14 DAY TRIAL // Electronic Arts may be a game publisher, but when a company becomes as big as it has, money is never enough. So EA expands its line of products with comic additions. Forming a partnership with IDW Publishing, the company plans to create two comic books inspired from video games. The Army of Two and Dragon Age franchises are the ones that will be expanding with products in the brand-new format.
The first issue of the Army of Two comic book will be penned by Peter Milligan and drawn by Dexter Soy, and it will take place after the action of the Army of Two video game and before the upcoming sequel of the title, The 40th Day. The comic will be a monthly print under IDW's new EA Comics department, and it will be in a classic paper release available in comic stores but also in a digital format, available as iPhone and iPod Touch downloads on Apple's iTunes store.
As for Dragon Age: Origins, no in-house artists have been announced but it did receive an author, Orson Scott Card, the man behind the sci-fi classic Ender's Game, who has experience with the comic book universe in the form of the Ultimate Iron Man comic but with the gaming industry as well through the Xbox Live Arcade Shadow Complex.
Dragon Age and Army of Two have already left the video game territory and expanded into other domains. The rights to create an AoT movie have already been purchased by Universal Pictures since last year and Dragon Age has already been transformed into a novel and even received a tabletop role-playing game release. The follow-up on Army of Two, The 40th Day, will come out for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable on January 12, 2010 while Dragon Age will become available a little faster. On November 3 the PC and Xbox 360 versions will be ready, but the PS3 one will have to wait another month.