Grownup Comics, Super Heroes, Marketing, Blockchain and NFTs

Actually, corporate comics are the opposite of grownup comics. It’s all about inviting grownups to become childlike when expressing their dreams, not dumbing down to adult humour in graphics.

“As a result, it becomes aspirational, innovative and inspiring. We can also turn people into superheroes which in turn allows them to showcase the wonderful elements of their companies,” says Raki Brown, director of Corporate Comics.

Corporate comics has even hired a futurist to work on this project.

“When you ask a company to look at itself as a cartoon or a strip it totally changes how they see themselves and allows for new vision. It also brings new ideas, narrative and exciting interpretation of the product and company,” he adds.

As soon as Raki and his team bring in their ideas, the client tends to get really excited and often this leads to much more exciting conversations about the company. Compared with mundane marketing methods of brands, logos and text, it’s easy to see how clients can become very enthusiastic.

Raki also creates superheroes or characters for key people within their client. His first job is to tell them to ignore what they do and concentrate on what they believe in and what their passion is.

“And we also look at their own personal kryptonite – that can be very powerful in terms of narrative.”

Interestingly, creating a superhero can often inspire the CEO to do more superhero activities – one leads the other.

Comics are also important for GenZ and the Zoomers – attention span is limited and this audience is used to absorbing content in a different way.

“If you don’t talk their language then you are going to lose them.”

The fast paced world means that people may look at video for a few seconds – typically with the sound off, or may look at a picture, without or without reading the text below – but with a comic complex ideas can be communicated in a single strip or even screen.  Stories can be understood in a split second – which is all anyone has these days to attract eyeballs.

First comics then NFTs – they are in the process of building a metaverse with compelling comic strip story lines. Who would not want to be part of that process?

As part of this development, a close eye is being kept on what blockchain best facilitates their NFTs. A couple of options are in the mix including WAX, Syscoin and of course Ethereum.

So far, the cost of gas on Ethereum is an inhibiting factor or at least until such time as faster implementations and lower fees are onboarded. Due to these high gas fees and slow confirmation times, Ethereum only works well for high priced, very limited edition NFTs. Mass market NFT adoption is impossible on Ethereum for this reason. You may be able to sell 1 NFT for $1 million on Ethereum, but you could never sell 1 million NFTs for $1 each On the flip side, there is huge adoption here and a huge community both of NFT producers and whales active on that site.

WAX, an EOS blockchain, bills itself as the King of NFTs and certainly the low carbon footprint and no fees makes it more attractive. The WAX Atomic Market has more users now than all marketplaces on Ethereum combined (source – DappRadar) and four out of the top ten blockchain based games in the world are built on WAX.

Flow (NBA Topshot): Flow is not yet a decentralized blockchain, meaning you don’t really control your NFT. Flow stores the NFT media files on its own servers (again meaning you don’t really own your NFT). It is a closed ecosystem, and there are serious concerns around people being able to withdraw their funds or their items. Only approx. 6% of the Flow users are verified to withdraw their funds, and this low percentage may be indicative of a botting issue on Flow.

Another newcomer is OG Syscoin LUX.  A fork from Bitcoin and around since 2014, Syscoin recently introduced its NFT platform like no other. NFTs generated on the Syscoin network are scalable, low-cost, divisible and non-divisible. Because Syscoin is merge-mined with Bitcoin, creating and using NFTs on the Syscoin platform does not introduce any additional carbon footprint.

So who to pick? Actually, why not try them all, or rather try the ones with no fees like WAX and Syscoin LUX so there is no downside.