Intergalactic greetings to you all!
Quite some time has passed without any news — sorry for that! The ETH-MEN team has journeyed far and wide to work and expand the Six Galaxies and is now back with some news!
As you already know, a few months ago the ETH-MEN IP went under a new galactic administration, as Lord Zieg passed the sceptre to the OG ETH-MEN artist, Littlesilver. He took some time to research on the blockchain space while working on the art and deciding which way would have been better for the future of Gataxia.
Let’s start with a look at what’s coming up for already existing holders, then we’ll dig into the new regular series.
For what concerns holders of any comic, figure, or avatar minted under the OG ETH-MEN contract(s), we are going to have a few free comics coming. The first of them, that is already finished, is a small parody story with Zoofie and Zieg that is gonna look quite different from the usual ETH-MEN stuff and we hope you will all enjoy- this is a one shot to take just as a comeback gift.
The next thing coming will be the Origins story of our favourite space cowboy, Godrick, and will be first in resuming the work and publication of the Origins series about the main characters of the ETH-MEN comics.
For avatar holders in particular, since we didn’t receive any request for exclusives in some time, the upcoming Origins comic drops will get a dedicated variant cover in addition to the main edition.
We plan to mint and airdrop these new comics on Polygon, in order to keep everything 100% free for existing holders and to include people that for one reason or another are not following the project anymore but have been supporters from the start.
For what concerns the original ETH-MEN 3D action figures, Zieg is still working with our long-time 3D artist, Emilio, to finish them. We have recently uploaded all the 3Ds of the Wiener series, with the Pransky series coming next.
For the new regular series we have some unexpected news: ETH-MEN is going cross-chain, and the next series of ETH-MEN will be… on TEZOS.
In fact, it’s not even called ETH-MEN as that would not make much sense, but TEZ-MEN. We feel this decision needs a bit of background to explain why, as we assume most of you are not up to date with other chains and not particularly in love with the idea of making a new wallet and learn how everything works, but a foreword first: the TEZ universe and the ETH universe will work as parallel dimension, so each cycle is readable as a stand alone. They both push the gataxia story further and checking the difference between each character version is probably one of the funniest parts, but anyone that feels more comfortable on a single chain (whether it be Eth or Tez) won’t be missing the main storyline as they will eventually converge to the same point in space and time.
One of the main reasons for this decision about the regular was to switch from the previous pricing/supply model and to finda way to make the burn mechanic almost free and more versatile. The higher edition count at a consistently lower price will keep the entry bar affordable for everyone that just wants a few minutes of casual reading, while for more hardcore collectors we have gamified the burn mechanic to access the rarest items. The pricing will be fairly close to an IRL comic book of the same kind/size, so people can just spend a few dollars and have fun reading it without having to worry about recouping the investment. We want folks to have a genuine comic book experience while embracing the use of blockchain and NFTs and we want to make comics with the only purpose of making comics, having fun in the meantime, providing some cheap and good entertainment and most importantly pushing the media forward given the new possibilities opened by digital support.
However, this still doesn’t explain why Tezos rather than Polygon or another chain. To explain that, we have to mention that Littlesilver has been active as avcollector and artist on Tezos for more than a year and, knowing that space from both the collector and the artist perspective, thinks that the community has some characteristics that makes it perfectly fit for what he is trying to achieve: it’s very active, very art-focused, used to relatively high edition counts and very open minded about different media. The market there right now is consistently closer in spirit to what ETH used to be when ETH-MEN first came out and with definitely more space for an art-focused indie project like ours. Mint and gas costs gave us the opportunity to push the limits of the burn function, since every TXN of that kind would cost (as of Q3, 2022) around 0.1–0.15 $ including the minting of the new token. Starting from the “basic” sealed comic token you will have to burn to collect other items and influence the final supply of everything by doing so.
And of course we will also have the figures, with two new 3D artists joining the team. You can see some examples of their efforts here.
The contract is in the last stage of the making, has been deployed and tested on testnet and has been done by landlines which is not only an extremely skilled dev but a stellar generative artist (and I would strongly suggest checking out his work).
Above you can see TEZ-MEN comic samples from both issue 1, written by Littlesilver with most of the art from Daniele Caviglia and issue 2, from which Littlesilver will take lead as both artist and writer.
Hope you liked the news! To add one last note :
ETH-MEN is (as far as we looked but we looked fairly hard) the first comic series in NFT form and we firmly believe that there is a great historic value in that, and we want to keep the series going strong for a long time still. I know many of you would not exactly love exploring other chain options but the main thing about comics is to have people read them and enjoy the story, leaving them wanting to read more about that world- and to do that in this market with something as niche as NFT comics the high supply/low price road seemed the most promising to us. Anyone with doubts, questions, suggestions or else is always free to reach out in the discord or directly to Littlesilver.
Long live Lord Zieg!
