What is a Marvel Comics Draft?

Back on RPG.net, we used to play a fun game where we would draft a team of superheroes, à la Fantasy Football, and then write a year-long series of their adventures. Sometimes folks would write a full comic script, sometimes they would just do issue summaries – whatever you feel most comfortable doing.

In this case, it will be Marvel Comics characters and existing Marvel Comics titles.

Sounds fun! But I’m a huge comics nerd, and I’m very concerned about continuity

I hear you, Other Cappa. For purposes of this draft, Marvel up until the end of 2015’s Secret Wars III happened, and then our universe took a hard left compared to mainline Marvel. If you have questions, we have two totally awesome comic book threads every week – https://the-avocado.org/tag/comics-thread/ and https://the-avocado.org/tag/comic-book-chat/ – where you can ask some of the nerdiest nerds who ever nerded to fill you in on anything you need to know.

Okay, so how will it work?

If you’re interested in participating, comment on this post expressing your interest. At 6 PM MST, on May 23rd, I will randomize everyone who has volunteered as tribute, and we will begin a seven or eight round serpentine draft – that is to say, first on the list gets their round one draft pick, until we get to the last on the list – who will get their first AND second round picks, and then back up the list to #1, who gets their second AND third round picks, and so on.

Now, an important consideration is whether this will be a “live” draft or an “offline” draft. The first type of draft would involve each person posting that round’s pick(s) in turn, with everyone waiting until it’s their turn to post. This type of draft can be exciting, with lots of time to speculate about what the writer is planning to do, and trash talk your rival writers, but it can also be much slower because of time zones and work schedules. In an “offline” draft, everyone would send me their draft picks (with alternates for each round) and I would simply post the final results.

RPGnet favored live drafts because the speculation was a big part of the fun of the game, but an offline draft lets everyone get started with the writing sooner. I’m going to default to a live draft unless the majority of people expressing interest in participating also express a preference for an offline draft.

What’s the point of drafting specific characters?

This is to establish your “ownership” of the character for that season/publishing year. If you have a great idea where Quicksilver retires and opens a bar in Milwaukee, you obviously don’t want some other writer putting him front and center as leader of the West Coast Avengers. Once you’ve drafted a character, anyone else who wants to use your character in a crossover, has to get your okay to use them. Once you’ve given the okay, they are free to write that character how they want within the confines of your agreement, so think carefully about how much info you want from them before signing off!

Wolverine, being Wolverine, is open for everyone to use.

What if I’m writing The Fantastic Four? Why do I need to draft seven characters?

Again, it’s about “ownership”. If you absolutely need Annihilus for your cosmic dimension hopping vision of the FF, you can prevent the writer of the Nova Corps title from killing him off while you still need him. If you love Foggy Nelson as a supporting character and don’t want him sequestered off in the latest X-Men time travel shenanigans, claim him!

Who gets to write what?

Great question! I am going to put this one up to a vote – when you express interest in being a writer, tell me if you would prefer to draft your comics title or just pick one from a list I’ll put into the actual draft post. I’ll tally the votes and announce which we’re going to do in the draft post tomorrow night.

While we’re at it, let me know if you would all prefer a monthly “publishing” schedule in which, say, draft positions 1, 4, and 8 post their new issues in the first week of the month, while 2, 5, and 9 are the second week, and so on; or a weekly schedule, when everyone will post their new issue each week on “new comic book day”. The latter option helps make sure we get our full ‘year’s’ worth of issues before burnout sets in, while the former option allows you to spend more time working on plot and scripting.

I think this covers all the basics, feel free to ask more questions in the comments if you need them. If you’re getting on board, make it explicit!