 1976, penniless and frozen to death on a park bench. Ever since, Stardust has been an object of continued fascination in comics, but it truly made a resurgence in the 2000s. Over the next two decades, the Wizard would appear in multiple comics, including Savage Dragon and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In 2007 and 2009, Fantagraphics republished Hanks’ complete works, cementing his cult status, and the rest is history.
An Anthology is Formed
Future editor of the nominated Stardust anthology, Van Jensen, came up in the comics industry at the tail end of Hanks’ newfound hype. A former crime reporter, he published his first graphic novel, Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer, in 2009 and swiftly moved into writing Flash and Green Lantern Corps for DC Comics. It was in these beginnings that Jensen first ran into Fletcher Hanks’ work.
“I saw some of [Hanks’] art floating around online. It hit me immediately. This was like R. Crumb riffing on goofy Silver Age comics, except it was all made before any of that existed. It's just so singular, when superhero comics have long been pretty formulaic. And then Fantagraphics released some collections of his work, which I devoured.”
This obsession would lead Jensen to assemble a massive tribute to Stardust’s creator.
In August of 2022, Jenson posted on X/Twitter:
“I've been kicking around creating an anthology of different creators doing their take on STARDUST THE SUPER WIZARD, the mad creation of Fletcher Hanks? Who would want in on that?”
The post swiftly gained hundreds of likes and replies from creators wanting to make this anthology a reality. A month later, the book would be formally announced with open submissions for any and all comic creators. The call would receive over 100 submissions, and in the following months, a book would emerge featuring industry giants like Mike Allred, Francisco Francavilla, Derf Backderf, and even Hanks’ grandson, Ian, would pen his first story for the collection.
To say the anthology was highly anticipated would be an understatement. When the campaign launched on Zoop on June 6, 2023, it reached its $10,000 goal in 12 hours. This momentum would continue, and the campaign extended its deadline to July 6th, allowing the anthology to surpass $30,000, unlock a free digital collection of the original Stardust comics, and 4 additional pages for the book.
Post-Campaign
After a massively successful campaign, it should have been smooth sailing; however, as is familiar to many indie creators, there were unforeseen delays to the book's completion and delivery. Originally, the book was to be finished in July, with backers receiving their copies sometime between October and November, but that timeline soon became overly optimistic.
Pete Woods wouldn’t be able to tackle Jensen’s story, a meta-tale about an alien, Nesnej Nav (Jensen’s name backwards) or The Editor, who comes to Earth to judge humanity based on their stories, until the spring of 2024. Reportedly, Woods had started the story and anticipated finishing it by June, but in July, the art was still being made, and later, due to “personal and professional commitments”, he had to leave the project. Michel Melki would take Woods’ place, and the line art would be finished during the holidays of that same year.
At this point, the book had grown from around 150 pages to 180 (far more than had been unlocked via stretch goals) as new creators were added during the extended timeline. Updates from the campaign suggest this was done to soothe the wound of backers’ disappointment since fulfillment was quite delayed. Regardless, one name was curiously missing during all of this; enter Michael Todasco.
Computer Generated Super Wizards
Who is the creator of (the now former) first Eisner-nominated, AI-generated comic?
Todasco got his first comic at six years old and has been a fan ever since. According to a LinkedIn article he wrote in 2022, he even went so far as to quit his “good job in 2009 to pursue a crazy passion of starting a comic art marketplace,” which he would call Sketch Maven.
The now-defunct website allowed users to purchase and sell their original comic book art and even sold the color guides (photocopies of the original art for a colorist). Touting itself as the “world’s greatest comic art marketplace,” It offered works from major publishers like Marvel and DC, as well as more obscure offerings. While this site was running, Todascao also served on the Board of Directors for the Cartoon Art Museum until 2012.
With the closing of his website and the end of his tenure at the museum, Todasco would proceed to work for PayPal for over ten years. In August of 2022, he became enamored with AI programs claiming “I freaked out. I couldn't believe what it was spitting back to me,” and felt that everyone should dive into these programs as soon as possible because “the earlier you freak out from using the tools, the better you'll understand it, and the sooner we can collectively try to shape the future we want.”
In the following months, he would write 8 more articles on AI, including one where he describes how he made a comic in a single day using these programs.
Tabasco first had ChatGPT generate a script, which he translated into a typical comic book format. He then ran the panel descriptions through three different image generators before ultimately deciding Midjourney was his favorite. After asking ChatGPT to generate a title, he finally assembled the AI images, text, and word balloons in Comic Life 3, a website and app originally launched in 2008 that allows users to place their personal pictures in a comics page layout. This is likely the same method Todasco would use to make his Stardust comic.
Todasco’s foray into AI occurred around the same time Jensen inquired about interest in the anthology, and according to Publishers Weekly, the creator of Alex Irons was one of the first to reach out, leading to him pitching his AI comic.
However, Todasco was not mentioned in the original Zoop campaign. His contribution first became public after he announced Alex Irons’ contribution in March 2025. The book reopened for pre-orders, but this revelation didn’t amount to anything at that time. Jensen would later regret this lack of transparency, calling it “my biggest screwup in the whole process.”
As backers received their books, some noted the AI comic and Jensen’s connective story which pointed out its presence within Stardust. The Editor character says, “I mean…That last story was clearly the work of Artificial Intelligence, all in the service of some commentary about the public domain…which I suppose is relevant as it explains why humans legally can tell any Stardust tale they wish…” Sadly, none of these mentions gained much traction beyond those users’ personal social media accounts, and no news outlet reported on it at the time. A niche indie anthology with one AI comic wouldn’t be newsworthy until it was nominated for one of comics’ most prestigious awards.
Eisners Nominate and AI is Revealed
With the book finally complete (and with a possible trade coming from Image Comics, according to a comment on Jensen’s Substack), one more round of pre-orders was launched, and backers finally received their long-overdue anthology. Even big-name creators, such as esteemed letterer Todd Klein, were clamoring for the book after its release.
The only thing that would make this success sweeter would be accolades from the comics industry’s upper echelons.
The Eisner nomination was incredibly exciting for every contributor, with many noting how “proud” and “honored” they were to be a part of this book, while thanking Van Jensen for the opportunity. Some contributors even shared the same short video (now deleted) to celebrate.
For one contributor, English writer Michael Powell, it was his “first venture into writing for the American comic industry,” and artist Chris Sanderson was thrilled that his “dream project” with Doc Wyatt would be honored. Shaenon K. Garrity was also excited to share this experience with her 8-year-old son, who wrote their Stardust story and, along with the children of contributor James Asmus, would possibly be one of the youngest writers to ever win an Eisner.
Then it all came crashing down with the revelation of Todasco’s comic. Calls for the book’s removal from consideration cascaded throughout social media, and our own editor, Byron O’Neal, would start a petition that, as of writing, garnered over 3000 signatures, calling on the Eisner committee to enact a No AI policy.
Four days after the nomination, Jensen would withdraw Stardust from consideration, and a spokesperson for the awards released a statement:
“In light of the recent disclosure that Artificial Intelligence was included in a work submitted for Eisner Award consideration, the judges have indicated that had they been aware of this information, they would not have voted for its inclusion.”
Policies on AI use were promised to be developed at a later date.
And with that, the return of Stardust the Super Wizard, primed to be a feel-good success story, would go off with a whimper. Sadly, it seems fitting that a character with a legacy of being a strange reflection of its controversial creator’s psyche would continue to be a strange reflection of our own controversial times nearly 100 years after the fact. Perhaps that is the true fate of the punishing Super Wizard.
With AI art becoming frustratingly more common each day, a machine-generated comic would have snuck through the comics awards eventually. No one could have imagined it being this soon, by the famed Eisner Awards, and from a tribute to a cult superhero. They say reality is often stranger than fiction, and the saga of Stardust the Super Wizard continues to be one of comics’ strangest.
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