Wild Cards: The Hard Call
Author Daniel Abraham penned a 2008 six-issue Wild Cards comics limited series, published by Dabel Brothers Productions. The first issue of the series was issued simultaneously with two variant covers, and the sixth and final issue was later published by Dynamic Comics. Dynamic then collected the miniseries as a single hardcover graphic novel in early 2011; this second series was called George R. R. Martin's Wild Cards: The Hard Call.
It is an original story and not an adaptation of any of the short stories.
This story contains the following tropes:
- Broken Ace: A literal case with the Sleeper.
- Cursed with Awesome: Deconstructed. Alex has superpowers but they came at the cost of his brother's life and the life of almost everyone else at his school.
- Fantastic Racism: Only a minor feature of this story.
- Foreshadowing: Kira's act of sprouting wings indicates she was becoming a butterfly.
- Fridge Horror: How exactly would Kira and Alex become intimate?
- Heroic Sociopath: Simon.
- The Sleeper himself, to a lesser extent.
- Jumped Off the Slippery Slope: Fallon.
- Knight Templar: Fallon.
- Lost Aesop: The story is about Jokers and whether it's worth it to transform back into a human being with the sometimes lethal Trump virus. What it's trying to say about beauty, society, and medical risks is unclear.
- Redemption Equals Death: Simon.