NFTs: Will DC Steal Ownership of Comic Book Original Art?

I didn’t want to write (or even think) about NFTs, but then this DC memo leaked and I had thoughts.

DC Comics wants to assert ownership of digital original comic book art. This could cut off DC artists from much-needed income in the future.

Let me set this up for you before I try to explain how NFTs could revolutionize comic book art sales and how DC might be trying to destroy the original art market all at the same time.

A Brief History of Digital Comic Book Art

The following is a sweeping generalization. Yes, I know there are exceptions. There are always exceptions. For the point of this discussion, just roll with me here:

Paper: Up until twenty years ago, all comic book original art was drawn on paper. Usually, it was a piece of Bristol board paper at roughly 11 x 17 inches in size. Pencils were drawn first, and then an inker came over top to finish it off. The coloring was always done on a copy of the paper, pre-computer. Lettering was done on the boards between pencils and inks. Again, pre-computer.

In the end, you have a big piece of paper filled with original art and lettering on it. As time went by, they became collectibles.

Hybrid: About twenty years ago, a new process came up for some art teams: The pencil artist would draw their page, scan it in, and send that file to the inker. The inker would print out the pencils on a new sheet of paper, and finish the art with inks.

On the bright side, this meant there was twice as much original art, and the inker and penciler both had a complete issue to sell. The trickier part was figuring out what the market would bear in such a case. The pencils were the original original art and worth more, but the inker’s work is the final artwork and more representative of what you saw in the comic.

In any case, there was physical art to sell for the artists and all was good.

Digital: Finally, fully digital art became a possibility. The rise of Wacom tablets, Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, Cintiqs, and all the digital tools associated with those led to fully digital comics production pipeline. No paper necessary. The “pencil artist” can now draw on their screen and export a final high resolution copy of that file. The inker can download the file, draw on top of that digital file with their stylus on their screen, and upload the file back. Colorists and letterers could do their parts at basically the same time with separate copies of the final art file.

Someone — often letterers, sometimes a dedicated production team at the publisher — eventually merges all the files together and give you the final page, ready for printing.

However, there’s no physical product as a side effect of this system.

The Pros of Digital Comic Book Art

It can be faster for the artist.

CTRL-Z is an easier tool than a kneaded eraser.

The digital tools also make things a lot easier. You can draw right on top of photo reference. Art program have tools to automate drawing out perspective grids. 3D models can be included, shifted around, and drawn onto the page. Make a proportion error with your anatomy? No problem, just lasso that part and resize it. No redrawing necessary!

You could even draw all the parts separately and then drag and drop them onto the page, resizing as you go.

You can also draw at any size you want. If your eyes are shot from 20 years of being hunched over an art board, you can draw at 5x the actual art size and put all the detail in you want as the art fills up your screen.

No longer can one bad panel ruin an entire page. It’s super easy to draw over it, fix it, replace it, whatever you need to do.

The Cons of Digital Comic Book Art

There’s something to be said about the potential to become a perfectionist. When you can so easily draw every line 100 times until you get the absolute perfect one, you might trap yourself and take longer to draw a page than in the analog days.

The bigger and more relevant problem, though, is that there’s no original art to sell. That’s huge in the world of comics, where there’s not much money.

Original art collectors in the modern era are insane beasts willing to throw lots of commas to acquire this rarity — one-off comic art that’s seen print and is beloved by, er, thousands. Maybe tens of thousands.

The money is so big that it’s an international sport. Investment funds spring up around it. Dealers and agents handle the sales of artwork for clients who don’t want to deal with the headaches of selling and shipping.

Original art is not just a hobby, but also an investment. It’s an investment whose returns have been soaring skyward for the last twenty straight years.

I used to collect some small examples of original art, but by 2005, all the affordable stuff was disappearing.

All of that is great for the artists who can afford to make a living drawing comics because their original art sales will put them over the top. The page rates they get from Marvel/DC aren’t making anyone rich, but if you add in the price of the original art, suddenly you have a career.

It’s a big part of the reason why some artists will do their pencils on the computer, but then print those out to a board to ink over with traditional tools. That creates the original art to sell while still keeping many of the advantages of using digital tools.

Some artists have tried making an exclusive 1-of-1 print of their digital art. If it’s the only print they ever make in that format, it has the same rarity as a piece of original art and —

— yeah, I don’t think that idea ever took off. Nice try, but it’s just not the same.

How NFTs Help Digital Artists

I’m not going to attempt to explain NFT here. Just Google it. Or listen to Planet Money’s NFT podcast.

Suffice it to say that NFTs make it possible to better trace the line of ownership of a piece of original art, as well as possibly providing a singular way to sell digital art in a way everyone can accept.

A few years back, Neal Adams floated the idea that comic artists should get a cut of every sale of their original art even after their original sale. He did it with one of his covers — offering his blessing on the sale for a cut of the final sale price.

That’s an easy thing to do with such an iconic cover, but what about all the rest of the art floating around? How would people keep track of those sales, particularly in private deals?

NFTs would seem to provide that chain of ownership and history of purchase and, effectively, a contract to pay the originator in all future deals, to make such a thing possible. (That contract can be part of the NFT. Money automatically gets sent to the artist after every resale.)

NFTs could also be the way to sell digital original comic book art. If the market wanted it, this might finally be the way for digital artists to sell their “original art,” at last. There’s no physical page, per se, but NFTs were created to sell a unique piece of digital art, which is what a comic book original art page is.

This isn’t just me hand waving: It’s already starting.

Remember: A comic book artist doesn’t retain the right to reproduce their original art, but they do keep the right to sell that piece of art that they created.

In the digital world, this has always been a bit murky. What is “original art” when it’s all bits and bytes that are so easily and without degradation able to be reproduced over and over and over again?

In comes NFTs. Here is the chance for a digital artist to sell their digital original art. The NFT makes it possible. Associate the art to the NFT and Bob’s your uncle.

This works if, over time, collectors and the market in general agree to those terms. If people find those NFTs to be something worth owning, then a whole new market springs up to replace the old one that those artists had to jump out of.

If we’ve learned nothing else in life, it’s that people will collect anything imaginable. Is it really so far out there to think about NFTs s a collectible thing?

The NFT Craze of 2021

But we’re not that there yet.

It’s the Wild West out there, and all the usual Get Rich Quick folks on the internet have sprung into action. They’re turning anything and everything into NFTs. I’m not talking about Jack Dorsey selling his first tweet here. I’m talking about charlatans using automated systems to steal art from people on social networks to sell on their own without any attribution or financial remuneration to the original artist.

Also, people and companies are testing the waters with what it possible. As with every new technology, the first uses of it are often the dumbest and craziest. We’re in the experimentation phase, and so silly things like digital cat drawings are selling for insane prices.

Eventually, if NFT is to have the bright future that so many think it will have — hello, Gary Vee — this insanity will need to pass and more realistic uses and expectations will need to become the norm. That’s going to take some time.

OK, nothing new there.

DC Sends a Memo

Yesterday, BleedingCool.com published a leaked memo sent to DC artists this week.

Let’s parse it line by line, because there’s some very standard legal stuff in here, some understandable reminders of ownership, and one GIANT RED FLAG that should scare any artists currently working for DC.

Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are becoming the newest fan collectibles and have generated significant press and buzz in the digital space.

True that. Good, so far.

DC is exploring opportunities to enter the market for the distribution and sale of original DC digital art with NFTs including both new art created specifically for the NFT market,

This makes sense. DC owns their characters. Well, technically, AT&T does, but let’s not get stuck in that mess.

DC has the rights to control the likeness and distribution of its properties. If an artist sold an original piece of Wonder Woman art created for the NFT market for hundreds of thousands of dollars with no license from DC, that might wake up the lawyers. (Good morning!)

Right now, DC wants to stop any further craziness right now by reminding its freelancers that just because they draw a monthly comic for them, that doesn’t mean they can draw and sell anything they like with those characters.

DC could institute a new program where they effectively commission original art of their characters from their stable of creators and offer it as an NFT. They can pay the creator a flat fee or a percentage; I’m sure that’s the kind of thing they’re trying to figure out right now. (And if they can do it without paying the artist much of anything, they’ll run with it!)

They’ve already announced digital Batman statue NFTs, which — well, I try to reserve judgment on new technologies, but that sounds pretty dumb to me.

Time to Drop a Potential Bombshell

But, wait, I left off the last part of that paragraph from DC’s memo. And this is where you should start getting nervous. Let me bring back the last sentence and finish it off in bold type:

DC is exploring opportunities to enter the market for the distribution and sale of original DC digital art with NFTs including both new art created specifically for the NFT market, as well as original digital art rendered for DC’s comic book publications.

In other words, every page of art produced for a DC comic that is done in Clip Studio Paint on a Cintiq is now locked down by DC. If an artist saw the NFT market as a way of getting back original art sales money so they could pay their mortgage the same way traditional pen-and-ink artists do, DC’s lawyers have issued their response:

Now, let’s not get too hasty here. Perhaps this is a first draft from a lawyer still learning the market. They want to use broader terminology to cover all their bets now while they work out the details.

Maybe the lawyers don’t realize how the comic book world has worked for the last forty years. Or maybe they just don’t care?

As DC examines the complexities of the NFT marketplace, and we work on a reasonable and fair solution for all parties involved, including fans and collectors…

Does anyone here truly believe DC will be looking out for its artists in this examination? Seriously? They’ll look to pay them as little as possible to puff up the profit margins in a desperate effort to prove to AT&T that they’re profitable enough to not be shut down entirely. At that point, AT&T would just take over the NFTs as part of their Branding or Licensing division.

I’m in a particularly cynical mood today….

….please note that the offering for sale of any digital images featuring DC’s intellectual property with or without NFTs, whether rendered for DC’s publications or rendered outside the scope of one’s contractual engagement with DC, is not permitted.

Fair enough, though that “rendered for DC’s publication” thing could again include the original art for their comic books.

If you are approached by anyone interested in including any of your DC art in an NFT program, please let Lawrence Ganem, DC’s VP, Talent Services know.

Like I said before, the usual gang of Get Rich Quick internet charlatans are out there, trying to jump on the latest bandwagon. I doubt many of them will bother with actually talking to artists, but some will likely do it to look legit, while ignoring the elephant in the room that is DC Comics. For that purpose, this memo is a good idea.

We expect the participation of DC’s freelance talent will be an integral component of the NFT program that DC puts into place.

Sounds like:

“We expect you to bend over while we kick you on the backside and laugh at you. We hope to take out the dead wood artists next, but that’ll just be a happy side effect of this ‘exploration.'”

We’ll share further information as it becomes available, and we appreciate your cooperation and partnership.

Is that a promise or a threat?

Maybe, Maybe, Maybe

I love it when a company discusses a “partnership” with their creative folks. I’m sure Alan Moore appreciates DC’s partnership.

Look, I don’t want to create alarm here, but the power being asserting — in advance — by this memo are effectively overriding the rights DC artists have explicitly had and relied on for decades.

NFTs might have been a game changer for digital artists, and the solution to the one penalty they pay for the convenience of doing their work digitally. But DC is jumping out first to assert that it isn’t so.

Maybe the lawyers are just being overly broad.

Maybe this is not what they intend.

Maybe they just want to stamp out people doing digital con-like sketch commissions from home and putting them on a blockchain. (Boy, there’s another thorny legal issue that’s surprisingly still gone un-touched: sketch commissions at conventions.)

Maybe, maybe, maybe. I can only read what’s there in the memo and hope that there’s a clarification in the future. Right now, it looks like DC is taking a pre-emptive step to strip creators of a right they had in the pre-digital days.

Maybe NFT fizzles out for the fad some assume it is, and all this is for naught.

But if it’s something with staying power and acceptance, this memo is the first alarm that artists might want to respond to before it’s too late.