From the Static Selection Process and Updates
Our final selections have been made! Later today (1/18) we will begin sending out notification emails. First round of emails will go to the pitches we have selected. Once those are firmly in place we will start reaching out to parties who we would like to speak with about developing their pitches into stand alone stories or series. The final batch sent out will be notices of non-selection. This will probably take a couple weeks to sort out depending on how quickly replies from creators come back.
Out of 191 pitches we whittled our way down to 16 stories. I thought I’d take some time to explain how we went about this. We want to be transparent in our selections, and it might help address some questions on many minds.
Starting with our full list we began noting down objective measures such as number of team members, page length, and if the team/story met the Band of Bards mission of advancing representation, inclusion, and diversity in comics. Along with that we scored each pitch on three subjective measures – Overall Impression, Strength of Story, and Quality of Art. Each category got a score of 1-5 with higher being better.
With these scores we made an initial cut based off of a minimum total score. Chris and I then discussed how we would rank these three subjective categories in order of importance. Agreeing that Overall Impression, Quality of Art, and then Strength of Story was how we both viewed this question we assigned weights to each category. After calculating weighted scores for each pitch we then saw some clear cut separation, enabling us to make a second round of cuts. The order of scoring and then deciding weights is important here. If you assign weights to categories before getting raw scores you can inadvertently bias your raw scoring. This method enabled us to give fair scores to each pitch and then get the benefit of fair weighting and a less subjective way of separating submissions for a second cut.
At this point we had gone from 191, to 81, and then to 19 remaining submissions in a fairly unbiased way. While the titles of each submission were induced in the data being reviewed, we did not include the names of the parties. Yes, the submitting party was visible when reviewing the pitch and would influence subjective scoring on Overall Impression, but this was a minimal impact in total. We went to lengths to make sure we weren’t simply picking our friends or favorite creators. But now that we were at 19 and still had to cut a few stories it was time for hard choices and no cold calculations to make them for us.
These final three cuts were painful. Truth be told there were a lot of stories we loved that didn’t make that final 19. Many submissions were separated by just 1 point or even half a point. The positive side of this is that we also identified dozens of submissions that we believe could be developed into stand alone titles. A very unintended and unforeseen consequence of this anthology is that it also turned into a quasi-talent search. We have become aware of many more phenomenal talents through this process. We’re hopeful that many of those not selected for From the Static will still choose to work with us to develop their pitches into one-shot stories or even a series. Of course we are not entitled to that and if someone would rather continue pitching their story to other anthologies it won’t hurt our feelings. These are your stories and you must do what you feel is best. Either way, we’re grateful to have the chance to read your pitch!
That’s pretty much it for now. Next update will come after the final line up is firmly in place and we can make official announcements of stories & teams.
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