This comic was offered as the first of my subscriber-only comics, so if you’re a subscriber that received this in your mailbox a while ago and have come to check out the commentary, welcome! Hope you enjoyed the new subscriber-only comic.
Idea inspiration
This one was inspired by all of the efforts by people to “jailbreak” ChatGPT to do what it isn’t supposed to do.
Unsurprisingly, this is an exploit that seems like it has already been patched by GPT-4.
Art inspiration
I did some visual research on what kind of designs would be good for the teenager, but they were all a bit much for a character that only appears in three panels. I ended up going with a generic baseball cap, chains, ill-fitting shirt and terrible posture combo.
The dictator uniform is a combination of cool things I found from various image search results. Other stuff that I left out that was too hard to draw – chains, tassels, and more medals.
Real hardcore fans might notice that I moved the credits panel to the top instead of the bottom, because I thought it might look better separated from the news caption.
Challenges
Nothing too challenging this time around. The last panel doesn’t really make a lot of literal sense, and at some stage was going to be a simple front-and-side mugshot, but I thought it was funnier this way.
Rewards
Back to five panels at last! The comics should be as long as short as they need to be, but the sweet spot tends to be six. Too much more than that and they are hard to draw and start to get too ambitious for this format.
