Captain Democracy

Michael Austin — Thu, 03 Sep 2026 15:44:34 GMT

Captain Democracy is a combination of political interest, snark, and my increasing fascination with the creative potential of Artificial Intelligence. I have wanted to be a comic book artist for many years, but I can’t draw a stick figure to save my life. In collaboration with ChatGPT, however, I have found that I can live my dream and have an AI bot draw the pictures. Thus was born Captain Democracy: the hero we deserve.

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Captain Democracy: All the Strips, from Publius Press: a comprehensive record of every Captain Democracy strip, including never-before-known production details and the full transcript of a design session. Captain Democracy: All the Strips is now available from Amazon and . . . . well, it’s on Amazon.

Captain Democracy

Michael Austin — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 04:13:06 GMT

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Captain Democracy

Michael Austin — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 14:05:10 GMT

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Captain Democracy

Michael Austin — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:04:02 GMT

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Captain Democracy

Michael Austin — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:08:24 GMT

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Captain Democracy

Michael Austin — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 15:02:22 GMT

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Captain Democracy is a combination of political interest, snark, and my increasing fascination with the creative potential of Artificial Intelligence. I have wanted to be a comic book artist for many years, but I can’t draw a stick figure to save my life. In collaboration with ChatGPT, however, I have found that I can live my dream and have an AI bot draw the pictures. Thus was born Captain Democracy: the hero we deserve.

NOW AVAILABLE!!!

Captain Democracy: All the Strips, from Publius Press: a comprehensive record of every Captain Democracy strip, including never-before-known production details and the full transcript of a design session. Captain Democracy: All the Strips is now availale from Amazon and . . . . well, it’s on Amazon.

Captain Democracy

Michael Austin — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:02:51 GMT

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COMING TUESDAY AUGUST 25!!!

Captain Democracy

Michael Austin — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 12:59:11 GMT

Coming Soon: Captain Democracy: All the Strips, from Publius Press: a comprehensive record of every Captain Democracy strip, including never-before-known production details and the full transcript of a design session.

The Birth of Captain Democracy; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Skynet and Love ChatGPT

Michael Austin — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:35:42 GMT

The First Pancake

I knew from my prompt engineering course that I couldn’t just ask ChatGPT to make me a superhero. But I thought I would try anyway. When I asked for a single panel introducing a new superhero named Captain Democracy, what I got was Captain America with a “D” on his forehead. I knew AI bots tended to be derivative without clear, unambiguous prompts. But I was hoping to avoid a major lawsuit right out of the gate. Also, note that the speech bubble seems to be pointing to both potential speakers.

The next iteration gave me this guy. An improvement? Not so sure. But at least less likely to be met with a cease-and-desist order from a mouse.

Though this is not the prototype I ended up using, it was a vital part of my thought process. I didn’t like it at all, but by articulating why, I discovered what I really wanted. The guy above is a perfectly serviceable hero. Strong, mysterious, color-coordinated. But Captain Democracy isn't supposed to be a heroic hero; he's a satirical one. This guy looks like he has never cracked a joke in his life.

Even more importantly, Captain Democracy is the personification of democracy itself, and I don’t see democracy—especially American democracy in the Trump era—as noble or heroic. I wanted my hero to be hapless, bumbling, and out of shape, but also plagued with good intentions that perpetually exceeded his ability to put them into effect. This is the democracy that Winston Churchill described as the worst form of government on earth, except for all the others.

My Captain Democracy has amazing powers, like flight and super strength, but they never seem to help him much. He ends up bumbling his way to victory most of the time because his intentions are so noble, and yet so impractical, that the world can’t help but conform to his expectations from time to time—usually out of pity, but also because we all harbor the secret hope that the world will live up to the expectations of its inveterate optimists. This is Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, with Mr. Smith played by someone who looks more like a middle-aged Danny DeVito than a young Jimmy Stewart.

So, I wrote my final prompt in the design iteration process.

The first Captain Democracy strip appeared on my Facebook page on my 59th birthday, June 29, 2025.

Now that I had a hero and a proof of concept, it was time to create a strip. But I had a problem: a hero and some villains were the extent of my planning. Actually, having them do things—things that conveyed sharp social satire while providing a reliably hilarious punch line in every fourth panel—turns out to be harder than I thought. So I turned my first strip over to ChatGPT and just said, “Create a funny strip about the dysfunctions of democracy using Captain Democracy as the hero.” This is what it came up with. It was not very good.

This was not a good strip. It conveyed the entire argument in four panels. There was no way to draw it into four or five installments, as Garry Trudeau and Berkeley Breathed always managed to do with Doonesbury and Bloom County. In desperation to get more than one strip out of an idea—albeit not a very good idea—I asked ChatGPT to write a prequel strip in which Captain Democracy gets an emergency phone call and can’t wake up. So it became a two-strip sequence (and one I didn't load onto the Captain Democracy Substack page when I took the strip public).

And thus was born, only to die immediately thereafter, the first iteration of the Captain Democracy comic strip.

These early strips never made it to the Substack page. They appear here in public for the first time in their proper role as cautionary tales. They show problems that arose when I tried to have ChatGPT do everything, both draw the pictures and write the script. Make no mistake, the chatbot was eager to do it all. It assured me that it could think of the scenario, write the dialogue, and produce the entire strip.

When I did this, I ended up with something more like Nancy than Doonesbury: self-contained sight gags, rather than extended satirical narratives. The strips were one-off sight gags conveying neither nuance nor complexity. Fine for filling empty column inches, but not what I wanted to do with my first shot at a lifelong dream. I never handed the reins back to ChatGPT.

But doing it myself meant that I needed to learn a lot more about non-AI graphic design. Ironically, the more I used AI, the more non-AI skills I had to acquire. When I created the first strip, I had to prompt ChatGPT for each panel, and without a tool to put four panels together into a coherent comic strip, I laid everything out in Microsoft Paint. Over the next six months, while I was teaching myself how to prompt a Large Language Model effectively, I also had to teach myself how to use the following programs or websites:

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program), an open-source alternative to Photoshop, became the first photo-manipulation program I could use successfully.
Krita, an open-source drawing program, has a special plug-in for comic artists. This let me insert speech bubbles and tails, freeing me from needing ChatGPT to render the text perfectly the first time, which it was never quite able to do.
Canva, an online, subscription-based graphic-design suite, allowed me to create templates that quickly turned four different images into a coherent comic strip with a consistent top panel.
Artistly, an AI image generator with a one-time purchase price, never generated Captain Democracy panels from scratch, but it proved remarkably effective at removing stray arms, legs, and other stray objects from panels where they clearly did not belong.
Substack, which I had never used before, is an excellent platform for disseminating articles (and more importantly, comic strips) through both its web page and through subscription-based emails.

From the educational perspective, even if I had never produced a single panel, learning how to use these tools was worth the time I invested in the comic strip enterprise. I have used all these programs and websites for other projects, and they are now part of my professional toolkit. And when I decided to collect all the Captain Democracy strips into a book (which, dear reader, you now hold in your hand), I added professional layout software, Adobe’s InDesign, to that toolkit. Producing Captain Democracy did not exactly take a village, but it did take a hard drive.

Herein, I believe, lies the greatest educational promise of artificial intelligence. When AI extends our ability to do things that were previously beyond our reach, it also requires us to acquire new competencies to turn those possibilities into finished work. When teachers understand this, and when students grasp what they can actually accomplish with the help of AI models, classroom assignments can become a gateway to releasing human potential, unlocking knowledge locked away by limitations AI can help us overcome.

As a longtime writing teacher, I am quite sure that AI will be the end of the thesis-driven five-paragraph essay assignment. I do not mourn its loss. Five-paragraph essays do not occur in the wild, and thesis statements were never anything more than rhetorical training wheels. Teachers who still give such assignments deserve the AI-generated drivel they will almost certainly receive.

But look what we can now put in its place. How about a final assignment to write a full-length opera or a symphony, or a history of a nearby town? With AI, freshman English students might create a graphic-novel version of Moby-Dick or Great Expectations. Or how about a full video version of The Iliad or Dante’s Inferno?

AI can help students do things like this. But it can’t do them on its own. Or, at least, it can’t do them well. To accomplish a major project using AI, students will have to learn how to prompt a chatbot multiple times over weeks or months. They will have to learn how to put different pieces of a project together. They will also have to master production and organization technologies capable of creating the final project that AI will help them create.

Ultimately, this is what Captain Democracy taught me: artificial intelligence can remove the barriers that make certain things impossible, but making something possible does not make it inevitable. AI has opened up a world of opportunities, but most of them are wearing overalls and looking a lot like work.

The Birth of Captain Democracy; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Skynet and Love ChatGPT

Michael Austin — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 23:33:16 GMT

In the summer of 2025, I had one of those opportunities that, according to Thomas Edison, most people don’t recognize because it comes “dressed in overalls and looks like work.” At the time, I was the provost of a small college in central Utah, and neither I nor the college had made much progress in figuring out how to incorporate Artificial Intelligence into the curriculum.

Neither the state legislature nor the Utah System of Higher Education appeared likely to let us continue in our innocence. A workforce readiness report commissioned by the legislature in December of 2024 indicated that an overwhelming majority of employers would not hire recent college graduates who could not use AI to increase their productivity. From that point on, the mandates wrote themselves (with, I suspect, more than a little bit of help from Claude or ChatGPT). AI had to be incorporated into our curriculum, and, as provost, I had to supervise the effort.

At the time, most of my knowledge of AI came from rumors and complaints, along with the occasional doomsday prophecy invoking Hal or Skynet as a precedent for world domination. I did not know how AI worked or what it could do. I did know (or had come to believe) that it was destroying our students’ ability to think, ruining the environment, and stealing training materials from almost everybody’s books—including mine, as I discovered when I received the class-action lawsuit notices in the mail.

At my core, I am an Enlightenment humanist, more comfortable in dusty libraries than with computers. I like old books and great ideas. I think that Homer and Euripides still have a lot to say to us and that Dante and Dostoyevsky are the last word on most subjects of any importance. The composition textbook that I edit for Norton—Reading the World: Ideas that Matter—is one of the last bastions of the great-ideas model in contemporary composition. AI chatbots simply did not fit into this worldview.

Certified Prompt Engineer

Railing against and trying to boycott AI was not an option. And I could hardly throw my shoes into AI data centers half a world away. I had a professional responsibility to implement both classroom AI policies and curricular guidelines, so I did what I always do in such situations: I read a stack of books on teaching with AI. And then I enrolled in an online course in prompt engineering through Vanderbilt University. I knew that I had to give the new technology a fair chance and find meaningful ways to use it. Otherwise, I would never be able to convince faculty members—most of whom were far more skeptical than I was about artificial intelligence—to give it the state-mandated old college try.

The course went well. I learned some genuinely interesting ways to prompt AI bots, and I saw several ways this technology could be used in writing classes—especially in English composition, my home discipline. I saw that AI was really good at some things and really bad at others. I also understood that there were both ethical and unethical ways to use artificial intelligence in college writing.

When I finished, I was (along with 80,000 of my best friends who took the course with me) a Certified Prompt Engineer. But more than that, I came away converted—not, perhaps, to the inherent and acontextual value of AI, but to the proposition that it was going to become an important part of our students’ lives, and that professors like me had a responsibility to teach them how to use it wisely and ethically.

I also came to believe that humanities classrooms were the best place to teach AI, precisely because the humanities are well positioned to help us negotiate the boundaries between artificial intelligence and genuine human wisdom. I want students to understand that AI is a tool and that, like every human tool from stone axes to the Internet, it can extend human reach tremendously—but at a cost.

Throughout the course, I thought frequently of Socrates’ warnings against writing in Plato’s Phaedrus. Writing decreases the human reliance on memory, and it records subjective ideas as truth, making it impossible to ever engage a long-dead author in a meaningful dialectic. This seemed right to me, even though I only knew about Socrates because Plato had recorded the conversation in writing—perhaps accurately, perhaps with his own spin—2,500 years ago.

I also thought of another curious phenomenon in my own life. Since switching from maps and memory to the GPS built into my phone, I have been able to go many places without getting lost. But I have also lost the ability to find my way—even to places I know very well—without the GPS voice telling me where to turn. Once I delegated wayfinding to a convenient technology, I became completely dependent on it for things I used to take for granted.

As I considered what AI could give us and what it might take from us, I realized my last assignment in the course was to create a visual design using AI. And this assignment alone shifted my thinking from “AI gives us some things and takes away others” to “AI is the best thing to ever happen to me.” To explain why I felt this way, I need to take a detour back to my adolescent love of visual satire.

My Three Heroes

One of my father’s proudest possessions when I was growing up was a complete set of Walt Kelly’s original Pogo books, which I started reading in fifth grade and continued until I went to college. Kelly’s Okefenokee Swamp fascinated me. Every Christmas, my family sang, “Deck Us All with Boston Charlie” despite having no idea what it meant. I learned about the John Birch Society in a long conversation with my father after reading about the “Jack Acid Society” in a Pogo book. And I was probably the only kid in my middle school class who knew that cherchez la femme meant “look for the woman”—not because I knew anything about French, or, for that matter, women, but because it was the pun behind Kelly’s bardic tortoise, Churchy LaFemme.

Walt Kelly was my first taste of political satire in any form. He brought all of the political figures of a previous generation into his swamp. There I met Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, George Romney, and Joseph McCarthy (i.e. “Simple J. Malarkey”)—all turned into critters and turned loose on the swamp dwellers. It was fascinating, heady stuff for an adolescent boy living in Oklahoma in the 1970s.

When I was about 15, I discovered Doonesbury in our local newspaper, and I soon owned the three omnibus editions published between 1970 and 1978. Unlike Pogo, which was all in my past, I could read Doonesbury every day, and it dealt with my headlines. I got in the habit of copying strips I found meaningful and taping them to my locker, my bedroom door, and, on more than one occasion, to papers I turned in to my deeply unimpressed high school teachers.

When Garry Trudeau went on an extended sabbatical in 1983–1984—just when I was graduating from high school and entering college—I discovered my third satirical master, Berke Breathed, whose Bloom County comic strip was one of the highlights of my freshman year. I owned all of the books, followed the comic religiously in the daily paper, and plastered my dorm room with xeroxed strips. I even had a Bill the Cat plush toy.

By the time I finished my freshman year of college, I was fairly sure I wanted to be a satirical cartoonist, and my head was full of ideas for what to draw. But I had a big problem. I couldn’t draw anything. Nada. Zip. Zilch. I couldn’t manage a straight enough line for a stick figure. While I had some facility with satirical prose, I had absolutely none with satirical pictures. Or any kind of pictures. I just couldn’t do it.

So I said goodbye to my actual dream and pursued a Ph.D. in English instead. I specialized in the British Eighteenth Century and all of its glorious satire: Dryden, Swift, Pope, and Fielding, among others. And I forgot all about wanting to draw cartoons. I taught literature for twelve years—including a class that I developed on Satire—and have now spent nearly twenty years provisting at three different institutions.

In all this time, I never really thought about my earlier desire to be a satirical cartoonist until the fateful day, forty years after my freshman year in college, when an online instructor assigned me to create something visual with ChatGPT.

(To be continued. . . .)

Captain Democracy Is (Almost) Back

Michael Austin — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 14:35:48 GMT

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Coming Soon: Captain Democracy: All the Strips, from Publius Press: a comprehensive record of all Captain Democracy, including never-before-known production details and the full transcript of a design session.