Someone asked in the comments about NFTs. Non-Fungible Tokens. For the intent of this post, I may go back and forth in referring to them as “Digital Collectibles” or NFTs. For those of you who have always been unsure of what NFT’s are, they are Digital Collectibles — you can own one of a collectible on the internet, and in this post I would like to explain why they are important, not only valuable, but important.

So to get this, I first need to explain two things:

1. I may know more about Comic Books than I do about Venture Capital.

2. I’m on the board of a comic book related company called Skybound (think Walking Dead or Invincible) and an investor in a comic book marketplace called Shortboxed.

To be nostalgic for a moment, I have read and collected comic books my whole life. And after understanding more about the comic book business through my investments in Skybound and Shortboxed, it is important to separate the two types of comic book users. There are people who collect comic books for their value and there are people who read comic books for their art, story and media. I happen to be weird and enjoy both. Perhaps because I was raised on Monopoly and the X-men TV show.

NFTs will bridge the gap of these two users.

So here is why Comic books are important, and this will help to get to why NFTs are important.

There are many types of media - Comic Books, Books, TV, Movies, Video Games, Social Media, this list goes on. Life is media to some degree, everything in your space influences how you perceive your world. And media is a way to get a message out.

There’s a cost to each of these forms of media. It’s extremely expensive to launch a video game that competes and gets your message out. It is also extremely expensive to build trust enough to get through the right network and release a TV show to be streamed on something like Netflix. Even Youtube to some degree has become so controlled by top streamers, that standing out is difficult. However… comic books has always been neglected as a medium, and has a rabid fan base.

Comic books are the cheapest medium to create and build a community around a character. In the non-digital world, this continues to be true. How many Marvel movies have you seen in the last year? Those were all developed by comic books first, in order to foster a community of obsessive fans. Fans like me who debate ridiculous plot lines and character flaws.

Comic books are a way to open source the development of characters and storylines with an obsessive fan base for a low cost. In the physical and digital world.

I should say that Comic books WERE the cheapest way to do this, until NFTs. There is a capital cost to getting a comic book out the door. It’s relatively cheap, but it’s not nothing.

In the world of digital collectibles and NFTs - you can be paid to develop the content by the community. The community will issue digital collectibles and get paid before their characters are actually developed. And that community ends up having ownership over the value created out of the intellectual property.

This is the promise of NFT communities. The development and distribution of character IP will no longer have a cost, it will actually have a business model.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments.