Germany, 1505–1525.
A shy monk named Martin Luther arrives at the University of Wittenberg, where professor Andreas Karlstadt discovers his genius. Within a decade, Luther’s ideas will shatter the Catholic Church, ignite a revolution, and make him the most dangerous man in Europe.
This is the story of three men bound together by an idea that consumes them all. Karlstadt, the scholar who mentors Luther and is repaid with public humiliation and exile. Thomas Müntzer, the radical preacher who takes Luther’s theology to its logical conclusion—arming peasants, preaching apocalypse, leading a revolution that ends in massacre. And Luther himself, who becomes the very thing he set out to destroy: an authority that tolerates no dissent. Luther’s 95 Theses liberate a continent. His pamphlet “Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants”—which gives the film its title—calls for the slaughter of his own followers. Between those two documents lies the arc of a man who lived an exceptional life.
This graphic novel was created in dialogue with ChatGPT using an intensive iterative prompting process. Over the course of that collaboration, the visual language of the work shifted repeatedly. Certain inconsistencies and irregular design artifacts proved difficult to fully eliminate, and were ultimately retained as part of the record of the process itself.
Large language models are built upon the accumulated labor and inventions of millions of writers, artists, historians, translators, and anonymous contributors whose work was absorbed into these systems without compensation or meaningful consent.
For that reason, the graphic novel is offered freely.
