Marvel launches Digital Comics Unlimited archive
At Marvel.com, you can now read comics online! From the AP story:
Marvel is putting some of its older comics online Tuesday, hoping to reintroduce young people to the X-Men and Fantastic Four by showcasing the original issues in which such characters appeared.
It's a tentative move onto the Internet: Comics can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded, and new issues will only go online at least six months after they first appear in print.
Still, it represents perhaps the comics industry's most aggressive Web push yet. Even as their creations -- from Iron Man to Wonder Woman -- become increasingly visible in pop culture through new movies and video games, old-school comics publishers rely primarily on specialized, out-of-the-way comic shops for distribution of their bread-and-butter product.
I'd love to weigh in on the service, but it seems like Marvel failed to anticipate the traffic this would generate, as their site is either timing out or throwing random SQL errors. I can tell that it's a subscription service, however, not a free one. It looks like you get a certain number of free samples, but membership is $9.99 per month or $59.88 annually. I certainly hope they beef up their server capabilities before too many people buy in.
If you'd like to try to check it out, visit Marvel Comics Unlimited. Let us know what you think!
This service sounds perfect for me to catch up on some Marvel comics for free. Are there other services that are similar?
The original article I found gave a link to Zuma comics and DC comics, so I guess they're doing something similar.
If they are going to make this work it needs to be user friendly. I'm not the best with PC's, but I am damn sure not the worse either, so I don't know if it
s just my pc or what, but I can't seem to get the pages to do the smart zoom or whatever it's called. They should take a hint from the pirates and try to do it a way that if already familiar to the audience they are trying to encourage to stop pirating. Then again, if I already have a hard copy, I feel it's my right to be able to download a copy for my hard drive.
Damn these typo's. Been doing that all day. Why must that wretched "apostrophe" be so close to the "enter" key.
Rhetorical question. But my view on this news stands.