Earth Unaware (First Formic War)

well, having written Ultimate Iron Man for Marvel some years before. It wasn’t the first time Scott and I had worked as a team, either. We had collaborated on the novel Invasive Procedures and on a limited-issue comic series for EA Comics based on the award-winning video game Dragon Age.
    While Marvel began assembling an art team, Scott and I began to develop the story. Ender’s Game had been on Scott’s mind for over thirty years, so many of those early story sessions consisted of Scott sharing what had been stewing in his brain all those years and me furiously taking notes. The early conversations were primarily focused on world-building. Scott had given a lot of thought to the concept of asteroid mining and how the whole industry would work. What was the science of it all? How do the miners get the metals back to Earth? What economic infrastructure must exist to make survival in the Deep possible? Would miners work exclusively in the Asteroid Belt, or would some miners venture farther out? Were there only corporations doing the work or was there room in the economy for independent mining families and clans? And if so, what is the relationship between free miners and corporate? And how do miner families marry and prosper? How do they mix up their gene pool and exist in such an empty and isolated environment?
    And what about the military? Scott and I knew that Mazer Rackham had to play a pivotal role in this story. Where was he trained? And more importantly, who trained him? Who showed Mazer how to command?
    Once Scott and I had a basic framework of the world, we began populating it with characters. We knew from the get-go that we weren’t writing Ender’s Game. This wouldn’t be the story of a single hero; it would be the story of many.
    The challenge was, we were writing a comic book. And comic books, in case you’ve never counted, are generally twenty-two pages long. You can only squeeze so many panels of art onto a page, and the more dialogue you write, the more art you cover up. So it’s best to be extremely economical with words. Some of the ideas and characters that Scott and I were developing simply wouldn’t fit in the comics.
    Around this time Marvel introduced Scott and me to the art of Giancarlo Caracuzzo, who blew us away with his environments and characters and style. The immensely talented Jim Charalampidis joined as colorist, and in no time, beautifully vibrant pages of the comic began popping up in our inboxes.
    Creating comics is much like filmmaking in that’s it a highly collaborative process. Ideas can come from anywhere, and the contributions of each individual shape the outcome for everyone. The character of Victor Delgado, for example, will always exist in my head exactly as Giancarlo drew him. And the muted earth tones that Jim gave El Cavador are the colors I see whenever I think of the ship.
    There were other people involved in the comics, of course, but the person who deserves the most credit and a lifelong standing ovation is Jordan D. White, our editor at Marvel, who had a hand in every aspect of the comics and who may be the nicest person working in the industry today. (You should follow him on Twitter at @cracksh0t. That’s a zero, not the letter O.)
    Additional thanks go to Jake Black, Billy Tan, Guru-eFX, Cory Petit, Jenny Frison, Salvador Larroca, Aron Lusen, Bryan Hitch, Paul Mounts, Arune Singh, John Paretti, Joe Quesada, and everyone else at Marvel.
    As Scott and I continued to develop the stories for each issue, we continued to create story elements that simply wouldn’t fit in the comics. To give you a sense of what I mean, this novel only includes the story contained in the first three issues of the comics. And not even the complete story of those issues; there are bits of issues two and three that won’t exist in novel form until a subsequent book.
    So Scott and I had to make some concessions and exclude people and events from the comics that we knew would only exist in the novels. If you’ve read the comics as well as this book, you’ve likely noticed some of the changes. Scott and I think of it this way: The comics are an adaptation of the novels even though the comics existed before the novels. Or perhaps it might be more accurate to say: The comics are an expansion of the backstory of Ender’s Game and an adaptation of the novels that followed them. Hmm. Think about that too much and you might get dizzy. Of course, this practice of evolving a story is