Serial Box is partnering with Marvel to tell new serialized stories about your favorite superheroes

Over the last couple of years, publishing startup Serial Box has experimented with new ways to tell stories. Today the company is moving into the superhero world with a new partnership with Marvel, which will produce new stories about Black Panther, Black Widow, Jessica Jones, and Thor.

The publisher is best known for long-form, serialized stories called “Serials”, which play out like a season of television. Each season is composed of 10 to 16 individual installments, which take about 40 minutes to read, each one designed to be read on its own, but which also convey a season-long storyline. The similarities to a TV show don’t stop there: instead of individual authors writing a single work on their own, they bring in a writer’s room of writers to produce stories like The Witch Who Came in From the Cold, Ninth Step Station, or The Vela. The stories can be read via the company’s app and website, and are also accompanied by an audio adaptation.

This is Serial Box’s first foray into tie-in fiction, and in a release, CEO Molly Barton says that they’re “thrilled that Marvel is entrusting us to extend and expand the story worlds for these beloved characters.” The stories will be originals based on the characters, but won’t be retellings from the comics or films. The first story out of the gate will be about Thor, and will land sometime this summer. The company says that Aaron Stewart-Ahn, Brian Keene, Jay Edidin, and Yoon Ha Lee will make up the writer’s room for this first serial. Serial Box wouldn’t say if its stories will fit together in its own connected-universe model, or if each season will stand alone.

Now, it seems that Marvel wants to see how well Serial Box’s method of storytelling will fit its characters. There have been plenty of prose novelizations of Marvel’s characters over the years, but they’ve never really caught on with audiences in the same ways that Star Wars novels have. Serial Box’s model feels like an ideal fit: a way to tell an ongoing, long-form story that’s more akin to a comic series than a regular novel. It seemed to work nicely for Netflix and its own constellation of projects (until they were all canceled).

While the comic book world is used to long-running, serialized stories, this partnership is the latest bit of experimentation from Marvel. The last decade has shown that the company has become more than just a comic book publisher: it’s a full-blown content studio, and has been branching out beyond the comics medium into film, television, and audio. One project that feels similar to this is last year’s Wolverine podcast, The Long Night (and forthcoming second season, The Lost Trail.) Last year, the author of that project, Benjamin Percy, told The Verge that Marvel had been “intrigued” by the possibilities that audio afforded them, and wanted to see if a superhero story would work. “We weren’t looking to reinvent the wheel, we wanted to do what worked.” Now, it seems that Marvel is interested in seeing where else its characters and superhero stories will work: as a serialized, long-form novel.