The Web3 Future of Comic-Cons with Josh Blaylock of Comic Boxels

We talk conventions, artists and the Web3 future of the comic industry.

Aug 9, 2022

On this episode of The Hyper Room, @Hypercasey talks to Comic Boxels co-founder and Devil's Due Comics founder Josh Blaylock about:

- The Web3 future of Comic-Cons

- Josh's SDCC and C2E2 experiences

- How to onboard artists into Web3

- How he is reinventing comic book publishing with NFTs with Comic Boxels.

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Continue the discussion in THE HYPER ROOM:

Podcast Excerpts

Casey Hyper: You work with artists like Agnes Garbowska and Jimmy Palmiotti. How do you talk to them about Web3 and getting involved? What are some of the things that you think convince artists to get involved or, start to sway them to look a little bit more into it?

Josh Blaylock: I'm more about creating the party and seeing who wants to come to it. But it's all been very organic. Agnes, I saw her comment on a reply to an artist famous in the Bitcoin space back in the day. And, and I was like, oh, you follow her. So I DM’ed Agnes and found out she was all about NFTs and trying to learn everything she could. So she was there from the beginning of the project.

My partner and co-founder on the tech side, he found me on Clubhouse when we were all at Clubhouse till two in the morning after our regular day jobs back a year and a half ago. Jimmy though, I just saw him being one of the people who were curious about it and saw that they had started to work with some people.

So I just went to the people who were interested and then there were some others who I know are secretly interested who are terrified to tell their fan bases. I'm very close to being able to share this new, very simple but different platform, you know, to read the comics and mint.

Comic Boxels is not interrupting the reading process. We're not creating friction that makes it harder for people. It's very simple. Like it, read it. No one's forcing you to buy the NFT. But if you want to, here it is.

I think a lot of the artists will finally be able to make the jump. Shockingly, a lot of artists currently don't realize that their stuff is already being sold by Marvel and DC anyway, or that there's hardly any publisher that you can work for, that's not selling NFTs and they're turning down jobs from other companies because they’re like “I can't be involved in an NFT thing.”

It's like, yeah, but you already are.