Stan Lee NFTs Capture the Creator’s Essence in Classic Comic Covers
Read the full article by Andrew Hayward here
Artist Rob Prior collaborated on the portraits with Lee before the legendary Marvel creator’s death. Now they’re Ethereum NFTs.
KEY POINTS
A new NFT collection features paintings of Stan Lee done in collaboration with the late Marvel Comics creator before his death.
Buyers will receive both the NFT version and artist Rob Prior’s original physical painting.
The late Stan Lee is arguably the most iconic comic book creator of all time, and he had an outsized personality to match his bold superhero inventions—including Spider-Man, Iron Man, and the X-Men. A new NFT drop, called The Legacy Collection: Portraits of Stan Lee, includes paintings that capture the essence of the Marvel icon alongside some of his top concoctions.
Lee, who passed in 2018, didn’t live long enough to see the rise of NFTs, which act like a deed of ownership for digital items, including artwork. However, Lee was intimately involved in the creation of many of artist Rob Prior’s original paintings.
When a mutual friend suggested the idea of the pop-culture artist painting the Marvel legend into a variety of classic comic book covers, Prior said that Lee was immediately sold—and that the elder Stan had a convincing way of getting what he wanted.
“It kind of became history. Whether I wanted to do it or not, I was going to do it,” Prior told Decrypt of his first interactions with Lee. “Whenever Stan wanted you to do something, the words out of his mouth would be like, ‘I’m 95, Robbie!’”
Lee suggested many of the classic comic book covers that he wanted to be painted. Currently, the collection includes 65 paintings, but another 30 are planned.
“I just want to be able to give people around the world a chance to see the stuff that [Stan] really liked,” Prior explained. “And face it, he just loved cameos. So what better way to honor Stan than to have him cameo in all of his favorite books and favorite things, and all the things that we grew up with or are growing up with?”
More broadly, Prior sees NFTs and provably scarce digital artwork as revolutionary, and believes that they will further shake up the traditional art world.