Some worlds begin with words on paper, a screenplay, a notes app... BizarreBeasts began with a sketch.

What started as one artist's hand-drawn outsider creatures slowly turned into a full onchain universe: a community, a token, mini-games, comics, music, and now BizarreBeasts is the first place recipient of the DCP Award for Base Creators! A new chapter is on the horizon: short animated films bringing BIZARRE worlds to life.

BizarreBeasts is one of the strongest examples of what creator-owned, onchain storytelling can look like: weird, human, handcrafted, and powered by community.

We had a chat with Dylan, the creator behind it all, to talk art, worldbuilding, and why decentralization feels like the right home for this universe.

BizarreBeasts started as an exploration into merging my love for outsider art (Basquiat, Jean Dubuffet) with the passion for cartooning and illustration that shaped me growing up, like Calvin and Hobbes (Bill Watterson) and Rocko's Modern Life (Joe Murray).

I've never had formal art training, but I've been drawing and creating my whole life: learning to illustrate cartoons and comics as a boy, launching a screen printing shop in my 20s, then transitioning to painting, ink, sculpting, and mixed media in 2018 when my wife and I founded our art studio.

The first BizarreBeasts illustration came to life in August 2021. Over the following years, I created 50+ canvas paintings and 300+ ink and digital illustrations.  All by hand, all original characters, all darkly humorous outsider art with characters that felt both BIZARRE and uncomfortably human. This was years before any involvement in Web3. Just paint, ink, and paper.

The digital expansion began in 2023, when I started bringing my artwork onchain, and in 2024, I taught myself to code using AI tools. Those original paintings and illustrations became the foundation: every game character, every NFT, every animation frame traces back to my original sketchbooks. Since then, I've launched 50+ NFT collections, built 9 original games with over 152,000 plays, and grown a community of 1,800+ collectors and 6,800+ token holders. But the art came first. Everything else was built from that.

The BizarreBeasts ecosystem does have a lot happening: games, music, NFTs, tokens, comics, animations, meme tools, sticker collections, and a full miniapp.(www.bizarrebeasts.io).

But the handmade energy stays alive because every asset, across every medium, starts as a hand-illustrated image. The game characters? Hand-drawn frame by frame. The meme stickers? 100+ individual illustrations. The character animations? Built from original artwork.

The balance comes from treating "hand-drawn" not as an aesthetic choice but as a disciplined practice and brand choice. If I can't trace a piece of content back to my sketchbook, it doesn't belong in the BizarreBeasts universe.  It's the unique voice of BizarreBeasts that shapes everything else.

Giving these characters actual voices and movement and letting people experience their personalities and their world rather than inferring them from still images. Animation adds emotional weight and fuels imagination. A BizarreBeasts universe with moving, reacting, speaking characters, and original music is a world viewers and collectors can actually live in.

The onchain dimension changes the relationship entirely. When viewers experience BizarreBeasts media as co-owners through onchain collectibles, rather than passive audiences just viewing the media something impactful occurs. Through decentralized technology and community-powered distribution onchain, the BizarreBeasts characters and media become shared cultural property. This transforms "viewership" and “content consumption” into community and shared ownership.

The traditional art world has a one-way relationship: artist creates, gallery sells, collector owns, audience observes from a distance. Traditional media works the same way: viewers consume content, platforms extract value, and audiences have zero ownership stake in the things they spend hours engaging with. You can watch a show for a decade, play a game for thousands of hours, and walk away with nothing but memories. The relationship only flows in one direction.

With BizarreBeasts, collectors aren't just buyers; they're community members who participate in daily rituals, create memes with project assets, compete in game and meme contests, and hold tokens that give them actual utility and voice in the ecosystem. The $BB token isn't just tradeable, it unlocks features, enters contests, and earns rewards based on engagement, not just holdings.

BizarreBeasts

Learn about the artist and innovator behind BizarreBeasts - a web3 creative universe built on community, coins, and culture.

https://bbapp.bizarrebeasts.io

Decentralized platforms make the relationship horizontal rather than hierarchical. My collectors aren't patrons keeping an artist afloat from above.  They're collaborators building something alongside me. When someone mints a BizarreBeasts NFT, collects a post on Zora, or supports my Paragraph blog, they're not just acquiring art and project media, they're joining a BIZARRE universe and helping shape what it becomes.

Because it's where I actually live. The BizarreBeasts is a personal artistic evolution to explore art styles and humorous artistic themes.  The characters are reflections of how I see the funny and unique side of the world and others, including myself. We're all a little uniquely bizarre when you look closely enough. We all have that uncomfortable space between who we present to the world and who we actually are. The characters just make that gap visible in a way that lets us laugh at it instead of hiding from it.

What I hope the community takes away is permission to be BIZARRE, and truly themselves. Web3 already attracts people who don't quite fit the mainstream mold: builders, artists, collectors, and digital travelers who see value where others see noise. BizarreBeasts gives that energy a home and a visual language. When someone connects with a BIZARRE character, they're not just appreciating art they're recognizing something true and fun about themselves that doesn't usually get acknowledged. All with a community of BizarreBeasts doing the same thing!

Go be BIZARRE.