When our team first released this whitepaper, we had gathered a tremendous number of insights from comic production talents from around the world. Many where from diverse backgrounds, socio-economic situations and skill levels. From working individually, to working on small teams to larger indie publishers. We talked to them all. Insights into the creator space was just one of the few areas we did our research on. At the same time, we were learning more in depth about blockchains and the companies, software programs, and tools that power this mysterious environment. At no time did we sit in one place to long. Our research and discovery took us to many locations both online and off.

This whitepaper represents the culmination of our early understanding of how some of these technologies and ideas from distributed ledger technology could positively impact independent comic creators. In it we talk about what blockchains and smart contracts are and what they’re not. We talk about the difficulties indie creators assume once they decide to produce and compete in the traditional comic industry. This is not just a first world problem, but one that challenges smaller businesses and independent producers worldwide.

The main model we put forward in our work was meant to act as a visual guide to show how digital representations of comic book art (and the comics themselves) can be registered and transacted. We explain that through careful consideration, design, and development, an application to meet the needs of indie comic publishers can be engineered. We took our own advice that day. We were convinced through our industry insights and understanding of blockchain technologies we could build a solution from our own model. Several months later our developers got to work and that solution became HeroLedger. Two years later we finalized our MVP version of the application and did a soft launch.

For those of you curious and brave enough to read a big document, we recommend you give it a shot. Start in the sections most interesting to you, oh! and make sure to check out that diagram mentioned above. It’s our version of Doc Brown’s “Flux Capacitor” from the film Back to the Future.