All the futuristic contraptions and creatures in "Cyberpunk: Peach John" were intricately rendered by Midjourney, a viral AI tool that has sent the art world into a spin, along with others such as Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2.

As Japan's first fully AI-drawn manga, the work has raised questions over the threat technology could pose to jobs and copyright in the nation's multi-billion-dollar comic book industry.

It took the author, who goes by the pen name Rootport, just six weeks to finish the over-100-page manga, which would have taken a skilled artist a year to complete, he said.

"It was a fun process, it reminded me of playing the lottery," the 37-year-old told AFP.

Rootport, a writer who has previously worked on manga plots, entered combinations of text prompts such as "pink hair", "Asian boy" and "stadium jacket" to conjure up images of the story's hero in around a minute.

He then laid out the best frames in comic-book format to produce the book, which has already sparked a buzz online ahead of its March 9 release by Shinchosha, a major publishing house.

Unlike traditional black-and-white manga, his brainchild is fully coloured, although the faces of the same character sometimes appear in markedly different forms.