When I started working on lessons for the 7th grade math classes last year, I inadvertently resurrected the Solution Squad. It wasn’t my initial intention. I just wanted to make a school for super-powered teens. The Mutants & Masterminds roleplaying game had a fictional school called The Claremont Academy, named after X-Men writer Chris Claremont. I thought, well, my favorite teen hero artist was George Pérez, so I’d name mine after him. And once I thought about how they would get around, I thought, why waste a perfectly good design? I have the Coordinate Plane.
But where would they get a Coordinate Plane? Why, from La Calculadora, of course. She designed and built it for her team. And that’s when it hit me. Her last name was also Pérez (not a coincidence). The school could be named after her! But she was an eternal 16-year-old. She couldn’t run a school. And so she and the rest of the squad got aged up to adulthood, 21-22 years old, and the story took place five years after the graphic novel. When I tried to design La Calculadora in ChatGPT, it could not, would not, get the uniform right. I spent no less than eight hours trying to force the image generator to get the suit right. It just couldn’t do it. It also gave me some frighteningly real-looking images in its attempts.
Now, I have a secret. I have always thought that most live-action superheroes look like Adam West playing Batman. People in superhero costumes look ridiculous to me. They have ever since I became an adult. I don’t judge people who choose to do it. It’s just not for me. For me, superheroes belong in comics and cartoons. After all, they were intended for kids. So, when I chose to create La Calculadora for everyday classroom use, I went with an American animation style with cel shading.
But still, every single time, it failed to get the boots right, and it failed to do the rib panels on the costume right. Eventually, I just settled for saying the Squad’s costumes had evolved over time.
And that’s the way it went for the whole school year. Every time I brought a member of the Squad in, I modified their costume to match this set.
But then this morning, I found, quite by accident, a picture of La Calculadora’s inspiration, George Perez’s niece, Milla. And I went back to ChatGPT and asked it to model the character closer to her. And what do you suppose it did? It got the costume 95% right on the first try! Suddenly, there’s 16-year-old La Calculadora, staring me right in the face! I did five minutes worth of Photoshop work on it to get it just right. A year later, ChatGPT has figured out how to do what it absolutely couldn’t do before.
This was, without a doubt, the closest image to how my mind’s eye saw the character. And just as suddenly, the floodgates opened. There’s nothing stopping me from making new Solution Squad material, just as they were in the graphic novel that came out nine years ago!
I worked on a turnaround sheet for the character and now it can be drawn on-model again and again. Now, I know all the arguments against AI are going to come up again. I have recently been attacked online by one of my former Solution Squad artists. But perhaps, not coincidentally, said artist still owes me artwork that I paid $400 in advance for, eight years ago. My time for spending money on artwork that I wait years for (or that I never receive at all) has come to an end. I’m also not rejoining the comic book world. I did my time out there, never to be repeated. This time, I am going to stay in my own little corner of the universe, doing what I’m best at: creating materials used to teach kids math!
