I’m pretty sure that every comic book nerd plays the dream-team-building game - making up dream rosters for their favorite superhero and super-villain teams. During a long period of frequent insomnia, I came up with my own set of rules for it, an organized and exhaustive set of criteria which exercised my encyclopedic knowledge of comics and helped quiet my restless melon when bedtime beckoned.

Whatcha do is pick a team - my first one ever was The Avengers - and build a nine-character roster using specific guidelines:

Two members are veterans, characters who’ve been a member of some iteration of the team before. For my Avengers, I chose The Falcon and Spider-Woman - tough, tactical, street-level heroes with government ties, good leadership material.

Two members are new to the team, characters who’ve never been associated with any iteration of the team in canon before. This gets pretty tough in the modern day where so many teams have expanded to basically include everybody, but for my Avengers I went with Kitty Pryde - ditching her Shadowcat identity and adopting The Vision’s then-unused moniker - and, since I lacked a powerhouse, The Eternals’ Ikaris.

Two members are revamps of previous members. I decided I could use existing revamps - I could put the new Blue Beetle on a speculative Justice League, for instance - but I generally prefer to make up new ones. My Avengers included a new Ant-Man - actually a late-generation Ultron running a beta-build moral code program and packed with Pym particles - and Mockingbird, a Wundagorian sorceress.

One member is all-new. This character you get to create from whole cloth, no restrictions except that he or she has to be wholly original. I created Olympus, a sort-of a la carte Billy Batson who could summon short-lived gifts from the Greek Gods at the utterance of a magic word.

And, lastly, you get two reserve members who are total wild cards, they can be anyone from anywhere - completely original, old members, revamps, villains, resurrected heroes, whatever. I added a newly sculpted obsidian version of IT, The Living Colossus - known as IT, The Black Goliath - partly because I wanted Kitty to form a romantic relationship with the mind which drove it (so she has a thing for Colossi, apparently) and I needed a cosmic hero and a speedster so I went with childhood fave Nova, The Human Rocket.

The Falcon, Spider-Woman, Kitty Pryde, Ikaris, Ant-Man (IV?), Mockingbird (II?), Olympus, IT and Nova, My Avengers. It’s a lot of fun to build these dream teams using restrictive guidelines, it becomes a lot less about “here are my favorite characters” and more about carefully considering who fits into different roles, how to balance the team, how the characters end up relating to one another. I’d recommend it as a fun mental exercise for comic nerds, whether you use my guidelines or your own …

(Image up top from here, image immediately above this is a sketch page featuring some of my costume ideas for my new Avengers)