Fantasy Football - but with comics:
I probably should have posted this *before* the draft, since I now think it's basically closed until the next "season," but I followed a link a week or two back to Metti Publisher, a fantasy football style thing for comics.

For those who don't know fantasy football, basically you pick real players, add them to your fake teams and then your fake team performance is judged by the real stats that the players rack up during the season. With Metti Publisher, you "draft" a handful of writers and artists, put them into positions and then your score is judged by the position those writers/artists (and more importantly, the titles they work on) rank in the top 100.

It was an interesting challenge, because most of the writers and artists I really like aren't super-popular and the industry does tend to reward characters over creators, so the safe bet is to pick whoever is on Infinite Crisis, Superman, Spider-Man, etc. My inclination if I'm playing a "fantasy" league, though, is to pick the writers and artists I would actually employ if I had my own publisher, and could let them create their own titles from their own imaginations.

I think I hit a pretty good balance, though. My draft came through today and I've got a pretty decent bench: Gail Simone and Robert Kirkman (my Monthly Writers), Dan Slott and Peter David (my Special Writers), Andy Diggle and Sean McKeever (temporarily on my bench) are on the writing side. Pascal Ferry and Michael Lark (my Monthly Artists), Phil Hester and Scott Kolins (my Special Artists), Cameron Stewart and Cliff Chiang (Cover Artists) and Mike Huddleston, Frazer Irving and Darwyn Cooke (temporarily on my bench).

As you can see, it's definitely not my ideal real world publishing plan. In truth, if I wasn't judging on whether they're prolific and successful enough to be in the top 100 more often, I'd be putting all the guys on my bench into the field, and I'd probably have both Darwyn Cooke and Phil Hester on the writing staff as well. But it's not supposed to be an ideal representation of publishing, just kind of a fun game that plays using some of the numbers in the industry. I'm curious to see how I do, but given that my emphasis these days is on books that are mostly selling outside the top 100, I'm betting I won't place too well. I did get some of the buzz and up and coming creators, though, so that may pay off for me.

I was kind of amused to see that I knew a lot of the names in the game, but not necessarily in my league. Steve Rolston happens to be in my league, which is cool, but my local friend Nate Southard is playing and I found out not from talking to him on Friday or Saturday but by seeing his name in one of the other leagues. The strange wonders of the Internet at work.