The promise, the danger and what the future actually holds
Going by industry conventions, the third highest grossing film of 2014 had no right to succeed the way it did. It was based on source material that had a fan base that consisted mostly of some of the most niche comic book fans. The cast featured actors best known for playing supporting roles in sitcoms and professional wrestling. It was weird, it was extremely spontaneous, and the climax was a direct reference to Footless. So what was that movie?
It was Guardians of the Galaxyand it raked in more than $700 million at the box office.
But remember: 2014 was eight years ago. Yes, a lot has changed since then, with perhaps the biggest change coming in the early 2020s, and the rise of blockchain technology and Web3 to mainstream prominence. Movies and related franchises about cartoon characters have saturated the media, sometimes with unseemly, dangerous consequences for storytelling in general. So it’s time to explore what role NFTs will play in the future of storytelling – especially in the context of comics.
How NFTs open up storytelling
Several creators have seen NFTs as a potential catalyst for massive change in how future franchises are developed and built. A notable example of this is Forgotten Runes Wizard’s Cult. Via the sale of their Wizard NFTs, they have given holders the ability to do whatever they want with the characters.
And with that freedom, holders have spun their own stories in the Forgotten Runes’ Book of Lore – a codexif you like, on every character in the collection.
So what does the Forgotten Runes team do with all these characters and community-built lore? Telling stories – all in service of the goal of speeding up the next big fantasy franchise. “We want to get into the mainstream. We want to get into the whole audience that loves the fantasy genre, Forgotten Runes Co-Creator Elf said in an interview with nft now. “And so it’s a really good way to make these ‘ the legacy media terms’ on.”
But while the mediums Forgotten Runes has chosen to express its world and characters are traditional, the creative process has been anything but. Even with so many different authors contributing to the text, Forgotten Runes has managed to piece together cohesive media to tie the community’s efforts together.
The draw of NFT comics
Despite having a TV series and a blockchain game in the works, the comic is perhaps the most promising part of Forgotten Runes’ media ventures. The reason is simple: processing this type of media can be incredibly fast. “A lot of people will often ask us like, ‘How is it going to work, getting so many different stories from a decentralized community? How are you actually going to put all these things into one media expression? And my answer now is just like, well, look at this cartoon. This is how we do it. The proof is in the pudding,” said Elf.
And what has Forgotten Runes done with prints of the NFT comic? They gave it away. To all. “The whole point is to get to a non-crypto audience and expand,” Elf said. “A lot of people have told us to token gate a lot of the things we make, and I understand why they say that, but it just doesn’t make sense. […] Why would you want to limit the audience?”
“A cartoon [is a] much faster way to put cold content into a large, professional, studio-quality media expression,” said Elf. “[They] able to experiment faster, iterate faster, and explore characters and stories faster.” Thanks to the inherently quick turnaround of comics as a medium, there’s reason to believe this format could lead the way in attracting new fans to an NFT-first franchise – and Forgotten Runes is far from the only party aware of this fact.
Even for NFT collections that initially started out as just PFP offerings, several creators realized that comics were a great way to flesh out the characters without having to wait years for their idea to come to fruition. One such creator was Pixel Vault founder GFunk, who turned the iconic CryptoPunks collection of 2D sprites into the living, breathing cast of PUNKS Comic in May 2021.
Potential disadvantages
There is no doubt that giving a franchise’s fanbase and community the opportunity to write its continuity provides unprecedented levels of engagement between fans and their objects of fandom. But when theoretical anyone holds a franchise NFT can participate in the story, there are some small risks.
To illustrate, let’s look at a popular form of expression that fandom has widely embraced since the late 90s: fanfiction. In the hands of a skilled writer, this medium is ripe for further development of somewhat one-dimensional characters in their original texts, among other literary possibilities and explorations. If a writer succeeds in building a compelling world with a logical set of rules, any half-decent fanfiction writer will have a lot to work with.
However, the opposite also applies. An example, let’s look at My immortal – a piece Harry Potter fanfiction was so universally disliked that some have even speculated that it is an overly elaborate piece of satire showcasing the worst of what fanfiction had to offer. If JK Rowling’s Wizarding World had a similar structure to decentralized NFT franchises, then My immortal will be recognized as actual canon within the franchise. In the real world, this play did little to diminish its success Harry Potter franchise. From a certain subset of the Potterhead community, it may have even added to it. The same cannot be said if the work was actually recognized as a canon entry in the series. Just see how fast Game of Thrones seemingly disappeared overnight from the mainstream conversation after the largely negative reception its final season received.
Fortunately for NFT franchising, there are guarantees to ensure that everything comes together My immortal quality levels remain in society. In the case of Forgotten Runes, a natural curation process takes place to highlight the best of what the community has to offer – direct references to user-created lore within its legacy media expressions. “I just read numbers one through four [of the Forgotten Runes comic] and [our comic artist’s got] between 20 and 30 wizard references from various community members in these first four editions. It’s a strong proof of concept. I want to continue that kind of creative pipeline through everything we do, through the show, through the game, through everything,” Elf said.
How the comics industry is reacting
Perhaps most revealing of the future role NFT-built franchises will take in storytelling is the involvement of Marvel and DC in the NFT space. Recently, former Marvel executives teamed up to launch the Slam Girl series with an NFT, much because of the technology’s potential for creative expression and community building.
“When we started making comics, it was ink-on-paper. Now you see some digital comics and what have you. But it seemed to me that NFT is the real gateway to the metaverse and to today’s communication,” said Slam Girl curator and former Marvel Executive VP Shirrel Rhoades in a previous interview with nft now. “I think it opens up a whole new world of collectibles, […] storytelling, […] and visual presentations.”
Beyond this, however, legacy comics brands have largely been interested in the potential of NFTs as digital collectibles. It only makes sense, since people have been collecting comics for as long as they’ve been reading and writing them.
For Marvel fans, digital collectibles marketplace VeVe has kept a steady supply of Marvel-themed collectibles on the market. These can range from digital figures to digital replicas of iconic Marvel covers from its long history.
Likewise, DC has also launched NFT collectibles featuring The Caped Crusader alongside DC Universe, the comics publisher’s new Web3 imprint. Inside, users will be able to engage in the tradition of buying and selling comics among fans and collectors thanks to the new DC Collectible Comics initiative, which will create new digital collectible comics every week from the publisher’s vast archives. At the forefront of the launch on 27 October is a digital collector’s version of the very first issue of Superman, which will contain a limited mintage of 3,000 pieces. It will also have an affordable price of $9.99. Upon purchase, buyers will be awarded different levels of rarity, ranging from common to legendary. Perhaps comic franchises that started as NFT collections will one day do the same, bringing their journey in Web3 full circle.
What the future holds
Even in the face of a bear market, creators like Forgotten Runes and Pixel Vault continue to make promises for the future of the NFT landscape. While it would be nice for projects to see their value and sales trend upward over time, the legacy comics industry and all its media outlets have shown us one thing: What matters most is the ideas, stories, and characters in NFT comics. keep spreading and announcing.
But in the long term, an idea that Elf believes should spread to all the brands currently dominating the media landscape is something inherent to most Web3 projects: that the focus should be placed on the fans and creators first, and the shareholders and companies second.
“Creativity takes a back seat to profit,” Elf said of his experiences with traditional media. “It’s the non-creative people at the top who make the final creative decisions. The antidote is to reverse that model. What if [the fans and creators] actually got to sit in the creative driver’s seat? What kind of amazing product would you get from that model?” It might be hard to see now, but there’s a good chance it’ll make it to the pages of an NFT comic.
