Marvel Announces New Prose Book Line

Marvel is teaming up with Aconyte Books to publish a new line of prose novels. Aconyte and Marvel announced the multi-year deal earlier today, with books planned for release in 2020. Aconyte Books is the prose novel publisher of Asmodee, a global games group that is in the process of releasing several new Marvel games. Asmodee will be releasing Marvel Champions: The Card Game and the miniatures game Marvel: Crisis Protocol later this year. This new book line seems to solidify that Asmodee and Marvel will be working together for the foreseeable future.

While no specific book titles were announced, Aconyte publisher Marc Gascoigne teased that fans would see books focusing on all sorts of characters from the Marvel Universe. "The Marvel comic book universe has featured a host of great characters and storylines crying out to be told over the years, and now is their time to step into the spotlight," Gascoigne said in a press release. "You can look out for legends from Asgard, several volumes focusing on some of Marvel's heroines, and stories of some of Professor Xavier's lesser-known students, and that's just to get us started."

Aconyte was created by Asmodee to expand on the worlds of some of their most popular board games, such as Pandemic, Catan, and Arkham Horror. While this is Aconyte's first third-party announcement, we could see some tie-ins between Marvel Champions or Marvel: Crisis Protocol in the future.

Marvel has worked with various publishers on prose novels before, including Bantam Books and BPMC which released numerous novels in the 1990s. More recently, Marvel set up its own Marvel Press, which released prose versions of various comic book storylines along with original series. Marvel Press's most recent release was in 2018.