He was a big fan of Omega the Unknown, and was rather saddened when the superhero vanished from the shelves back when he was a boy growing up in Brooklyn. But now, more than 30 years later, Marvel Entertainment has contacted him and asked Lethem to write the story.
"I was very devoted as a teenager to comic books," said Lethem, who recently finished a tour for his new novel, You Don't Love Me Yet . "I drifted to other kinds of reading, but I never lost interest in the medium."
Marvel contacted Lethem after his book Fortress of Solitude , which had some comic book reverences, and asked if he would consider doing work in the medium, said Marvel publisher Dan Buckley."We wanted to see what he was interested in, and he brought it up immediately," Buckley said. "Bringing this kind of talent to the room is fantastic. He knows how to tell a story, and his perspective is different from traditional comic writers."
Omega is a rather odd superhero. He’s mute, and has a psychic connection with a 12-year-old boy named James-Michael Starling, who moved to New York City with his family from "the mountains" to improve socialization skills after his years of home-schooling. Omega is “the last surviving member of an unnamed alien race.”
"It was an interesting challenge," Lethem said. "One of the things I concluded very quickly was that it's not a written form. My primary task was to provide amazing things for artists to draw."
The first six issues are completed, and the series will have a total of 10, like the original, which debuted in 1976. No official release date has been given. Likewise, Stephen King has also gone the comic book route, with his Dark Tower . "I'm a big fan of the medium," King said of comic books. "A different way to tell stories is always exciting. It's like being a kid with a chemistry set."
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