Pokémon, Picasso, and the Language of Comics: Can AI Map Art Styles to Purpose?

Alex X. G., • designcomicsdata
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Collage of ducks and swans arranged on Scott McCloud’s Big Triangle, spanning photorealism near Reality, icon cartoons near Meaning, and abstract or pixel looks near Picture
McCloud’s Big Triangle as a map of looks — same subject, many styles.

We put Pokémon and Picasso on McCloud’s Big Triangle to ask: can comic language describe vision — and can AI map art styles to purpose? Inspired by Understanding Comics.

TLDR

Scott McCloud’s Big Triangle places pictures between Reality, Language, and Picture. The Style Atlas maps 365 looks there. The published map uses the tagging results of the with Gemini 3.7 Flash. Typical miss on the is ~8% on ten comics (McCloud’s whole printed set ~13%; ~15%). Franchises skew Language; artists stay more Reality-led. Gemini 3.7 Flash is the balanced winner of that pass. Try Pokémon and Picasso.

Published Labels default

Why Gemini 3.7 Flash is the balanced winner

9.3% mean

Lowest average miss

Best even score of the six-model pass.

~1.7% band

Inside digitization noise

Sits with Qwen and Kimi; several models can still share “#1.”

14% worst

No blow-ups

Qwen’s tail exceeded 24%; Kimi hit 31% on Little Orphan Annie.

Not every column

Median and style wins

Qwen had the tightest typical miss (9.3% median). Gemini 3.5 Flash won the most styles, but sat outside the cluster.

Horizontal bar chart of median miss percent for six vision models on ten held-out McCloud styles using the gated repair v3 prompt; Qwen3.8 Max is lowest
Median miss vs McCloud on the gated repair v3 prompt (lower is closer).

Explore again

  1. Jump to Pokémon

    Published Labels (Gemini 3.7 Flash tagging results from the gated repair v3 prompt), Big Triangle diamonds on, Pokémon selected.

    Open Pokémon →

  2. Then Picasso

    Same map, a fine-art pin — see how far Language vs Reality sits.

    Open Picasso →

  3. Flip to Trapezoid

    Same Pokémon pin, calculated sister map for pictures that carry a concept.

    Open Trapezoid →

* Sample images are for style analysis; we claim no rights to them (fair use). Contact me to request removal.

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