They Waited 35 Years for Permission

Jan Utstein met William at San Diego Comic-Con thirty-one years ago. They built a comic publishing company and an IP company together, developed properties, and got optioned — in Jan's words — "a million times."

Nothing ever got made.

"Contracts, lots and lots of contracts. But we never made it beyond that."

One of their properties was created thirty-five years ago. It has been a comic series. It has been optioned more than once. They made a short demo reel with Ben Burtt and other Lucasfilm people. It sat in development hell.

The closest they came was a meeting that went perfectly. A large company, an enthusiastic executive who wanted to showrun it himself, a name director attached to the pilot. Everyone on board. Greenlit in the room.

"In between the meeting and the parking lot, the director changed his mind. And the whole thing fell apart."

That is the industry a lot of people are quietly still waiting inside.

The robots danced

Jan and William started playing with AI on their own — carefully, because in the comic book world it is close to taboo. San Diego Comic-Con and most other cons require exhibitors to sign a contract stating they will not sell AI art, so the two lanes have to be kept scrupulously separate.

Then they generated two of their robot characters dancing.

"The first time I saw two of our robot characters dancing, I literally started crying. After all these years."

Thirty-five years of a property existing only on paper, and it moved.

They joined our first micro-drama cohort after meeting us at the licensing show. Their framing of the decision has stayed with the whole team since:

"We're going to take control of our own destiny for a change, and stop waiting for everybody to give us permission to do what we can now do on our own."

The other version of the same story

Brad Roe spent twenty years in on-air marketing at Fox and CBS, launching CSI, Criminal Minds, and most of the major dramas on the network. Then WGN America, where he worked, stopped existing. Then FanDuel Sports Network shut down.

He went to an AI conference at Culver Studios looking for what to do next, bumped into our CEO at a social gathering, and heard the term "micro-drama" for the first time. When the format was described to him — hook at the top, keep them going, make them want the next episode — he recognised his own job.

He had a script sitting in a drawer. A golf-course dark comedy. It had been written as a movie years earlier and pitched a few places without funding, which is where scripts like that usually stop.

He now has five episodes cut.

"No one's stopping me from producing now. I am a content creator, I'm a producer, I'm a writer, I'm picking the music, I'm editing the thing. It's been very liberating."

Two camps at the con

Jan spent the last few weeks at conventions and came back with a useful read on where the industry's head is at. There are two groups: people who think AI is going to take their jobs, and people who think it's going to give them jobs. The dividing line, she noticed, is mostly whether you already have work and how secure it is.

She has watched this pattern before. Digital lettering and digital colouring were going to destroy comics until letterers started using computers and found they could hit schedules and hold consistency. Video games were technicians' work until Hollywood brought in writers and artists, and the games got beautiful. Phil Tippett was pronounced extinct when CGI arrived at Jurassic Park, then took everything he knew about how bodies move into the new tool and stayed at the top of the field for decades.

"The technology of art is only as good as the people whose hands it's in."

Brad's version of the same point is blunter:

"It doesn't have to be AI to be slop. We've all been to plenty of movies where the effects are kick-ass and the script's a piece of crap."

What actually changed

None of them finished a whole series in five weeks, and the cohort was never designed for that — the target is one to three finished episodes, a bible, and enough fluency in the pipeline to keep going alone. Jan and William got further behind than they wanted, partly because they were prepping for Comic-Con at the same time, partly because William was sick for two weeks.

That Comic-Con turned out to be their most profitable show in thirty-one years. Art print and music-art sales doubled; overall sales up 22%. The analog business and the AI work are both running, in separate lanes, at the same time.

What changed for all three of them was the wait. Thirty-five years of asking permission, twenty years of a script in a drawer, and then a five-week window with deadlines, classmates, and a pipeline that lets one person do the work of a small studio.

"We're not going to let the naysayers affect us when we know what we can accomplish."

If you want to see how the work itself breaks down week to week, we wrote up where AI micro-drama production actually slows down from the same conversation.

Disclosure: Jan Utstein, William O'Neill and Brad Roe paid to take part in Leyline's first micro-drama cohort and spoke on a public panel about it. Some cohort graduates are paid by Leyline as trainers and event hosts. Of the eight people in Cohort 1, five completed the program. The cohort is built around finishing one to three episodes, not a finished series — individual results vary with experience and available time.

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