Nelson Ribeiro, an editor in our collections department and one awesome dude, provided some info on The Blue Ear and how the project came about.

If you’re unfamiliar with The Blue Ear, it’s a character we created in response to a letter from a mom who wanted to show her hearing-impaired son Anthony that even super heroes need to wear hearing aids. You can read all about The Blue Ear on Nelson’s Marvel.com blog, but here’s a bit from Nelson himself:

I was so moved by the story, there was no way I WASN’T going to draw something! As I was reading Anthony’s story, the name for his device just kept sticking out to me. “Blue Ear.” It just sounded like a super hero name. All that was missing was the, “The” in front of it. So I went home and drew out a few sketches of what “The Blue Ear” would look like. From the story, I knew Anthony didn’t want to wear his device, so I wanted to make sure that The Blue Ear’s listening device was very prominent and very important to his ability as a super hero.  I even tried to write all the captions in a way which would focus on how important it is for the Blue Ear to wear his device. Hopefully, Anthony would also realize how important it is for him to wear it everyday as well!

We’ll have more about this on Marvel.com next week.