Mfers is the public domain, CC0 stick figure collection minted by Sartoshi in November 2021, directly inspired by the "Are ya winning, son?" meme. No roadmap. No utility. No central team. Anyone can build with it (so we did)
Five years ago, I started messing around with the character. I found an artist on Fiverr and made a couple of walking sequences. They were bad. They taught me something more useful than success. I liked making it.
https://youtu.be/sr4dxkPgJQM?si=EAr7sKXP9EszTZYx
Then I met Alex, my co-creator, in the most on-brand way possible. We got rugged on an NFT collection together. We kept talking, and eventually we decided to build instead of complain.
The first real thing we made was a short film called Are You Winning Son?, exploring the relationship between the dad and the son in the meme. The son is the mfer. We showed it at NFT NYC. The response told us this was a show, not a side project.
https://youtu.be/Bo0qoc55mjc?si=BpepNqCg3G_Z_tvZ
The standard playbook would have been to launch an NFT right then. Promises. Roadmap. Trust us.
The people we wanted to build for were exhausted. Trust had been spent. Saying "give us money for what we might make" was the wrong way to start. Reputation compounds slowly and burns fast. We wanted to start the compounding, not the burning.
So we flipped it. We built the roller coaster before the souvenir shop.
The roller coaster is the show. We partnered with The Hive Studio, an Emmy-nominated animation studio, and produced a full first season of The Normal Mfer. Ten episodes. Eleven minutes each. A real season of a real animated series, fully made, before we asked anyone for anything. The pilot earned coverage from outlets like Blockworks, who clocked the Rick and Morty vibes and the take on manosphere self-help culture through a 23-year-old still living with his parents.
CC0 Studios is the wider container for this work. The goal is to be the Adult Swim for crypto-native IP. Build the worlds of the public domain characters the internet already loves, and extend that to other creators who bring us IP worth building. Mfers is the starting point. It is not the end.
This is the souvenir shop. The show already exists. The collection is something for fans, haters, or whoever to collect, buy, sell, and trade, however they like. Proceeds fund season two. "Abnormal Mfers" are intended as collectible items, not for investment purposes.
We worked with @sircandyapple & @jonnydegods of @infinitefunn to create the art and a number of other featured artists to make 1/1s in the collection. Including: @Groowut, @brain_pasta, @RedruMxART, @reylarsdam, @MarlonPruz, @kingxerox5, @bookofbee, @pixelord, and @a_marrast.
We recently signed with Chronicle Studios at chronicle.studio. Chronicle helps studios and IP owners cut through the discovery problem on YouTube and beyond, using a cultural intelligence layer to match content with audiences likely to actually love it.
Chronicle is led by co-founder and CEO Aaron Sisto. They recently brought on Scott Greenberg, co-founder and former CEO of Bento Box Entertainment, the animation studio behind Bob's Burgers, Central Park, Krapopolis, and a long list of others. Greenberg co-founded Bento Box in 2009 and ran it through its Fox acquisition in 2019. He is now in a leadership role at Chronicle.
I want to be precise. We do not have a Netflix deal. We do not have a network commitment. What we have is a finished season, a serious distribution partner, and the conviction to keep going.