Maybe you will lose some of your "territory" in the process, but what makes you, you will be preserved. Nobody will be able to ask "draw me a comic with these dialogue in the style of $ARTIST$".
Personal styles are dime a dozen and of far lesser importance than you think.
Professionals will draw in any style, that's how we make things like games and animated movies. Even assuming you had some unique and incredibly valuable style, all it'd take to copy it completely legally is finding somebody else willing to copy your style to provide training material, and train on that.
Try imitating Mickey Mouse, Dilbert, Star Wars, Hello Kitty, XKCD, you name it.
Randall will possibly laugh at you, but a legal company which happens to draw cartoons won't be amused and come after you in any way they can.
> Professionals will draw in any style...
Yep, after calling and getting permission and possibly paying some fees to you if you want. There's respect and dignity in this process.
Yet, we reduce everything into money. Treating machine code like humans and humans like coin-operated vending machines.
There's something wrong here.
Those are not styles, they're characters for the most part.
You absolutely can draw heavy inspiration from existing properties, mostly so long you avoid touching the actual characters. Like D&D has a lot of Tolkien in it, and I believe the estate is quite litigious. You can't put Elrond in a D&D game, but you absolutely can have "Elf" as a species that looks nigh identical to Tolkien's descriptions.
For style imitation, it's long been a thing to make more anime-ish animation in the west, and anime itself came from Disney.
> Yep, after calling and getting permission and possibly paying some fees to you if you want.
Not for art styles, they won't. Style is not copyrightable.
While I know that styles are not copyrightable for good-faith reasons, massive abuse of good-faith is a good siren for regulation in that area.
> You absolutely can draw heavy inspiration from existing properties, mostly so long you avoid touching the actual characters.
From what I understood, it's mostly allowed for homage and (un)intentional narrowing of creative landscape. Not for ripping people off.
> For style imitation, it's long been a thing to make more anime-ish animation in the west, and anime itself came from Disney.
But all are done in tradition of cross-pollination, there was no ill-intentions, until now.
After OpenAI ripped Studio Ghibli, and things got blurred. It's not my interpretation, either [0] [1].
Then there's Universal and Disney's lawsuits against Midjourney.While these are framed as character-copying, when you read between the lines, style appropriation is also something being strongly balked at [2].
So things are not as clear cut as before, because a company stepped on the toes of another one. Small fish might get some benefits as a side-effect.
Addenda: Even OpenAI power-walked away from mocking Studio Ghibli to "maybe we shouldn't do that" [3].
[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/05/opena...
[1]: https://futurism.com/lawyer-studio-ghibli-legal-action-opena...
[2]: https://variety.com/vip/how-the-midjourney-lawsuit-impacts-g...
[3]: https://www.eweek.com/news/openai-studio-ghibli-ai-art-copyr...
