WAGDIE Project > US comics sent!

Hi Fam,

Huge thanks to you all for persisting with the project and for your patience! Last Friday I sent the final kickstarter shipments to my friend James Powell (check his children’s horror comics, they’re awesome!!) what a legendary fellow! He’ll be distributing them from his base in Colorado as soon as the books sent via express courier to the US arrive.

Please note some backers received a UV torch with their order if they live in Australia. Why? Postage costs the same up to 1kg here, and I had purchased 4 different types of UV torch to test for my NFT project. (NFT edition gets a free torch with batteries). Plus I wanted to reward those who were the higher tiered backers in Australia.

The feedback has been great so far - I’m really stoked that people are enjoying the book!

I’ll be dropping my improved Generation 2 NFT version of the Glow-In-The-Dark comic soon. Please look forward to it. The Generation 1 version is still available for a short time here:

https://threefoldcomics.com/

Here I am with my favourite little human - I’d like to say X helped me pack the books. He didn’t but he knows daddy makes glow-in-the-dark comic books and he thinks that’s cool. I have to admit I get a kick out of that!

I still have to send out some NFTs and the B&W manga edition is on the way.

Speaking of NFTs, there is so much misinformation and misunderstanding surround this new tech.

Perhaps I can clarify.

The easiest way to understand it is to think of them as contracts. They are called smart contracts after all. The most basic form of contract is the contract that shows you are the verifiable owner of the art etc. However the best NFTs also feature utility. E.g. you buy the token, and it gives you access to certain things, a gated section of a Discord, of a website etc. Free mints (NFTs) for token holders only. Or you get airdrops i.e. even more tokens that get sent direct to you, the token holder.

If you’re coming from the world of comics one way to view them is like a kind of supercharged Patreon.

And a project drop is kind of like a crowd funding campaign set into hyperdrive, where the team attempts to raise capital for their project in order to fulfil an ambitious roadmap. (NFTs are not all fire and brimstone, though you might think they are after looking at this next project.)

And sometimes these tokens are part of an interactive storytelling experience. Remember when back in the eighties Batman comic there was a choice to kill the second Robin? Well the community, the comic book readers chose to kill Jason Todd in the Death in the Family! Well that is another way community holders can participate in a project - I have to admit I think it’s incredibly exciting.

This project, expressing the nihilism of the current financial/crypto market crash, is a project that was free to mint. It has been innovating and creating an incredible story, a kind of community Role-Playing Game in the process. Here is the project’s modus operandi:

𝔑𝔬 𝔚𝔢𝔟𝔰𝔦𝔱𝔢. 𝔗𝔴𝔦𝔱𝔱𝔢𝔯 𝔞𝔫𝔡 ℭ𝔬𝔫𝔱𝔯𝔞𝔠𝔱 𝔒𝔫𝔩𝔶. 𝔉𝔯𝔢𝔢 𝔐𝔦𝔫𝔱. ℭℭ0.

𝔗𝔥𝔢𝔯𝔢 𝔦𝔰 𝔫𝔬 𝔪𝔞𝔭, 𝔬𝔫𝔩𝔶 𝔡𝔢𝔞𝔱𝔥.

𝔚𝔞𝔤𝔡𝔦𝔢.

You can catch up with the story so far at this unofficial website https://www.wagdie.org/

The unknown team even purchased a Mutant Bored Ape and sacrificed it to the gods (they burned the token)… it’s crazy stuff. Then those who burned their own avatars/NFTs were airdropped special ‘Tokens of Concord’

And the art? I think it’s a superb example of pixel art. The kind of thing that made me fall head over heels in love with gaming all those years ago. There is something about the pixel abstraction that really fires up the imagination. In comic books we fill in the gaps, we imagine what happens in the gutters between panels. I feel there is a similar mechanic at work with pixel art, we fill in the gaps, the details which are somehow inferred but incomplete until we process them.

And this model is crazy good. It’s done over 16 million USD, and the creators receive only in 5.7% royalties so they’ve made about 1 million with the community benefiting from the rest. It’s a new way of doing things and the possibilities for creators to experiment are varied and wide.

All the best,

Nima

ps. I’ll leave you with some more WAGDIE art, and a reminder that we are not all going to die, we are definitely going to make it!