In case you’re asking, no, I did not draw this image you see here. It’s one of many drawings I found on this website I just stumbled upon this morning called Drawception.com where from what I understand reading the site’s info section is about playing these games where you're given a drawing to describe or a caption to draw – the game this image comes from is titled Demon Golfing. Haven’t tried playing these games myself yet (maybe I’ll try it out someday), feel free to visit the site yourselves if your curious.
The reason I chose this image is partially because I thought the gaming concept the site presented was curious, and partially because I thought it was fitting to this subject I decided to post about this Sunday morning as an attempt at cooling the heat off of the very serious – and very important – discussion/debate on AI comics in yesterday’s post. So this post is gonna be about something that – apart from work and other nonsense – have been distracting me from my own comic drawing (I’m getting the new page finished today though).
And that is fictional sports. And I mean fictional sports as opposed to sports in fiction, one example of the latter here on DD being Fluffy 500 by IronHorseComics which features – at least to the eyes of someone like me who knows nothing about motor sports – a legit simulation of real life motor sport while featuring characters that are anthropomorphic animals. Fictional sport to me would fall something more in line with, let say, Blood Bowl by Games Workshop.
Blood Bowl being a tabletop miniature game that is about this fantasy themed hybrid of American Fotball and Rugby. Unlike any of those sports you have rules that allows players – the players being humans, orcs, demons and humanoid rats - to kill each other on the field and it is all in all a parody on those two real-life sports together that just does whatever it wants. That to me is a fictional sport.
A sport that may either be a mock-up – again like Blood Bowl - or a parallell alternative to a modern and/or historical sport – to use another DD example let’s take Bravo1102’s Interstellar Battle Girls which is a parallel on gladiatorial combat sports - or a totally different sport all together that is purely fictional – like Quidditch in Harry Potter.
Recently I have had this idea of a fictional sport just randomly pop in my head that's been festering all week, and first it began whit a parody of Ice hockey that would be in the same ultraviolent, dark-humourous spirit as the theme of Blood Bowl – Ice Hockey already being a notoriously violent sport, at least within some leagues. Then it switched over to being this parallel alternative to a real-life sport that really isn’t violent at all – the sport in question being golf.
How can golf be violent – unless it’s taking place in the setting of Happy Gilmore perhaps – well, how about a dark fantasy setting where there are these holes opening up in the ground that unleashes a curse upon the surrounding area, turning it and everything in it into something out of Evil Dead/Army of Darkness or Berserk or Crater’s Edge (mentioning another comic here on DD).
Then you have this mystic with a staff that spits out a magical orb, then uses the staff as a golf club to hit the orb, sending it into one of these cursed areas and then the mystic have to go in and find the orb and keep hitting it towards the hole and putt it into the hole once there – which would vanquish the hole and exorcise the cursed area - all while fighting off monsters and evil spirits along the way and competing with other mystics in who putts the hole with their magic orb and exorcises the area first, moving on to the next cursed area to repeat the exorcising golfing procedure as the next step of a tournament.
It's a fun little idea that I’m thinking about perhaps writing stories and posting fics on or use as a motif to create artwork on Newgrounds or something or maybe both. Anyway, it got me thinking about the fun creative process in creating a fictional sport of your own that stories can be written around and comics can be drawn upon if you so choose.
So what do you guys think of it? Do you have a fictional sport that you’re making a comic about that I haven’t mentioned? Have you ever experimented with the idea of creating one?
Let me know in the comments below and if a demonic clown head laughs at you after sucking up your magic golf orb and spitting it away, just smash its nose to pieces with your magic golf staff and see if it still laughs at you afterwards^^
Fictional Sports
Andreas_Helixfinger at 12:00AM, Nov. 26, 2023
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PaulEberhardt at 3:42AM, Nov. 26, 2023
I haven't tried so much making up fictional games in the past than showing existing sports in a cartoon way. That probably doesn't count. Still fun, though.
PaulEberhardt at 3:35AM, Nov. 26, 2023
I sometimes play a similar game with my students in cover lessons, which is called Gartic Phone https://garticphone.com/ . Everybody starts with a prompt, then the next one in line has to draw it on the screen very quickly. The picture is sent on, the next in line has to write a caption for it to be used as a prompt for the drawing to be done by someone else and so on. It's basically an enhanced version of the good old "Chinese whispers" or "telephone" game, and it's always a blast, especially when everyone gets to see all the resulting drawings in the end. I can totally recommend gathering some friends and try it. Perhaps we could turn it into a forum game some time, using PQs for passing on the prompts?