30 years, Rob Liefeld and a bunch of other comic book artists split from the two big corporate superhero publishers and launched a new company called Image, with the idea of letting creators keep the rights and profits from their creations instead of handing that IP over to someone else. Aside from being a revolutionary move for creators' rights, this also helped to fuel the comic book speculator market, where foil-embossed variant covers began to take priority over things like actual storytelling. Though the hype was huge for brand new books like Liefeld's Bloodstrike (aka "Definitely Not My Repurposed X-Men Drawings"), many of those early Image books struggled with publishing content on a consistent schedule, because it's easier to profit on hype than actually, ya know, make stuff.
Image has obviously done great things in the intervening years. But I can think of no better way to celebrate the anniversary of that strange era of speculator hype than with Rob Liefeld launching a new Bloodstrike prequel comic as an NFT.
From a press release I received that referred to Rob "I Fucking Love Pouches and Can't Draw Feet" Liefeld as "simply one of the GOATs" —
Liefeld is dropping a brand new, 29-page prequel comic to Bloodstrike #1 — with all new illustrations, and nine unique covers — which will be auctioned in the form of NFTs on MakersPlace. Each buyer will receive the comic in PDF form. Here's one of the coolest parts – the first 200 buyers of all nine covers will get an extremely limited edition, physical copy of the comic signed personally by Liefeld.
I recognize that Bloodstrike sold a million copies 30 years ago, so I suppose it's possible that 9 out of those million people might care enough about it to buy an NFT cover. If those people do in fact exist, I wish them happiness, and I hope those foil-embossed variant covers they're still holding onto are finally worth the millions of dollars they were promised some day.
