Update: A previous version of this article erroneously referred to Chakra the Invincible as Marvel's first Indian superhero. Chakra is owned by POW Entertainment!, a Stan Lee subsidiary. This article has been corrected to reflect this.
Stan Lee is tweeting from beyond the grave. The Marvel founder and beloved creator died back in 2018, but that apparently hasn’t stopped him from alerting his millions of Twitter followers about a brand new NFT drop coming at the end of the month in honor of his 98th birthday.
We'll circle back to the weirdness of a dead man tweeting, but first, let's take a look at this NFT business. The Chakraverse Collection No. 1 will be a series of 6,880 unique art NFTs that feature characters from the Chakra visual novel that have been iteratively generated by a computer. This basically means that there will be one regular Chakra, and then thousands of Chakra’s reimagined as various other superheroes or villains. There will also be several other characters from Chakra’s story and a bunch of Stan Lee-ified versions of Chakra too.
It's actually a bit depressing that Stan Lee's birthday is being celebrated with NFT's featuring generated characters from Chakra The Invincible, Stan Lee's first Indian superhero. After all, Chakra defends the city of Mumbai, and given how Mumbai is one of the most polluted cities on the planet, you'd think that Chakra wouldn't want his likeness associated with something that's definitely contributing to Mumbai’s poor air quality.
The Chakraverse Collection will go on sale starting on December 27 at 7:30 PM PT and run until December 29 at 12 PM PT. Each individual NFT will be sold blindly in a "loot box" so buyers don't know which NFT they'll get. Think of it like buying a pack of trading cards, only there's one card and it’s not really a card but a digital certificate confirming proof of ownership as defined by the blockchain.
Anyone can just download the images, but that certificate is what people will pay thousands of dollars for. Maybe. The price of each Loot Box hasn’t been announced so it's hard to tell what the secondary market value will be.
As for Stan Lee’s undead fingers still tweeting, that’s actually being handled by POW! Entertainment, a holding company that’s currently owned by Camsing International. So really, a corporation is tweeting for a dead man to shill NFTs. It doesn’t get more cyberpunk dystopia than that.