Young Adult Author Rainbow Rowell Teams Up With Marvel ‘Runaways’ TV Series

Young adult author Rainbow Rowell has signed on with Marvel to work on a TV series for Runaways.

RAINBOW ROWELL JOINS MARVEL FOR RUNAWAYS TV PROJECT

Marvel announced that Rowell, famed author of Eleanor & Park and Landline, would become part of their writing team, and that she would appear at the Book Expo American with more details. “WHAT AM I WRITING FOR MARVEL??? ONLY MY FAVORITE THING EVER!!! (Which I’m not allowed to talk about until tomorrow at BookExpo.)” tweeted Rowell.

“This is my favorite Marvel book,” Rowell said of her new assignment. “When [editor Nick Lowe] first reached out to me a few years ago about maybe working for Marvel, it was the first thing I asked him about. The characters and original story by Brian K. Vaughan (Paper Girls) are just so great and so beautifully built. I was really excited because I always felt like there were more Runaway stories and that book should just have kept going.”

“It’s kind of funny calling them the Runaways because it’s not like they’re the Avengers or the X-Men. They were not formed with a mission and a purpose. They’re just kids who ended up in the same boat,” continues Rowell about the series. “At the beginning of this series they are scattered to the four winds and half of them are dead. One of the challenges now is who are they when they’re apart? They got thrown together, but now they’ve been pulled apart. They’re trying to figure out who they really are without each other… This arc is very much about them choosing to be together.”

This is not Rowell’s first foray into the comic book genre. In 2014, the author began collaborations with First Second’s cartoonist Faith Erin Hicks on a graphic novel in the first of a two book deal. It should be noted that works by First Second often take as long if not longer than the three-year wait on Rowell’s piece.