Will Sliney: 'Perfect' AI makes children stop drawing but it's okay to make mistakes

Sliney hasn’t been seen in a mask and cape around his native Ballycotton, but he has been wantonly carrying out acts of derring do. A key member of the Marvel Comics team which has developed and perpetuated the universes of Spider-Man and Star Wars, his own animation directorial debut is around the corner with his short film Droid Academy. This is big news, but alongside this, there are new TV series, new books, a range of toys aimed at cultivating a love of art in the next generation, and even a chance to reminisce about scoring for Everton at his beloved Goodison Park.

As part of the preparations for Droid Academy entering the world, Will had an opportunity lately to team up with a 65-piece orchestra at the Cork School of Music as they recorded the theme for the animated short: A moment that reduced the 43-year-old to tears.

“I was bawling,” Sliney admits. “The power of music, the power of an orchestra anyway, they just started tuning up and I was like, ‘Oh no, I’m in trouble, I’m not gonna be able to hold it together’. It was that moment that I was like, this is something I never thought would happen.”

That it has is testament not just to Sliney’s artistic talent, but also that often unseen element of pure hustle. With his career firing on every cylinder, it’s worth recalling how a young fella growing up in East Cork managed to secure himself a position in the world of top level comics where he invented a Star Wars character (Ren), having secured a seat in the drawing circle for another cultural totem, Spider-Man.

“I don’t ever think I was particularly gifted,” he says. “I don’t even think that’s a thing. I think that’s just those that are more interested in it tend to draw, to draw more, so their skill is a bit higher than the person that’s next to them in the classroom. I do think there’s such a thing as talent in sports like Michael Phelps — the width, the length of his hands allow him to swim faster. That’s what I think natural born talent is. Most other things are skills that you learn.”

At school, Sliney was good at maths, and seemed destined to become an engineer: “The way I always say it is, I thought I wanted to design the aerodynamics of a Formula 1 car, but it turns out I just used to love drawing them, designing the liveries on them and stuff. So it was only when I was in college that I realised you could do this [drawing] as a job. So all of a sudden, this thing that I was interested in drastically turned around and became something that I could really go for, really, really put all of my energy towards. And that was essentially my 20s, just developing my skill, going to whatever convention that I could and getting in front of everyone and just slowly climbing that ladder and getting closer to what then was the dream job of working on Spider-Man and Star Wars.”

Hearing Sliney describe the conventions gives a real sense of motel America: “I would go to America for 89 days at a time, you’re allowed to stay for 90, and I would just put myself in every possible position. I’d basically come home with nothing in my bank account, and then work up enough to be able to go over there [again].”

It was, he says, a case of working hard to make your own luck: “I did that for years. And then, thankfully, the convention side of things got bigger and started spreading around the world. So all of a sudden, these conventions were happening in Ireland, and it actually ended up being the editor-in-chief of Marvel who, funny enough, is coming back to Dublin very, very soon. He met me at a convention in Dublin, and that’s where, essentially it was like my golden buzzer X Factor moment, when they were like, ‘yeah, we have the job for you, come over to New York next week and we’ll sign the contracts’.”

That was 2012 and Sliney’s universe has only gotten bigger.

Being Irish helps, he says, not just because you sound different to the majority of his peers, but also because of a different mental approach to the job, where it’s based less on the need for inspiration and more on knuckling down to the task at hand. If New York is the Hollywood of comics, then Sliney’s workspace in Ballycotton is a satellite of Tinseltown, something which means he does not see his profession as a solitary one.

“I’m one of the first generation that would have been placed around the world, you know, doing this work from Ballycotton,” he said. “But we tend to create kind of virtual studios for ourselves, and we’ll be on Skype together and kind of draw together.”

Comic books are collaborative, particularly in ever-expanding but self-contained worlds like those of Star Wars and Spider-Man, where you are following on from the work of those who have gone before you. It means functional places have their own rules and characteristics. 

Sliney gives a laugh when he recalls working on the development of Galaxy’s Edge at Walt Disney World Resort, effectively designing buildings that would then be replicated in real life, and how he included a dewback, the familiar thick-skinned reptiles — only to be immediately hauled up by the Story Group which oversees the Star Wars universe who told him those particular creatures weren’t native to there. 

Yet it was Sliney’s attention to detail that resulted in the Star Wars team crossing the hallway and requesting he come over from the Spider-Man team.

“It was like a transfer negotiation,” he chuckles.

Yet while Sliney is fully immersed in the wonders of the comic book university verse, he is acutely aware that many potential artists of the future can easily be deflected off course. He was part of the Homeschool Hub team, a vital creative link during the pandemic, and he recalls receiving “10,000 drawings a day from kids stuck at home”. That rate hasn’t really slowed down but Will gets a sense that parental worries over AI — that technology will make actual artists obsolete — are not just unfounded but could also mean some children put away their pencils.

“It couldn’t be further from the truth,” Sliney says. “There’s a massive, massive rejection of AI in art and comics, which has been lovely for me to see. [AI] can be smelled from a mile away.

“It used to be important for me that kids knew you could do these kinds of jobs. Now it’s important to keep them drawing and not have stupid things like that get in the way. Every kid draws. Some kids stop drawing because they think they’re not good enough. We’ve been targeting that with all of our shows [Draw with Will on RTÉ and Sky], assuring them it’s okay to make mistakes. This is all part of it. It’s never going to be straight up easy. You’re just going to continually learn.”

The latest weapon — or maybe we should use the term ’superpower’ — to tackle this is Sliney’s upcoming range of toys, which will ingeniously marry the action figure concept with artistic tools, to be known as the Art Force, in what Will says could be “the Spider-Man of the art aisle”. The toys, like 3DP, will have artistic opponents in them, often linking to other materials such as YouTube instruction videos — with different toys linked to different types of art, from clay and sculpting to paper and bracelets. Will hopes that they will help to keep children involved in art, and at the very least help foster “a wonderful hobby”.

Art Force launches today with Will’s free weekly tutorials on Instagram ( instagram.com/artforceacademy).

Prototype toys have been made and are expected to launch Christmas 2026. Meanwhile, the Art Force animation is currently in the works with Screen Ireland. Ultimately, Sliney hopes it will develop into ‘Art School’ with a goal to teach the art curriculum to kids.

Of course, all this comes at a time when the culture wars still rage and where, in Sliney’s words, “it’s almost becoming like the programmers versus the artist”. Comic books have always been bold, often reflecting what is going on in the real world through its own fantastical framework. Sliney sees its position as being aided by the fact that it is “fastest to market”, with an agility that other art forms can’t match.

“If you’re doing a movie, it takes four or five years of development, and the world obviously changes a lot faster now than it ever has,” he says. “It’s very hard to reflect it. Whereas the book that I’m working on right now will be in a store in two or three months time. It’s incredibly fast. So the big changes that happen in comics are reflected in what people, editors of comic book companies who are on the ground of comic book conventions or in real life, and what they’re able to experience in the world around them, it gets reflected in the book so much faster.”

With Droid Academy, Sliney can see the possibility of future directing roles, and alongside Art Force the coming months will see publication of a new Marvel book, The Rise of Skywalker, plus a new series of Draw With Will on Sky, while Seth McFarlane and Universal Studios have optioned a book written by Charles Shoule and illustrated by Sliney, Hell to Pay, with a view to turning it into a TV series.

He’s popping over to Goodison Park shortly to draw Irish international Jake O’Brien for the match day programme for the upcoming game against Bulgaria, and he may get the opportunity to put his stamp on the Toffee’s new stadium, having already painted a mural at Goodison, the same ground where he scored a goal in a pre-season charity match last summer.

“I scored the last goal of the game and I basically subbed myself off,” he recalls, adding: “I snuck a somewhat subtle Everton reference into the back of one of the Spider-Man comics, many, many years ago. And Liverpool fans wrote in and complained.”

It says a lot about Sliney’s current career trajectory that scoring a goal for his childhood team barely merits a footnote. He’s certainly grateful. “It’s a dream come true,” he says, stressing that the aim now is to ensure that children already scribbling away on their own work in their bedrooms continue to believe in the superpower of their own creativity.

With Sliney as a teacher, future superheroes look to be in safe hands.

• Droid Academy will premiere at Dingle Animation Festival and come to RTÉ in June. Art-Force launches today with Art-Force Academy, free weekly tutorials. For more info see instagram.com/artforceacademy.