Stan Lee’s Legacy Lives on in Web3

Stan Lee is a comic book legend who made iconic characters like Spider-Man, the Hulk, Black Widow, and more into household names. Though he passed in November 2018, his legacy lives on through posthumous projects, including ones in the realm of Web3. Several of Lee’s former collaborators have linked up with the green NFT platform OneOf to onboard fans of Lee — and Marvel Comics as a whole — into the metaverse.

In our latest episode of Behind the Drop, we spoke with OneOf co-founder Lin Dai — along with Art Director Will Meugniot and Slam Girl Curator Shirrel Jones — on how their latest venture, Slam-Girl, can serve as an extension of Stan Lee’s legacy, and potentially shake up the comics industry in the process.

“Stan is the creator of the modern comic book business. Beyond his work as a writer and an editor, the other thing that he did for comics that shapes the business as it is today is he made comics a cult of personality,” Meugniot, who worked on both Pryde of the X-Men and the 1992 animated series, said in an interview with nft now.

When Slam-Girl was first conceived in the early 2000s, Meugniot recalls it being a dark time for comic books, with “no entry-level characters for new readers.” He teamed up with Lee to create Slam-Girl, a character “designed to be a parody of everything we believed was destroying the superhero industry,” Meugniot said. Unfortunately, the character lay forgotten in Marvel’s vast vaults of unexplored IP for decades. Until now.

So how does Slam-Girl — a near-forgotten IP — hope to shake up the comic book industry? It’s all in how she’s set to make her debut. “As media shifts, comics are not just going to be characters on pages anymore,” Dai said in an interview with nft now. The first drop from the Slam Girl collection comes with battle cards and animations introducing the characters. The unique aspect of this drop is that holders will be rewarded for participating and engaging with their NFT. They will have the opportunity to upgrade their NFT to higher rarity traits and receive 3D generative models of themselves as Slam Girl. In the future, the team is considering releasing merchandise, along with physical or phygital comic books as well.

“When we started doing comic books it was ink-on-paper. Now you see a little bit of digital comic books and what have you. But it seemed to me that NFT is the real entry into the metaverse and into today’s communication,” Jones said. “I think it’s opening up a whole new world for collectibles, […] storytelling, […] and visual presentations.”