Spawn Creator Todd McFarlane and DJ Steve Aoki Launch ‘Oddkey’ NFT Platform

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Todd McFar­lane has nev­er been afraid to roll the dice and try some­thing new. He’s also a stri­dent believ­er in help­ing comics cre­ators main­tain own­er­ship of their cre­ations, which is why he’s step­ping into the boom­ing NFT are­na and part­ner­ing with music super­star DJ Steve Aoki to launch a dig­i­tal art mar­ket­place called Oddkey.com. The NFT plat­form, which is pow­ered by Meta­plex, will allow artists from comics, sci­ence fic­tion and music to sell and auc­tion their dig­i­tal cre­ations on the Solana blockchain.

“It’s an impor­tant com­po­nent for me,” says McFar­lane, not­ing his desire to pro­vide a sort-of safe space for cre­ators in the brave new world of dig­i­tal art. The desire for con­trol and to ensure he reaped the biggest rewards from his own cre­ativ­i­ty has helped define his career. It’s what led him to ditch Mar­vel, help spear­head Image Comics and launch his sig­na­ture cre­ation, Spawn. Less than a year away from the company’s 30th anniver­sary, McFar­lane says the par­al­lels between this NFT ven­ture and the cre­ator-owned comics imprint are impos­si­ble to miss.

The Oddkey marketplace logo.

The Odd­key mar­ket­place logo.

Aoki, a self-described tech­no-opti­mist who fre­quent­ly infus­es his music with tech sen­si­bil­i­ties, embraced NFTs ear­ly on. When the idea to cre­ate a mar­ket­place for dig­i­tal art, he reached out to McFarlane.

“We’ve been friends for a long time and we’ve talked about col­lab­o­rat­ing,” Aoki says. “I always want­ed to cre­ate some­thing big­ger that rep­re­sents cre­ators. And I thought, who gets this bet­ter than some­one who has built a busi­ness and an empire that’s sup­port­ed oth­er cre­ators and done it for decades? And that’s Todd.”

McFar­lane and Aoki say their NFT mar­ket­place will mir­ror the arrange­ment that estab­lished Image Comics as a cre­ator-owned pow­er­house. “It’s gen­er­al­ly the Image mod­el where we offer cre­ators the same deal to go off on their own, do what they want and keep what they make. They main­tain com­plete con­trol of their work and keep most of the mon­ey,” accord­ing to McFarlane.

Adds Aoki: “We’ve been metic­u­lous­ly putting it togeth­er, mak­ing sure it’s a place where it makes sense for oth­er peo­ple, just like it makes sense for us as artists and creators.” 

Spawn’s Uni­verse: See the Future of Todd McFar­lane’s Super­hero Epic

NFTs have gained promi­nence in rapid time as artists real­ize the poten­tial for major finan­cial wind­falls. It’s not just comics, either. The CEO of EA believes the gam­ing indus­try will embrace NFTs in the very near future. 

Both men won’t just be run­ning the mar­ket­place. They will also be con­tribut­ing their own dig­i­tal cre­ations. Aoki plans to cre­ate exclu­sive NFTs fea­tur­ing his music, and he teas­es that he and his part­ner are going to col­lab­o­rate on “some inter­est­ing new ideas” for OddKey.

If you’re won­der­ing about the ori­gin sto­ry behind the name of the mar­ket­place, it was a com­pro­mise because the two cre­ative genius­es couldn’t fig­ure out a way to work both their names in to a title they agreed on. “So we chopped off the first let­ter in Todd and removed “Ao” from Steve’s name, and that’s how we wound up with Odd­Key, “ explains McFar­lane. “So we’re still get­ting sort of our names in there with­out it becom­ing too obvious.”

The dig­i­tal art mar­ket also pro­vides a rare oppor­tu­ni­ty for fans to actu­al­ly own some orig­i­nal McFar­lane art. The artist hasn’t sold any of his orig­i­nal art­work since he left Mar­vel in the ear­ly ’90s, mak­ing his clas­sic Spi­der-Man art some of the most valu­able pages in the orig­i­nal art mar­ket­place. Good luck find­ing any McFar­lane-drawn Spawn art, either. He’s held on to vir­tu­al­ly all of his Spawn pages, but he says he will be cre­at­ing new dig­i­tal art that fans can purchase. 

“I’m still hold­ing onto my orig­i­nal art­work. I can’t quite cross that line yet, but I can at least crack the door open and go, ‘Hey, for the first time you can own orig­i­nal Spawn art. It’s just going to be in dig­i­tal form here on OddKey.’”

The fact that both he and Aoki are cre­ators with estab­lished track records of oper­at­ing on their terms is some­thing McFar­lane views as a strong rea­son for artists to con­sid­er OddKey. 

“If you’re inter­est­ed in this [NFT] space and you’re look­ing around, you may want to check us out, cause you can go hang out with a bunch of cre­ative guys like us, who have lived the life you’re pur­su­ing, and basi­cal­ly done what you’ve done, and basi­cal­ly got all the scars of the war that you’ve gone through,” says McFar­lane. “The alter­na­tive is you can go to some ven­ture cap­i­tal com­pa­nies who will try to build it up before sell­ing, and skim off your hard work.”

In oth­er Spawn news, McFal­rane recent­ly expand­ed his long-run­ning series into a full-blown “Spawn Uni­verse.” There’s also been new progress on the long-ges­tat­ing Spawn movie reboot, with Bro­ken City’s Bri­an Tuck­er com­ing aboard to pen a new screen­play.

Mean­while, a num­ber of Image Comics cre­ators have band­ed togeth­er to form a union called Com­ic Book Work­ers Unit­ed, though the pub­lish­er has refused to vol­un­tar­i­ly rec­og­nize the union.

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