The honest pitch
The Rugpull Gang, issue one, is a 24-page full-colour comic book. It costs $24.99, it is printed to order, and it ships worldwide. It was created by Dwayne Gordon and illustrated by Chaouqui Zidiyat.
That is the product. What follows is why we think it is worth your time, written for someone who has never heard of us and has no particular interest in crypto.
It is not a superhero book
The easiest way to describe a new comic is by comparison, and the easiest comparison is the one everybody reaches for: it is like X, but with Y. We are going to skip that, because the thing issue one is actually doing is older and simpler than a superhero story.
It is a crew book. A group of young people who are very good at something, operating in a city that is set up to reward exactly that skill, and slowly discovering that the game they are winning was built by someone else for a different reason. If you have a soft spot for heist films, ensemble crime stories, or the kind of science fiction where the technology is a setting rather than a plot device, this is aimed at you.
Nobody in it has powers in the cape sense. They have money, machinery, nerve and each other, and the book is fairly clear-eyed that those are not the same as being safe.
The cast is the point
There are fifteen members of the gang. Thirteen of them have a full profile on this site — a rank, an age, an origin, an energy rating and a biography. Two of them are blank.
The thirteen are from the UK, China, Russia, New York, Nigeria, Spain, South Africa, France, Jamaica, Japan, Australia and Brazil. They are between eighteen and twenty-four. That spread is not decoration and it is not a diversity checklist — the premise of the story requires a group assembled from everywhere, because what they are involved in was sold everywhere, and the book keeps finding uses for the fact that these people were not raised with the same assumptions about money, debt, family or risk.
Two examples, both of which are on their public profiles and neither of which spoils anything:
Prince comes from a family of bull herders in Nigeria. There are mechanical bulls all over this story, and he is the only member of the gang who has ever cared for a real one. He notices things about them that nobody else in the room notices, and he is routinely ignored.
Zwycz has an energy rating of 0M. Every other member is in the tens or hundreds of millions. His is zero. It is on his page, it has never been explained, and it is not an error.
The two blank profiles — Degen, and a member with no name — are blank because what they are is a reveal the story has not reached yet. The unnamed one appears on the first page of issue one. You will know her when you see her, and you will not know anything about her, which is the intended effect.
What actually happens in issue one
Without spoiling it: the gang pulls off something impressive, a city built on a particular kind of speculation is shown to you in detail, and the book ends by introducing something that does not belong in that city at all.
It is a complete story. This matters, so we will be explicit about it — issue one does not stop mid-sentence to sell you issue two. It has a beginning, a middle, and an ending that lands. The second issue continues it, but the first one is not a trailer.
What you do not need
This is where most of the confusion about this book lives, so let us clear it out.
You do not need a crypto wallet. You do not need to hold PROS tokens — the token is a separate part of the Prospective ecosystem and has nothing to do with buying a comic. You do not need an account on this site; you can check out as a guest with an email for the receipt and an address for the printer. You do not need to understand blockchain, NFTs, minting or anything else to follow the plot.
Checkout is a card payment through Stripe, exactly like any other online shop, with Apple Pay and Google Pay where your device supports them.
The crypto element is inside the story — the setting is a world that went all-in on a particular financial idea, and the book is interested in what that does to people. You read it the way you would read a novel set in a bank. No account at the bank required.
What you get for $24.99
A physical book. 24 pages, full colour throughout, trim size 6.63 × 10.25 inches, printed to order and shipped to you.
Printed to order means there is no warehouse of unsold stock and no print run we have to clear — it also means allowing a few days for production before it ships. Your order page carries the tracking link once it is on its way, and we email it to you as well.
It is available directly here, and also on Amazon. Buying direct is the best way to support the book, because there is no publisher between us and you — it is one writer, one illustrator, and whatever the book earns goes back into drawing the next one.
If you want to look before you buy
Go and read the character profiles. All fifteen are public, including the two blank ones, and they are the cheapest possible way to work out whether this cast is one you want to spend time with. If Prince's bio or Zwycz's zero makes you want to know more, the book will land for you.
If they do not, you have saved yourself $24.99, and we would rather that than a copy sold to someone who did not want it.
