May 6^th 2022 — Toronto, ON – Internationally renowned, award-winning, Toronto-based cartoonist Paul Gilligan is looking to leverage cryptocurrency to help animals in his hometown. The Pooch Café cartoon appears daily in hundreds of newspapers worldwide, as it has done for more than two decades. Now Gilligan wants to transition his funny take on the secret lives of coffee drinking dogs to the metaverse.

Gilligan’s art will be released as NFTs, short for non fungible tokens. NFTS are a form of digital smart contract that gives the buyer the intellectual property rights and ownership of one of Gilligan‘s original creations. 5555 pieces of art are up for sale, each featuring a variation of Pooch Café’s protagonist, Poncho. In return, Gilligan has pledged a portion of all sales to Toronto Humane Society.

“The community has been so good to me, that I wanted to give back” says Gilligan who has published Pooch Café (via Andrews McMeel Syndication) since January 1st, 2000.

According to Noah Foxman, part of the team supporting Poncho’s foray into the world of NFTs, this will be one of the first daily comic strips to be turned into a one-of-a-kind digital asset: “Pooch Café brings smiles to readers’ faces daily. We hope to extend that impact into the Metaverse”. In discussing this unique digital art sale, Toronto Humane Society CEO Dr. Jacques Messier shared: “While this is our first foray into Web3, we are always grateful to our donors for leading the way.”

The sale requires pre-registration and will likely last less than a week.

For more information on the sale: https://pooch.cafe and on Twitter @poochcafenft