Posted in: Comics, Digital | Tagged: comixology, Marvel Comics, orson scott card

Orson Scott Card, ComiXology And Marvel

One of the side effects of the Marvel #1 Free ComiXology now-paused-offer was that a number of people noted, possibly for the first time, the Ender's Game comics adapted from thework of Orson Scott Card published by Marvel in the "Noteworthy" section.

Marvel have published (and continue to publish) adaptations of Ender's Game: Battle School, Ender's Shadow, Formic Wars: Burning Earth and Formic Wars: Silent Strike. as well as previously publish Orson Scott Card's authored Ultimate Iron Man and Ultimate Iron Man II, with the likes of Christopher Yost, Andy Kubert and Pascual Ferry, all still available in print and digitally. IDW published six issues of Dragon Age written by Card, also available in print and digitally.

Some have asked why there wasn't any fuss over Orson Scott Card writing Iron Man, as there was with Adventures Of Superman. The truth is… there was fuss. Here are a few examples. At the time I wrote;

IRON MAN MAY ONLY MARRY AN IRON WOMAN

Hugo Award winner sci-fi fiction and right-wing political opinion writer, Orson Scott Card has been hired to write "Ultimate Iron Man." And everyone's been e-mailing me to point out that it's another Karl Zinsmeister story.

Except it's not. This is fiction. Orson Scott Card is an intelligent writer with very peculiar views and a tendency to use them in his work. He's what's colloquially known as a "friend of Mike Miller." However he's not, as Karl Zinsmeister is, presenting horribly biased viewpoints as non-fiction.

And as long as Orson doesn't actually have Iron Man pulse blast a gay pride event, I don't think too many people will even notice.

Just don't expect Ultimate Colossus guesting too soon, that's all.

And not many people did notice. Laura Hudson published an interview with him for Publisher's Weekly without it even coming up, though it did finger now-X-Men editor Nick Lowe as the man who headhunted Card to work for Marvel.

I wasn't drawn to comic books. I didn't like superheroes or supervillains, and I especially didn't like Iron Man. But I was drawn to the frozen-movie aspects of graphic storytelling, and regarded it as a challenge I wanted to tackle "someday." Then an astonishingly good editor at Marvel, Nick Lowe, kept after me… and sold me on the Ultimate [universe] version of Iron Man, [saying] that I could reinvent the backstory, create a superhero whose motives were intelligible, whose story would be intriguing. And I could create villains that I could believe in, human beings with complex motivations. That's what became irresistible. And as Nick worked with me to help me learn what I was doing, more or less, I ended up doing work I could be proud of.

But those were the innocent heady days of the mid-2000s, where everyone thought the best of everyone and gave them all the benefit of the doubt, as opposed to these cold harsh recessionary times where we see everyone through narrow pierced eyelids. Also before Card actually joined the board of NOM, when US support for gay marriage was around 30% instead of today's 50%, and when internet petitions hadn't actually changed anything then. Oh and just before Twitter and Tumblr.

Some people at DC Comics were complaining to each other about the unfairness that Marvel didn't get complaints, while they did. This is why.

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