Marvel, Star Wars, and Disney comics are being ‘burned’ digitally as the NFT component of VeVe’s digital comics app becomes clearer

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At SXSW 2024, Marvel Comics announced it was partnering with an NFT company called VeVe to get its digital comics to more people. On its website, the company said it “fills a current gap in the industry” and give fans “richer experiences,” by offering a digital storefront (and reading app) where all its comics are released digitally in tandem with its print editions (and digital editions on other platforms). But now, the NFT part of Marvel’s digital comics deal with VeVe is coming to light, and the idea of “richer experiences” is gaining a secondary meaning – as is the term used for this new innovation.

One year after partnering with Marvel Comics to be a digital distributor for its comics, Veve has announced that it will stop carrying Marvel Comics 30 days after their initial release date – but are framing it as a positive rather than a negative, saying it will make these digital comics ‘collectible’ in much the same way its NFT products are collectible. As Veve puts it, they are looking to transform the budding “digital comic collecting” market – similar to what the creator-owned company DSTLRY has been doing.

This applies not only to all of Marvel’s superhero comics available digitally on the VeVe Comics app, but also Lucasfilm’s Star Wars titles and the Walt Disney Company’s animation-based titles as well.

Unfortunately, VeVe has chosen a poor name for what they’re doing: they are calling this comic book “burning”. As it describes it, “every backlist digital comic release on VeVe will only be available for 30 days. After that, unsold editions will be permanently burned…” On February 28, it held a “massive burn event” where it said it “erased forever” all of the comics on its platform that were were more than 30 days old.

The term ‘book burning’ is a centuries-old form of censorship, in which books (sometimes comics) are publicly destroyed by fire in an effort to suppress access to those materials and publicly shame those who read those books – something that became a villainous act in Marvel Comics’ Man-Thing #17 back in 1975. VeVe isn’t looking to shame those who read these comics, they are deliberately trying to suppress access to these digital comics from Marvel and other partners to add “an entirely new layer of scarcity and exclusivity.”

While VeVe isn’t hosting comic book “burnings” to censor books, their unfortunate choice of words in this situation while also creating an artificial scarcity of comics on digital platforms seems short-sighted.

For fans, this marks “a fundamental shift in digital collecting,” writes VeVe in the announcement. “Gone are the days of unlimited availability — every new Marvel, Disney, or Star Wars digital comic drop will be a race against time. This isn’t just a change—it’s an evolution of how digital collectibles mirror the real-world dynamics of physical comics.”

For VeVe, they are hoping this will lead to increased value for their NFT take on digital comics, as they host a secondary marketplace where the company and users of the VeVe comics platform can re-sell and trade comics to others at whatever price they set, with VeVe getting a cut of all sales.

If you’d like to Marvel comics digitally without this, fortunately there are other options such as the Kindle app and Marvel’s own excellent Marvel Unlimited platform. In those cases you don’t ‘own’ the digital comics but rather have a license to read them whenever you want, but to each their own.