Marvel artist explains how to enter the NFT space | Interview with Mike Thompson

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us today. It's Rachel Wolfson here with Cointelegraph. Today I'm doing a very special interview with Mike Thompson. Mike is a two time Clio award winning artist and illustrator who has made quite a name for himself in the art world. Mike has worked with some major brands including Nike, Marvel, Coke and other well known brands that I'm sure all of you have heard of. So it's just a pleasure to welcome Mike here today. Hey Mike, how's it going?

Hey Rachel, how are you?

I'm doing well, thank you. Thanks so much for being here. It's such a pleasure and honor to be speaking with you. You're a very talented artist. If you could just go into your background a little bit to tell the audience a little bit about who you are, that would be great.

Absolutely. I'd love to. Thank you. First of all. So, yeah, I am a digital artist and sculptor. I've been working in the industry for over 20 years. Really over 25 years, if I'm being honest. Worked with a lot of different clients. I kind of started off in the T shirt industry. So on the textile side, I was designing T shirts for whatever hip hop songs were big in the summer. I won't tell you what year that was, but Summertime might have been a big song by Will Smith and Jazzy Jeff at the time. So dating myself. But yeah, so I did T shirts for a while. I started working with companies who were in the kind of the young men's clothing space and ended up with a company called Echo Unlimited, which was doing a lot of really nice kind of clothing and gear and stuff like that. And so it was great because Echo had this ad campaign and they got these rappers like Method man and DMX and all these guys to pose and they take photos of them wearing the gear and then I would paint the images of them right. For the ads and those came out in magazines like Double XL and Vibe and all that. And it was, it was fantastic because that allowed me to move on to start doing illustration for, you know, magazines and books and movie posters and things like that. So go forward a bunch of years. I've always been a big superhero fan. I don't know if you could tell, but I got into working with companies like DC and Marvel doing package design for toys and promotional stuff like that and eventually got into sculpting and I mean, I've been doing a lot of stuff. Doing a lot of stuff.

And how did you get involved in the crypto space?

So I met Fred and Christina almost two years ago. And the pitch was, hey, Mike, you're doing all this great artwork. We would love to create an NFT with you and sell it on there. At the time it was an online gallery called Pixeos. He's explaining to me what NFT is, and I was like, I don't know. I don't know. I was just like, yeah, this sounds weird. People are going to pay me for what they usually just steal as a jpeg. I don't know. So I kind of. I didn't do anything for a little while. And then the people sale kind of happened and I was like, oh, man, let me call Fred. So called him up and we got my original piece, which actually was in the LA Grammy Museum. I turned that into my first nft. It went up for a while and sat there until Flo announced my partnership with them and EPIX to do the icons collection. And then it sold. So I was like, oh, man. Hooked. So then we're working on, you know, Fred decided he was going to form Epics with Christina and, and their partner Mario. And so we, we kind of, you know, went full steam ahead. We're like, all right, for this collection, you can do whatever you want to do. And I decided I wanted to put my, my lifelong love of hip hop into this, this, this set.

And are there any other benefits that you want to elaborate on just having the collection? Virtual versus physical?

I love the idea of having collections of things with me at all times. You know, like, I'm a big comic book collector and I have these long boxes that are in a closet and they've been there forever. Everything's in plastic with boards and all that, you know, and video games are all like, in the, in the sleeves and just music walls of CDs and things like that. Right. But being able to have my entire audio collection on my phone at any given moment is compelling to me. Right. So, like, I think that that's the way we're moving with everything. And, you know, I'm all for physical things as well. Right. Like, so the statues that are behind me, I love the fact that I can look at them and grain, you know, get inspiration for working on other things from those. We actually have something that is in the works that's going to allow you to have the best of both worlds. So, you know, I don't want to talk about it too much, but you'll be able to combine physical with the unique NFT ID chips as well. And so that's pretty exciting.

So if a friend of yours or family member wanted to see it, you just hold out your phone and show them?

Exactly. I've got my whole comic book collection on my iPad now. It's crazy. What a world.

How has the transition been going from that into the NFT world? Was it an easy transition for you to take your physical artwork and kind of make that digital, or was it challenging?

So it's interesting because I started freelancing back in 2004, so I've been kind of working remotely for a big chunk of my life. And so if you had asked me about transitioning from physical into digital, as far as artwork, when I first did it, it was challenging just getting used to the whole space. But I've worked that way so long that the biggest challenge with NFTs was kind of wrapping my mind around the concept of them. And why Having something that you're allowing to someone, you're allowing someone to have ownership of something. So you're not only getting, you know, a print of my artwork, where there are a million prints, you're getting something that has a very kind of finite availability that you have ownership in. So it's, it's pretty exciting, you know, but it took me. That was probably the biggest part, is realizing what they are. I still can't pronounce the F part in the middle. Fungible. I think that's what it is, but I don't have to, so that's good.

Are you doing anything to educate the public, friends, family, you know, children on what NFTs are? I think a lot of the world, you know, they know, they know of NFTs, but they're still unfamiliar as to what they actually are. As an NFT artist, are you doing anything to educate the world on, you know, what NFTs are?

Absolutely. You'd be surprised. So since Flo started talking about my collection, everybody is coming to me, so I've had to kind of ramp up my own knowledge and tell people. So I'm. I'm actually an instructor at an online digital art school, right. This school called CG Spectrum. And I just had a kind of a panel discussion with the instructors and the teacher, like the students and everyone in there about NFTs and creating them. How difficult is it to do it yourself and sell them and things like that with family members every day, you know, since the pre sale of my collection, I have been, I've been telling people every day, you know, okay, go do this, do this. I've become like one of the technical support guys, you know that you call when you can't figure something out. So, yeah, I'm doing quite a bit of that.

Can you explain maybe the personal benefits for you creating NFTs, for instance? You know, like you said, it allows ownership, all of that, but any. Any personal benefits that you want to discuss?

So the biggest personal benefit for me is so I have two kids. I have a boy and a girl. And. And I. And I wanted to leave some type of a legacy with them. And, you know, it's. It's one thing to, you know, to be in a Coke commercial here or do this infinity thing there or whatever, but I think creating a collection like this, with the level of quality, like, I put everything into this. And like I said, you know, I truly love hip hop, so I want people to get that when they see it. It's not just a cash grab. It's something that's near and dear to me. Being able to create that and put that out there in a space where it can live on and sell, you know, and be traded and things like that. Like, that's a big deal for me. I really. I want my grandkids to be able to look back and be like, oh, man, Grandpa was killing it with this thing, you know, so that's the biggest thing for me, I think, you know, as a creator and an artist, it's fantastic because you have ownership in your own work, you know, like, that's the biggest thing.

Cool. Awesome. If people want to get in touch with you or if they want to find out more about your collection, how should they do that?

So my name online is iket Artworks. Looks like Mike Tart works. I didn't think about that when I. When I kind of bought that, but that's what it is. I'm not a baker, unless you count me cooking up all that good stuff. So. So yeah, they can reach me on Mike T. Artworks. My site is that. My Instagram is that. My Twitter is that without the S. So Mike T. Artwork. And so, yeah, you can reach me that way, but you can find me on Epics as well.

Thanks for sharing those thoughts with us, Mike. It's been a great interview. It's been a real pleasure meeting you, and I'm looking forward to all of your NFT collections in the future. And I'm sure the audience is as well.

Thank you. Thank you so much.