The AP is reporting that Marvel is planning to put old comics online for free for a small subscription fee, starting today! The goal is to boost kids' interest of Marvel properties through telling the origin stories of their favorite heroes, and get them to buy more comics.
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"You don't have that spinner rack of comic books sitting in the local five-and-dime any more," said Dan Buckley, president of Marvel Publishing. "We don't have our product intersecting kids in their lifestyle space as much as we used to."
Translate "kids' lifestyle space" into plain English and you get "the Internet." Marvel's two most prominent competitors currently offer online teasers designed to drive the sales of comics or book collections.
There will initially be 2,500 comics available, with another 20 released every week, all "virtual console"-like. Check them out at http://marvel.com/digitalcomics/ (probably later, when the site isn't giving a MySQL connection error).
Ooooo - Astonishing X-Men #1!
Last edited by Doctor Setebos; 11-13-2007 at 09:19 AM..
I just looked at the site, and unless I'm horribly confused, it's not free, it requires a subscription fee, although you can look at a free sample of 250 comics.
Nice, I was wondering when they would take the first steps towards digital. There are the DVD/CD compilations that you can buy in bookstores, but this is a significant number of comics available online for free.
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Why is 'abbreviated' such a long word?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Johnson
The dirty little secret of gaming is how much time you spend not having fun.
I just looked at the site, and unless I'm horribly confused, it's not free, it requires a subscription fee, although you can look at a free sample of 250 comics.
Yeah, I read part of the information wrong. The OP has been corrected.
Subscription fee? Not as interesting, and not as smart in my opinion.
Put the old stuff up there for free to increase interest in the old stuff and, as a result, drive sales of the new stuff.
The fee is foolish and will hamper the growth of the idea, I believe.
I couldn't agree more. That's part of the reason I was confused in the first place. I couldn't actually believe they were charging a monthly/yearly subscription fee for comics - some of which are decades old.
I hope this fails hard for Marvel and they see how stupid this idea is. Let's shine more light on the efforts over at Dark Horse Presents.
Hmmmm..... to be honest I'm tempted. This means I could read the original spider man comics and whatnot right? I've always wanted to but never actually spent the money to buy comics.
If it has a full search engine and sorting system then it will work nicely. This way someone can, when a new Marvel movie is announced, read up on who the heck somebody is ahead of time if they so desire, and Marvel can even guide users to their site to read up in the movie ads. E.g. who is Nightcrawler and how did he get that way?
If it has a full search engine and sorting system then it will work nicely. This way someone can, when a new Marvel movie is announced, read up on who the heck somebody is ahead of time if they so desire, and Marvel can even guide users to their site to read up in the movie ads. E.g. who is Nightcrawler and how did he get that way?
Only they'll be stunned and confused when they discover that the movie has decided to "recreate" the character into something more 12-19 tween/teen market friendly.
Hmm, does 21 years old still count as a "kid" nowadays? I never got into the whole comic book thing and I feel, deep down inside, that I have failed my nerd brethren by avoiding this particular medium. I very well could get into this, and a small subscription fee won't hamper me a bit. Getting all that stuff for free would seem like stealing.
Servers are up atm but whenever I try to register (£30 for a years access? Well worth it) I get told that the "username already exits"....damn me for trying such popular names as "dxrtz22kd" and "mrbandersnatch99".
Seriously though this is just the sort of thing they need to do if they want to bring us "old timers" back to the medium....well that and reducing the ***** price so that I can go out and buy 10-20 comics per week (like I used to do when I was a KID) without having to take out a second ***** ****** mortgage!
