Most superheroes begin in comics and then, if they are very lucky or Ryan Reynolds, end up in films. Worm went the other way. John McCrae, who writes as Wildbow, published it online between 2011 and 2013 as a deliberate attempt to take the superhero out of the panel and put it in prose. Now IDW Publishing is putting it back. In an exclusive with Gizmodo, IDW announced a comic adaptation, the story’s first physical release of any kind, starting on Comics Giveaway Day, 1st May 2027, with a prequel issue that includes a new written piece from McCrae. The first numbered issue follows in the summer.
For anyone who missed it, which includes most of the print SF world, Worm follows Taylor Hebert, a bullied teenager in the decaying city of Brockton Bay whose superpower is controlling insects. She means to be a hero. Things do not go to plan. Over something like 1.7 million words, about the length of the whole of A Song of Ice and Fire so far, it turns into one of the darkest, cleverest and most exhausting superhero stories ever written, full of power systems, moral compromises and city blocks being flattened by very large problems. It was published free, chapter by chapter, and reached around a million views a month at its peak, with about 80 million views in all. For a while it was the book that people who never read web fiction were told they must read, usually at length and by someone who had just finished it at four in the morning.
The creative team is writer Meghan Fitzmartin, artist Javier Ortiz Mateo, colourist David Vaquero and letterer Andriy Lukin, with covers by Skylar Patridge and Livio Baggio. McCrae is consulting and says he has been involved at outline, script, ink and colour stage. “Worm came about as an attempt to bring superheroes and supervillains, designed as they are for the visual medium of comics, to the printed word,” he says, and on his blog he calls the move to comics “bringing things full circle”. He is also refreshingly honest about his own feelings towards the book, which he describes as “mixed”, and he says the characters have been designed from scratch rather than borrowed from years of fan art. Fitzmartin, for her part, sums up the story as “complicated women, people with powers, feminine rage”, which is shorter than 1.7 million words, if less specific about the bees.
There is a commercial motive, and McCrae makes no secret of it. Fans have wanted a television series for years, and he says strong comic sales would be “a strong way for the community to get us there”. Serial fiction has always worked this way. Dickens built his career on monthly parts and then turned them into books, plays and anything else that would sell. Here at SFcrowsnest, a magazine that has been publishing online since 1991, we are happy to see the web serial treated as a serious place for genre fiction to start, rather than a waiting room for a publishing deal. A girl whose superpower is insects deserves a big audience, preferably from a safe distance.
Join the conversation (0)