NFTs still represented a strange new world to many comic book creators last year when Jason Chatfield decided to convene an online forum to address the question: With cryptocurrencies selling for millions, did the blockchain hold any promise for comic book creators?
Garry Trudeau dives into NFTs, selling ‘Doonesbury’ stripes at auction
“Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau, as a participant in March 2021 Zoom forum, remember the artists’ answers. “Enthusiasm quickly waned as people became aware of the enormous carbon footprint created by NFT extraction,” he says. “Even early users had already begun to peel off.”
However, Trudeau’s curiosity did not diminish. He stayed connected as blockchain technology developed, until he was recently introduced to an NFT company, Polygon, which announced last month that it had reached environmentally friendly “carbon neutrality”.
Trudeau will now offer its first NFT comics and character art for sale through the Heritage Auctions house, and all proceeds will go to charity. Live bidding starts Thursday.
For Trudeau, who has often adapted to digital developments throughout his fifty-year career, the auction is an experiment in what the NFT market can offer syndicated comic book creators like himself. “I’m a skeptic by profession,” he says, “but that does not mean I’m not fascinated by new technologies.”
Rick Akers, comic book buyer and shipping director at Dallas-based Heritage Auctions, says that “with the arrival and acceptance of NFT digital art, we see established artists in comic book and illustration art ready to reach a new market with their creations.” Trudeau is Heritage’s first NFT cartoon auction, with more planned later this year.
Recent notable auctions of NFT comics include Frank Miller’s ‘I Love You, Nancy Callahan’, which sold for more than $ 800,000 last fall, and Wonder Woman’s NFT works by former DC comic José Delbo, which sold last year for more. than $ 1.8 million.
After being contacted by an NFT company last year, Trudeau began curating which “Doonesbury” art should be turned into tokens. He still had a small collection of files on his desk, from when The Washington Post asked him in 2020 to choose his 10 best “defining” comics – to mark the 50th anniversary of his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic.
Although an agreement did not work with the first company, Trudeau offers the same 10 stripes as embossed tokens, as well as NFTs for several other collectibles. Each NFT comes with a signed and numbered physical print – “so even if you forget that you even own a digital token,” says the cartoonist, “you can have proof that ownership hangs on your wall.”
These comics range from the early ’70s, when “Doonesbury” commented on Watergate and the feminist movement, to the early 21st century, when the basic character BD apprehensively lost a leg in Fallujah – a time when the cartoonist began weaving more military tales. into his strip.
The charity that Trudeau chose to receive all the proceeds from was the International Medical Corps, which helps Ukrainian refugees and IDPs. Heritage Auctions and Andrews McMeel Syndication also donate their share of the proceeds to IMC.
From a professional point of view, Trudeau notes that “the main attraction for NFTs for me was not so much the potential income as it was the artistic challenge of working in a new medium.” His many digital projects have included launching the “Doonesbury” website in the 90’s and providing the strip’s fictional correspondent Roland B. Hedley Jr. a Twitter account in 2008. “Everything was fun – almost nothing of it profitable,” he says. “I just loved the new tools, the new forms of expression.”
With that said, the potential for artist royalties caught his eye. Unlike regular physical art resale, the secondary market for NFTs often delivers creative royalty on all subsequent sales. While not the model for his first Heritage auction, he says he has called on Heritage Auctions to “adopt an entire house policy of only affecting NFTs with perpetual royalties as a matter of justice.”
Trudeau himself does not plan to buy NFT art as an investment – he just wanted to buy tokens for novelty and nostalgia. But would he advise his syndicated colleagues to start influencing and selling their work?
“I have no idea if NFTs will work for most older comic book artists,” he says. “It may be that the company brands will flatten the competition.”
Meanwhile, he believes that cartoon icons that are native to the platform – “the monkeys and the kittens and the punks” – have flourished as speculative entities, instead of “as characters that someone actually cares about.”
“It’s still the Wild West,” Trudeau says, “and even if social responsibility ceases to be an issue, it can all be a house of cards.”
