A little while ago, I wrote about how I started using Midjourney to draw Monkeys Like Us.
Short version: my drawing was awful, the hand-drawn reboot went down like a lead balloon, and Midjourney finally let me make the strip look the way I wanted it – without making people’s eyes water.
If you missed that thrilling artistic arc, feel free to relive my trauma.

Anyway, these days my audience is small enough to fit in a phone booth. Comfortably.

The upside is, I’m free to experiment without fear of a fan revolt.

I’ve been quietly enjoying my Midjourney-enhanced comics. The jokes are still mine, the characters are still mine, and the overall tone is very much me – they just look significantly less like they were drawn by a toddler during an earthquake.

Enjoying my own stuff, but craving a bit of validation, I posted The Anaesthetist on Reddit.

It did not go well.
The internet did what it does best – burned it to the ground.

Not a single positive comment.
Not even a mah.

The angriest responses weren’t about the content, or the joke, or even the pacing (well… okay, some hated the pacing).
The fury was mostly aimed at the fact it used AI art.

Turns out, just mentioning those two letters is a great way to turn “mah” into “get this off my screen”.

I get it. The ethics of AI are complex, and people are passionate about it. There are real worries here – job losses, stolen styles, what this means for human creativity long-term. I’m not dismissing any of that.

But:

I’m not choosing Midjourney over hiring an illustrator. That was never on the table. It’s Midjourney, or it’s my own deeply distressing drawing, and my own drawing already had its chance (see: the reboot nobody asked for).
Nobody needs to see that again.

This isn’t a stand-in for someone else’s job. It’s a stand-in for my own.

I’m not pretending it’s anything it’s not. I openly use Midjourney.

The new Monkeys are seeded from my original strip. I’ve just made them less… traumatic to look at.

There’s no money in this. No prints, no merch, nothing riding on it commercially. This comic is still something that, statistically speaking, no one reads – except me, and occasionally mcpheeJnr, who doesn’t think it’s funny and is confident he could do better.

Could AI be misused? Definitely, that’s a real conversation worth having.

Is my occasional strip with no audience a meaningful part of the problem? I don’t think so, but I get why the topic makes people wary regardless of scale.

Midjourney has let me bring new life to something I’ve been making for years.

Does it make me an artist? Well, no. In the same way that writing a blog doesn’t make me an author.

It’s brought something I’ve made for years back to life for me, and made it fun again.

So yes, I use Midjourney to draw the strip.
But it’s for me. And I like it.

In conclusion:
More Monkeys soon, probably.
Still can’t draw.