More news from this weekend’s New York Comic-Con: Marvel Comics announced that they will be working with Orson Scott Card to adapt Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow into comic books later this year.
Ender’s Game (about a child prodigy named Ender recruited to help fight an alien army) and Ender’s Shadow (a concurrent book focused on another young soldier) will launch as separate comics in late 2008, with the first Ender’s Game collection due out in summer 2009.
Card said he was eager to pursue a comic book adaptation, but that the rights were previously tied up in a film deal for the two novels, which were under option to Warner Brothers, the parent company of DC Comics. “The moment I got the comic book and game rights extracted from the movie option deal, I let Marvel and other [publishers] know about the availability,” he said. “I truly was open-minded about who would end up doing the books, [but] Marvel got there first, with a terrific, ambitious plan” for both books.
Card will oversee the project. Ender’s Game will be scripted by Christopher Yost (who writes for New X-Men and X-Force) with pencil work by Pasqual Ferry (Ultimate Fantastic Four).
Even though the Ender series has ranged far beyond the two books, Card said that the emphasis for now is on the two primary novels. “Let’s see if anybody buys those before we move on to sequels,” he said. “It’s always up to the readers.”
(For our previous news of Ender tie-ins, see this article.)