Author: Charlie Kolbrener

It cost just 10 cents when it came out in 1938. It sold in April this year for $3.25 million. The mint condition comic book, found in a pile of 1930s movie magazines, was just one of 100 issues of Action Comics#1 known to have survived. The comic includes the first appearance of Superman and explains the superhero’s origins. The sale netted its owner a cool million dollars profit just three years after they’d bought it. 

Comic book investing is well-established. Anyone with a box of old magazines gathering dust in the attic hopes that buried in there somewhere is a mint condition of the first Batman story or the initial appearance of Spider-Man. But as comics migrate to the online world, those opportunities have become rarer. You can’t put a downloaded first edition on Comixology up for auction, no matter how quickly you grabbed it or how well you’ve kept it.

Some collectors hoping to turn their comic book appreciation into profit are now looking to digital solutions to monetize their digital habits. 

A new auction of Stan Lee NFTs is showing the way.

https://mintable.app/stanleelegacy

The auction of the Stan Lee Legacy Collection, held by NFT marketplace Mintable, includes fine art, pop art and NFTs. Lee chose the works with painter Rob Prior over a period of two years, and signed each of the images. Buyers will be able to purchase both the 1/1 original, massive paintings and their digital tokens. 

The paintings have titles such as “The Infinity Gauntlet”, “Introducing Stan Lee: Master of Magic”, and “I Am Iron Man”. Stan Lee appears in all of them: wielding the Infinity Gauntlet; dressed as Sorcerer Supreme; taking off Iron Man’s helmet. Lee’s request to be painted on to the covers of his creations is a nod to his love of his own cameo appearances in the Marvel films. 

https://mintable.app/stanleelegacy

STUDIOPRIOR

The auction also includes art by Stan Lee’s friend, photographer and producer Jonathan Bolerjack. The sale will take place on August 6, and a portion of the proceeds will go to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library which supports childhood literacy. An hour before it begins, a fourth Stan Lee painting will be revealed during a special livestream of the Bad Crypto Podcast. It really will be unique.

Buyers who participate in the auction will be able to pick up a number of benefits. They’ll be purchasing attractive artworks by two well-known artists, both of whom were close to Stan Lee, the leading figure in American comics. Prior has worked for brands including Marvel, D.C. and Image Comics, as well as on Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Terminator, Deep Space 9 and Game of Thrones. Each year he paints in front of an audience of more than 250,000. 

They’ll also be buying images of Stan Lee himself. In addition to the inclusion of Prior’s paintings, Bolerjack will be contributing photographs and videos of Stan Lee’s private moments. The founder of Marvel Comics has become an icon since he started making cameos in movies of his superheroes. Buyers will be able to own a unique, signed image of him, and photos of him in his last years. 

But they’ll also be able to make an investment that they can keep and transfer digitally. Each NFT links to one of the images, ensuring that for the first time, comic book fans will be able to own both an endorsed Stan Lee work and sell a digital version. It’s a watershed moment for NFTs, art and pop culture.

Few people had a better vision of the future than Stan Lee. Mintable’s Stan Lee Legacy Collection auction brings a future even he didn’t foresee.

Disclaimer: While I am not officially affiliated with either artist’s projects, I do own some related NFT assets, and they can be viewed here. And, of course, this article does not constitute formal financial advice.

When the auction ended on Saturday afternoon, the highest bid was 54.48 ETH (~$123k USD), and clon couldn’t believe it. He’d just gotten off the phone with his parents to tell them how happy he was. “My mind was blown,” he said. “Never did I think I’d be able to create something with someone that could all be given to charity.”

https://opensea.io/assets/cxllabs

GHXSTS x Cool Cats

The piece, titled, “GHXSTS x Cool Cats,” was the first collaborative artwork by GxngYxng and clon, two popular NFT artists. Using “The Giving Block,” a platform that enables cryptocurrency donations to nonprofits, they split the money three ways between Hope For Paws, Animal Equality and the Rainforest Foundation Fund. “We want to make sure the impact we’re making on the earth is a positive impact,” clon said.

Both GxngYxng and clon have enjoyed a meteoric rise to success in the NFT world this year. GxngYxng—best known for his “Ghxsts” (pronounced Ghosts), a series of 1/1 hand-drawn works described as lost souls looking for a home—entered the NFT space full-time after quitting a job in animation two months ago.

clon, similarly, was a freelance motion designer who decided to revive his decade-old “blue cat” illustration after seeing a poster on his wall that reminded him of the generative avatar projects currently popular in the NFT space. With the help of longtime friend “ELU,” he teamed up with developers “Lynqoid” and “xtremetom” to create “Cool Cats NFT.”

GxngYxng and clon’s individual projects have now seen sales totaling over 3.1k ETH and 6.1k ETH on the secondary market, respectively.

The decision for them to collaborate was an easy one. GxngYxng had reached out to clon about a collaboration after Cool Cats NFT launched, and as soon as clon heard about his work, he replied enthusiastically. “I think our styles are different, but there are enough similarities where they would mesh,” clon said.

The two artists passed sketches back and forth, made adjustments, and a “Cxllab” of four artworks, including the auction piece, was born.

For both artists, the charity component was a way of paying their recent successes forward. “Outside of collaborating with someone I look up to, to have the opportunity to give back was what made this project so important to me,” GxngYxng told ONE37pm. “Having quit my job and becoming an unemployed artist a few months ago, I never imagined I would have the opportunity to donate such a large sum.”

“The feeling of ‘your art can’t do anything’ to ‘your art can help so many people’ is priceless,” clon added.

“Sighduck,” the winner of the auction, had decided the large purchase would pay off. “These two projects are two of the hottest, and the community around them seems really strong. So I’m confident from an investment standpoint. And even if not for investment, I think it’s just a great piece of work,” he told ONE37pm.

He added that the charity component was important to him. “There’s so much capital flowing through NFTs right now, so that’s always a good thing.”

In the NFT space, donations to charity are commonplace. “Bored Ape Yacht Club,” an NFT mainstay featuring programmatically generated primates, also recently used The Giving Block to donate over $300k to various animal charities, including Orangutan Outreach and Friends of Bonobos. Because these charitable donations are made on the blockchain, anyone can confirm that the transactions are legitimate.

“It’d be great to continue to work with these foundations. They’re really nice people. Maybe I could draw something for them,” clon said.

When the auction entered into its final minutes, a user in the Cool Cats Discord server wrote, “And to think if clon had actually given up on blue cat, this all would have never happened.”

He replied, “I’ve thought about that every single day of cool cats.”

Disclaimer: While I am not officially affiliated with the Weird Whales project, I currently own three of them. My NFT assets can and will always be publicly visible on my OpenSea profile here. And of course, this article does not constitute formal financial advice.

Benyamin Ahmed is not spending summer vacation like his classmates. 

On Monday, from his computer in Pinner, near London, the 12-year-old announced the launch of “Weird Whales,” an NFT project featuring 3,350 programmatically-generated pixel whales. Each whale, with “traits” ranging from top hats to tobacco pipes, could be “minted,” or purchased at random, for 0.02 ETH (~$40 USD). Ahmed coded the project with help from his father Imran, a developer who introduced him to programming when he was five years old.

Within 9 hours, the project sold out, resulting in approximately $160k USD of sales. As of writing, transactions in the secondary marketplace have surpassed $1.5 million. “Weird Whales somehow blew up. I did it as a test, but somehow it went viral on Twitter,” Ahmed said. 

His father admitted he had prepared his son in case they had failed to sell. “The first batch he did… he didn’t sell any of them. I didn’t want him to be too disheartened.”

When Twitter users noticed the project and began buying up the digital whales, that view quickly changed.

Weird Whales was inspired by “CryptoPunks,” an NFT avatar project by Larva Labs that has seen sales of individual “Punks” go for up to $11.8 million at auction houses like Sotheby’s.

Soon after Ahmed’s project sold out, however, doubts began to emerge about his identity. Some users contended that he was an anonymous imposter, given that his young age was a unique selling point.

When Ahmed woke up to the comments at 5 A.M., he knew he had to clear the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). Using his Twitter account @ObiWanBenoni, he quickly posted a thread stating, “Yeah, it is me.” He then followed up with a YouTube video that featured him sitting at the computer with Weird Whales on-screen. 

“I went downstairs and checked the website. And then I checked Twitter, and there was this FUD, and I did not know what they were talking about because I was sleeping,” he told ONE37pm. “And it was about how someone thought it was identity theft, and some thought I wasn’t a real person, but this person pretending to be me.”

While Ahmed was initially upset that users doubted his identity, he considered the suspicion reasonable. “If I were in that position and there was this 12-year-old kid that launched an NFT project, had sold all the NFTs, and made 80 Ethereum, I would speculate a bit as well.” He clarified that there was no bad blood. “All the people that believed the FUD got back to me and said they were sorry.”

At first glance, Weird Whales is not a novel artistic feat. Critics, for example, have pointed out that Ahmed based his NFTs off an online image of a pixel whale. He is not shy about facing those claims. “I knew it had to be pixel art because I’m not really an artist—it had to be easy for someone like me to do. So I looked up ‘pixel whale,’ and it came up with multiple images—different people using the same pixel whale design.” He added, “The site said this could be used by anyone. So I thought I could use it myself.”

The art, however, was never the main point. Instead, Weird Whales was the culmination of a young programmer’s journey into the NFT space. It began on July 9th, when Ahmed joined the Discord server of another project called “BoringBananasCo.” He messaged the co-founder, Vishesh Sood, for advice on how to code a generative project. Because Sood’s own project was designed to be open-source and teaching-based, he happily obliged.

“What I initially thought was that it would just be a really great learning experience for him. So he didn’t think that much about marketing, or the art, or anything like that,” Sood, who goes by “Vee” online, said. “It was like, how do we get him to have a complete experience of launching a collectible product, because as a 12-year-old, that’s just something incredible to have done.”

Yet, despite the project’s modest ambitions, Weird Whales made mighty waves. “I was just playing around with code and testing. And then I remember looking at the website and the ‘sold out’ message had shown and that was really the turning point,” Ahmed emphasized. Sood chimed in, “He was just learning, and we wanted to support that.”

Now, three days later, Ahmed has had time to reflect on the experience. “You’re never too young to do something,” he told ONE37pm. “I could have said, ‘Oh, adults are doing this.’ But I found interest in it. And after this launch, I’ve seen similar people around my age, and I’m willing to help them succeed in their dreams.”