🔸 THE FINAL CUT 🔸
INDUSTRY NEWS FOR VISUAL STORYTELLERS
The Final Cut · May 22, 2026
Storyboarding · Animation · Comics · Pre-Production · Tools & Pipeline
Happy Friday, and welcome back to The Final Cut — your weekly roundup of what’s moving in the world of visual storytelling.
Wild week. Marvel’s 30-year publishing chief just walked out the door on the same day the Eisner judges quietly yanked a nomination because someone snuck an AI-generated page into an anthology and didn’t tell anybody. Meanwhile a French animated love story between a surfer and a skateboarder became the first cartoon to ever open Critics’ Week at Cannes — and Netflix bought it on the spot. The week of the working artist striking back, in other words.
Grab a coffee. Let’s get into it.
Comics & Illustration
Dan Buckley Exits Marvel After 30 Years — Brad Winderbaum Takes Over Comics, TV, Animation & Franchise
Marvel announced on May 18 that longtime publisher Dan Buckley is leaving the company after a near-30-year run, with Marvel Studios executive Brad Winderbaum taking on an expanded role as Head of Marvel Television, Animation, Comics & Franchise. David Abdo joins from Disney as General Manager, Comics & Franchise, reporting to Winderbaum. Buckley will stay through mid-2027 to support the transition, but the signal is clear: the publishing arm now lives under the same roof as the studio and animation pipeline, with one creative head over all of it. For comics creators, this is the biggest leadership reshuffle at Marvel since the early 2000s.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
Comics & Illustration
Eisner Awards Pull a 2026 Nomination After Anthology Hides a Page of AI Artwork
The Eisner judges rescinded the Best Anthology nomination for Stardust the Super Wizard after community sleuths revealed that one of its pages — by contributor Michael Todasco — was AI-generated, a detail never disclosed on the Zoop campaign or in the book itself. The editor has withdrawn the submission, the judges confirmed they “would not have voted for it” had they known, and Comic Book Yeti EIC Byron O’Neal has opened a petition to formally bar AI-assisted work from future Eisner consideration. The Awards committee says a new AI policy is now in development. A small story about one page, but a real line drawn in the comics industry’s sand.
Source: The Daily Cartoonist
Comics & Illustration
Sean Gordon Murphy Trades Gotham for the Open Road With Image’s The Last Driver
Sean Gordon Murphy — the Batman: White Knight writer-artist — is heading back to creator-owned territory with The Last Driver, an ongoing series at Image Comics launching August 19. Pitched as “Escape From New York meets Vanishing Point,” it’s a post-apocalyptic car chase about a driver named Clutch racing through a robotic GRID transport system to save his granddaughter. Murphy is writing and drawing, and the book ships in landscape format — an unusual choice that lets him stage the cinematic, side-scrolling chase sequences his pitch is built around. Variants come from Corin Howell, Matteo Scalera, and Ryan Ottley.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
Tools & Pipeline
Comics Writer Torunn Grønbekk Quietly Launches NORN — a Browser-Based Scriptwriting Tool With No AI, No Cloud
Catwoman and Valkyrie writer Torunn Grønbekk pushed her in-house comic scriptwriting tool, NORN, into public alpha this week. It walks writers from outline to beats to pages with auto-formatting for issue scripts, graphic novels, and strips. The pitch the team makes up front: no cloud sync, no AI integrations — it runs entirely in your browser, built by what the site calls “skeptical nerds who value privacy.” After a week in which AI in comics dominated the headlines for all the wrong reasons, a working professional shipping a deliberately AI-free craft tool is a notable counter-move. Free alpha sign-up at nornstory.com.
Source: NORN Story / Comic Book Club
Animation — Industry
Phuong Mai Nguyen’s In Waves Becomes the First Animated Feature to Open Cannes Critics’ Week — Netflix Buys It Days Later
Phuong Mai Nguyen’s hand-drawn debut feature In Waves — adapted from AJ Dungo’s graphic novel about a skater and a surfer falling in love as illness sets in — opened Critics’ Week on May 14, the first time an animated film has held that slot in the sidebar’s 65-year history. Netflix moved on it almost immediately, acquiring worldwide rights outside France in one of the closing-week deals at the 2026 Marché du Film. For the working animation community, two things to clock: a 2D love story carrying a major Cannes sidebar, and a streamer paying real money for it without an existing IP attached.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter · Variety · TheWrap
Pre-Production
The Annecy Animation Showcase at Cannes Reveals Its Five Works-in-Progress — From Insect Stop-Motion to a Sci-Fi Cooking Saga
The Annecy Animation Showcase ran inside the new Cannes Animation umbrella from May 15–17, presenting five features still in production: Sofía Carrillo’s stop-motion Insectario, Oscar-nominated Alain Gagnol’s Dog My Cats!, Takayuki Hirao’s Wasted Chef, Masashi Kawamura’s Hidari, and Vergine Keaton’s Bataille. With Japan as the 2026 Country of Honor at the Marché, anime and stop-motion shared equal stage time — and producers walked away with co-production conversations on craft-driven features rather than studio tentpoles. A useful snapshot of what mid-stage international animation pre-production looks like in 2026.
Source: Variety
Comics & Illustration
DC Takes 15 of the Top 20 Graphic Novels in April — Marvel Posts a Goose Egg
ICv2’s Circana BookScan rundown for April 2026, published this week, shows DC controlling 15 of the top 20 graphic novel slots, Image taking the other five, and Marvel landing exactly zero. Absolute Batman Vol. 1 took the top spot, Absolute Batman Vol. 2 hit number two, and the Compact collection of The Dark Knight Returns rounded out the podium at three. Read against the Buckley/Winderbaum reshuffle this week, the trade chart is a useful data point: the bookstore market has fully recalibrated around DC’s Absolute and Compact imprints, and that’s the inheritance Marvel’s new leadership is walking into.
Source: ICv2 · Comic Book Club
From the Community
Three Substack posts worth a restack this week
Animation Obsessive · May 15, 2026
Animation Obsessive’s Thursday edition uses the new Animal Farm adaptation’s flop as a way to revisit how the genre has historically handled (and mishandled) political allegory in animation. Sharp craft history from a newsletter that consistently treats animation as a serious art form.
Cartooning in the Age of AI #41: AI-Assisted Spam Nearly Fooled Me
Alex Hallatt · May 14, 2026
Working cartoonist Alex Hallatt on a moment she almost fell for an AI-assisted scam aimed at illustrators — and what it taught her about the spam-meets-syndication market our work now lives in. A grounded, useful read for anyone selling drawings online.
The Storyboard That Had No Story
Thobey Campion · Lore Machine · May 13, 2026
A founder-side experiment with ChatGPT’s Image 2 model and ByteDance’s Seedance 2 video model — generating storyboards and then animating them in 15-second beats. Polarizing piece, worth reading for working storyboarders who want to know what the AI-first pipeline actually produces and where it fails.
And that’s a wrap for this week. We’ll be back next Friday with more industry news.
Beyond The Process is a newsletter for working creatives in visual storytelling — storyboarding, animation, comics, illustration, and film pre-production.
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