FoxTrot creator Bill Amend revealed his take on NFTs in a Twitter napkin sketch which mashed up Planet of the Apes with cutting social commentary.
"A dump napkin cartoon any ape can right-click and copy," Amend wrote as the caption for his cartoon, which is entitled "NFTs in the Future" and shows an ape asking an exasperated Doctor Zaius -- the chief antagonist from the first two Planet of the Apes movies -- about the source of his frustration. Zaius, raging at his computer, exclaims: "All my humans gone!"
The orangutan Doctor Zaius, who was played by actor Maurice Evans and appeared in 1968's Planet of the Apes as well as the 1970 sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, was one of the few apes in the film's world who knew that humans had once been the dominant force on Earth. Adamant on keeping the remnants of humanity from replicating the acts of war that had nearly destroyed the planet, Zaius remained convinced that humans were evil and needed to be corralled, calling man a "warlike creature who gives battle to everything around him, even himself."
Amend's Planet of the Apes cartoon ironically comes only three months after Evil Ape, creator of the Evolved Apes NFT series, mysteriously went online and disappeared with the series' estimated $2.7 million dollars in investor funds. The drawing itself references Todd Kramer, who was hacked in late Dec. 2021
and lost all of his ape-themed NFTs. Kramer's tweet, which read "I been hacked. all my apes gone.," quickly went viral, with Twitter users mocking NFT culture.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are blockchain-based certificates of ownership that can be used for digital assets such as images and videos. A legion of dedicated collectors with big money to spend has come out in support of NFTs in recent months, but the tokens have garnered criticism from many who argue they are a pyramid scheme, particularly when digital art can easily be shared online by right-clicking and saving images. The electricity usage and resulting environmental toll that goes into creating NFTs has also been a major subject of controversy.
Despite this, many comic book companies have taken the plunge into the NFT world. DC, for instance, worked with Palm NFT Studio to release allegedly environmentally sustainable NFTs during the company's FanDome event last October, while Marvel has partnered with VeVe Digital Collectibles App for a line of official NFTs featuring iconic heroes like Spider-Man. Even the Twitter account of the late Stan Lee promoted an NFT based on the superhero Chakra The Invincible in December, prompting a wave of outrage from fans who saw the marketing decision as tasteless.
Source: Twitter