While still in its infancy, web3 has certainly been marred by scandal, volatility and a general uncertainty around government regulations. Yet what has been hallmarked by ups and downs has also been blessed with consistency in community, particularly around the arts and entertainment.

For companies like Macroverse—the multi-format entertainment studio that rewards its community, collectors, creators and collaborators for supporting franchises across comics, movies, television, gaming, and animation—the bet is that incentives for community members will help power the next generation of content consumption and fan experiences.

Eben Matthews, co-founder and chief executive officer of Macroverse, is a lifelong comics fan who helped create the graphic novel for the movie The Boondock Saints. Through working with Sony on the project, Matthews learned a 360 degree approach to comics—everything from publishing to getting into storefronts like Barnes & Noble to the ins and outs of comic conventions like Comic-Con. Now, through Macroverse, Matthews and his team aim to revolutionize the comic book industry with their digital technology in the hope of building community around comic book collecting in both the digital and physical realms.

“The Macroverse core community is closing in on 2,000 members and we launched on Drip Haus the other day,” Matthews said to me during a recent interview. “Within one week of being on the platform, we got over 70,000 subs, and it was pretty cool to see that traction.”

Recently, the company partnered with Titan Comics and is launching a project with DMC of the superstar hip-hop group, Run-DMC Macroverse has a slew of other partnership announcements coming later this year, which is quite a long way for a company that had to pivot from its initial trajectory due to Covid.

“Four years ago, me and my two co-founders launched a traditional web2 mobile app, brought about 100 creators onto the platform and pushed over 1,000 episodes of content,” Matthews said. “Just as we were scaling, we found ourselves in the early days of the pandemic, and we were in those early Clubhouse rooms where people were talking about nonfungible tokens (NFTs). Beeple was having his $69 million sale with Christie’s, Bored Apes were minting, and the lightbulb for us was digital comics and collectibility—the ability to own something that’s been highly collectible in the physical space—and now being able to own it in the digital space.”

After minting a digital comic book—in what Macroverse calls EPICS—collectors are able to enjoy an interactive story experience all within the confines of the NFT itself by utilizing Macroverse’s TapStory technology.

“TapStory adapts to whatever screen size you’re on and it’s a much more cinematic experience while also being true to the artform itself,” Matthews said. “We figured if NFTs were going to be digital collectible versions of your favorite graphic novels, they need to be the full thing that you're collecting, not just a pointer to something that gets unlocked. That’s the real innovation with what we’ve built on the web3 side—being able to push all the content that’s inside a graphic novel into this interactive NFT experience so that when you collect it, you’re actually collecting all of the content within it as well.”

It’s unlike other companies and products whose NFTs might only be the image of a comic book cover, which then may or may not point to an external PDF file.

“If it’s just the comic book cover, yes, you can trade that on secondary markets, but you don’t actually have the story,” Matthews said. “In our case, all of the actual content is within the NFT itself, so you’re able to have this digital representation of the story, the art and the entire experience.”

Although the company’s web3 venture only started minting at the end of 2023, Matthews said the response from fans and creators has been fantastic.

“They’re super receptive,” he said. “We’re still very early on the web3 roll out, but from the web2 experience we’ve had with creators—they get our way is a better way to deliver this content. We’ve been able to bring on a lot of existing comics creators, publishers, and the ‘traditional’ side of comics that are heading in this digital direction.”

Macroverse is both bringing traditional material from physical companies like Titan into the digital realm, and is also taking some of its internally incubated digital material—or material that’s been worked on with other creators—to build out into the physical realm. 

“It makes us the only web3-centric company in the comics world that can now bring that full-cycle from digital to physical to print to bookstores and comic book stores internationally,” Matthews said.

Part of Macroverse’s full-cycle process includes the development of one-of-one of X-editions of anything that can be printed, which are unique one-of-one NFTs that correspond to unique one-of-one physical copies.

“Imagine going to the comic store, there’s 10 copies of your favorite Blade Runner series, each of them having a unique variant cover,” Matthews said. “That means, if you're like me, you’re probably leaving the store with more than one of those, and what’s really cool is we can now connect that to an NFT, and the NFTs are then redeemable for the physical one-of-one editions.”

So if you’re the NFT holder, you can get your physical copy by exchanging the NFT for the physical. Conceivably, someone could hoard all of the digital copies to then be their own container for the supplying of comics.

“The Mixprint piece of it—which is that digital/physical connection—will launch through MixPass, an initial membership to the first handful of Mixprint drops through Magic Eden,” Matthews said. “There will be 2,222 holders comprising our core collector community who will get first access to all Mixprint drops and our first three drops with Titan Comics.”

But once the NFT is burned for a physical copy, that’s it.

“It’s a whole new product category, this one-of-one of X in the printed world, which as far as we know, has not been possible before,” Matthews said. “It’s an insane combination of art direction, technology, and this very bespoke printing process we’ve developed for comics and graphic novels, but we’re also talking about limited edition vinyl records, toy packaging—anything that can be printed that falls into the collectible category.”

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Currently, however, the system only works in one direction. At this time, fans can only collect the digital one-of-one and burn that to receive a physical copy, not the other way around.

“There will be a path to that but we’re starting first with the digital that you redeem for the physical for the first handful of drops,” Matthews said. “Once people are coming from the digital side and redeeming for the physical copies, then I think there will start to be a market for these one-of-one physical copies. For people who natively collect physical copies, the question will be, ‘How do I get the next one?’, and they’ll need to come to the digital side—at least initially—in order to do so. It’s sneaky web3 onboarding for people who are into these kinds of collectibles and the idea is to be able to collect in different systems and on different chains.”

For Macroverse, part of the multi-chain experience will be for holders of digital characters to pitch their story ideas to Macroverse and start producing content around that, which will then go out through the Macroverse platform with revenue shared with the original creators.

“We look at PFPs as characters in these larger worlds and if you own a character in a world, there’s no reason why that character couldn’t be the next Mandalorian in the context of a larger franchise,” Matthews said. “We’ve put a lot of production in place around how that actually works and are just starting the first batch of those through our own collections.”

In this way, Macroverse functions as both a premium content distribution studio through its original and partner content, and as a user generated content (UGC) opportunity for people to come in and build around and on top of that existing intellectual property (IP). If a particular UGC is performing well, Macroverse and elevate it from the content pool as a new IP.

“One of the projects that has come under the Macroverse umbrella is an NFT project called The Vogu, which are these incredibly illustrative robot characters,” Matthews said. “The project was very hot during the bull market and was a very successful mint—but was one of many projects where it was like—’What do we do now?’ We saw an incredible IP and franchise potential with the characters and an incredible community, so we brought it all under the Macroverse. Now if you own a Vogu, you can pitch us a short story on who that character is in this universe.”

The first batch of eight were recently greenlit, with the goal of building out the characters into the digital universe and perhaps even as physical product on store shelves.

“What’s cool about this ecosystem is that it’s allowed us to think about things from both sides,” Matthews said. “As we’re working with Titan Comics, we’re bringing their IP into this digital format and are helping build new experiences around that recognizable IP, like Blade Runner. As we incubate new IP—either from new collections or specific creators we’re working with—it’s a different side of the starting line, but one from which we can also go out through those other partner channels.” 

lead image: Eben Matthews