Fans accuse Marvel of AI art in the Spider-Man: Brand New Day book
One page pulled out of a $2 billion movie’s art book set off a familiar argument: was this drawn by a person?
The page in question
The Spider-Man: Brand New Day companion art book, 208 pages, arrived on August 18, 2026. Among its concept pieces is a New York street scene titled Big City, Little Spider, credited to concept artist Scott McInnes.
Readers zoomed in and found the usual signatures of generative imagery: taxis whose bodies warp and merge, buildings whose windows do not line up floor to floor, and fire escapes that smear into the facade. The accusation spread across X, Reddit and ResetEra.
The publisher’s answer
The book’s publisher responded that the image was a rushed human photobash made with cloning tools, described it as laziness rather than AI, and said the company has an anti-AI policy. Marvel has not commented.
The timing sharpens the reaction. The debate lands months after Marvel Studios laid off over 1,000 staff, with its visual effects department hit hardest, so any sign of automated art reads as a labor story as much as a craft one.
Why the distinction is getting harder
Photobashing, the practice of compositing and cloning photo fragments into a concept painting, has been standard in film pre-production for years, and a rushed photobash can produce exactly the artifacts that readers now associate with AI. The episode shows that the visual tells of a sloppy human job and a generative model have converged, and that the accusation now lands before the explanation does.
Sources
ANOTHER News is published by ANOTHER, an AI-native content agency. Daily coverage also runs on Instagram.
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