If you love comics just for their stories and characters and are not necessarily caring about having a physical collection of comics, you just want to read them. Have I news for you. Venture on over to Marvel.com and go to the Digital Comics section. Now this is a section I had seen on their site on past visits and just assumed it was for buying comics for ones kindle or nook or something where you would by the individual comic much like you would at a comic book store.
My assumption was completely wrong. What this is, is either a monthly or annual fee to view thousands of marvel comics uploaded from their paper pages to digital format. And you get to view all of the comics you want. Allow me to break it down for you numerically. For the year subscription to this service it costs you $59.88 which is on a reoccurring charge so remember to cancel before the year is over should you pick it up but decide not to continue with it. For this $59.88 which equates to $4.99 a month. You get the roughly 9,000 comics already uploaded at your finger tips, as well as the ones that are being uploaded on a daily basis. They roughly upload 25 comics a week (5 per business day), thus 100 comics or more a month. Just the 100 comics in a month for the price of $4.99 is awesome to me where the norm for comics these days for a single, what 28 page comic? is $3.99.
In the interest of writing an informed unbiased(lol, If you know me, you know I'm never unbiased when it comes to Marvel) opinion of the service I must admit there are 2 distinct drawbacks or should I say let downs to this service.1. Of the 9,000 comics there is not many complete series. Let me give you an example of I mean by this. Lets take say The X-Men, specifically the series now known as The Uncanny X-men there are 534 issues I believe at the time of writing this, maybe 535 or 536 stop nitpicking nerds. Point is there are a lot. What you get in the digital comics is Uncanny X-Men #1(1963) - #66(1970) then it jumps to#94(1975) - #153(1982)(this includes the Phoenix Saga!) skips a few more to #167(1983) and this is where it started to get really spotty.
See its not like they upload huge sections at a time. What they seem to do is almost randomly pick a 5 comics a day from the past 50 years and upload them. Now they are starting to keep the randomizing down and doing chunks. They also are making certain days for certain series, I.E. Monday is Spider-man day, Tuesday is Iron Man day, Wed is X-men day and so on. Although this still does not completely take out the randomness because sometimes they still throw in a comic that has nothing to do with that series.
My example will be "X-MEN WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 21" they uploaded 4 Deadpools which is very much a X-men character but then for the 5th comic uploaded Avengers #5(2010). Which obviously has nothing to do with the X-men in general except Wolverine is an Avenger again, but come on, Ironman, Thor or Spider-man day could have worked just fine, give me more X-men comics! .. Oh sorry, got a little ranty there.and2. They don't upload the Very most recent issues. I.E. its 2011 and they are starting to upload 2010 comics now. If this horrible? No there are obvious sales reasons for this, and there are so many past comics they still have to upload it will take years to catch up if it at all can be.
Conclusion: If you are just getting into comics, this is a must have service to get, or If you are an old fan but have stopped buying comics, pick it up and catch up and read back, adventures await. Its also worth noting they have a free preview to see how it works and what it looks like. So if you are on the fence check that out.
My assumption was completely wrong. What this is, is either a monthly or annual fee to view thousands of marvel comics uploaded from their paper pages to digital format. And you get to view all of the comics you want. Allow me to break it down for you numerically. For the year subscription to this service it costs you $59.88 which is on a reoccurring charge so remember to cancel before the year is over should you pick it up but decide not to continue with it. For this $59.88 which equates to $4.99 a month. You get the roughly 9,000 comics already uploaded at your finger tips, as well as the ones that are being uploaded on a daily basis. They roughly upload 25 comics a week (5 per business day), thus 100 comics or more a month. Just the 100 comics in a month for the price of $4.99 is awesome to me where the norm for comics these days for a single, what 28 page comic? is $3.99.
In the interest of writing an informed unbiased(lol, If you know me, you know I'm never unbiased when it comes to Marvel) opinion of the service I must admit there are 2 distinct drawbacks or should I say let downs to this service.1. Of the 9,000 comics there is not many complete series. Let me give you an example of I mean by this. Lets take say The X-Men, specifically the series now known as The Uncanny X-men there are 534 issues I believe at the time of writing this, maybe 535 or 536 stop nitpicking nerds. Point is there are a lot. What you get in the digital comics is Uncanny X-Men #1(1963) - #66(1970) then it jumps to#94(1975) - #153(1982)(this includes the Phoenix Saga!) skips a few more to #167(1983) and this is where it started to get really spotty.
See its not like they upload huge sections at a time. What they seem to do is almost randomly pick a 5 comics a day from the past 50 years and upload them. Now they are starting to keep the randomizing down and doing chunks. They also are making certain days for certain series, I.E. Monday is Spider-man day, Tuesday is Iron Man day, Wed is X-men day and so on. Although this still does not completely take out the randomness because sometimes they still throw in a comic that has nothing to do with that series.
My example will be "X-MEN WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 21" they uploaded 4 Deadpools which is very much a X-men character but then for the 5th comic uploaded Avengers #5(2010). Which obviously has nothing to do with the X-men in general except Wolverine is an Avenger again, but come on, Ironman, Thor or Spider-man day could have worked just fine, give me more X-men comics! .. Oh sorry, got a little ranty there.and2. They don't upload the Very most recent issues. I.E. its 2011 and they are starting to upload 2010 comics now. If this horrible? No there are obvious sales reasons for this, and there are so many past comics they still have to upload it will take years to catch up if it at all can be.
Conclusion: If you are just getting into comics, this is a must have service to get, or If you are an old fan but have stopped buying comics, pick it up and catch up and read back, adventures await. Its also worth noting they have a free preview to see how it works and what it looks like. So if you are on the fence check that out.
