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Original Marvel Comics Going Online
An anonymous reader writes "In a tentative move onto the internet, 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. The publisher is hoping fans will be intrigued enough about the origins of those characters to shell out $9.99 a month, or $4.99 monthly with a year-long commitment. For that price, they'll be able to poke through, say, the first 100 issues of Stan Lee's 1963 creation "Amazing Spider-Man" at their leisure, along with more recent titles like "House of M" and "Young Avengers."
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.
Dark Horse Comics now puts its vibrant and large images of 'Dark Horse Presents' up for free viewing on its MySpace site.
DC Comics has also put issues up on MySpace, and recently launched the competition-based Zuda Comics, which encourages users to rank each other's work, as a way to tap into the expanding Web comic scene."
"Comics can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded" - except for the fact that they have already been downloaded. Print screen, anyone?
bomb the us up set someone
Marvel is trying to compete with the torrent community in this, since an increasing amount of older comics can now be downloaded through Bittorrent.
In the long term, this is of course a good thing. However, the idea that issues 1-100 of X-Men will encourage anyone to take it up is, at best, optimistic. Let's face it; they may have been good at the time, but nowadays they're extremely dated. Of course, it does have Iceman looking like a snowman and Cyclops being called 'Slim' which might be good for a laugh, but overall I don't think they'll encourage many people.
Oh, from the article:
Even as their creations -- from Iron Man to Wonder Woman
Ahem.
Interesting concept of putting comic books online. But nothing beats having a hard copy. That just takes me back to being a kid and getting excited when a new issue came out.
The game.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The comics sucking too much for anyone to bother.
I like basketball!!1!
As with everything else, the older stuff looks great because we forget about all the junk that no one ever bought. That being said, there is some classic Chris Claremont stuff and John Byre stuff from the 80s that I keep on reading even now.
.cbr format from a .torrent site. :-)
The first 50 issues of New Mutants. Uncanny X-Men 100-200, Fantastic 4 140-175. Good stuff all around.
That being said, I have all of these in print and have no moral reason against downloading them in
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I've been out of comics since the X-Men animated series. Ever since I started playing City of Heroes, I've been wanting to get back into them, already bought a lot of Transmetropolitan. Here's hoping they'll eventually put up something like Civil War, so I can see it and hate myself for reading it.
$10 per month seems a little excessive to me. In fact this looks more like a cash in than a 'let's get a new generation interested'. The only people willing to pay that sort of cash are Baby Boomers reliving their childhoods.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Look, if they want to promote interest in their current work by getting us hooked on the classics, great. But that's marketing. And they want to charge us for their marketing?
These things are ancient and should be in the public domain anyways.
And guess what... if they were, they'd already be promoting more intrest in their current work!
Does your significant other love shoes?
ComicMix.com - no drm, back issues, original issues, solid community, etc.
Marvel, and comics in general, have a problem here. It is the same problem that the other entertainment industries are facing. Scanned comics are already a reality online. They are on the torrent sites right beside the music and movies.
However, one thing that makes digital comics a little different from other media is that the community has had to create their own file formats, standards and viewing software. While the means to play movies and music files have been built in for as long as they have been technically possible, there is no long standing computer format designed to show a series of pictures. So, the community has created their own standards in using re-named zip and rar files and viewing applications created to display them.
So, now Marvel is trying to get into the digital market. They have a problem here though. The market already has some well defined segments. The first is the people who already read comics on the computer. This is going to be a hard segment to win over. Not only do they have their own practises and conventions, but their selection is up to date and in-depth. 99.9% of the (surviving) comics ever produced by Marvel or DC are available, from WWII right up to the new releases each Wednesday. Trying to compete with this using not simply a limited, protected format but one that is incomparable will be vary hard.
The next market segment is comic fans who do no already download. This is going to be a small market. It is limited to those who are not digitally inclined and thus poor targets for any digital service, or who have chosen not to download for various reasons.
The final market available are people who are not currently into comics. Unfortunately for Marvel, traditionally when launching a new service the smallest returns are going to come from outside the established fanbase. And those who become interested are likely to divert to the 'pirate' comics scene if only to avoid having all the surprises spoiled six months before they can read them.
Is this worth doing? Absolutely. I suspect that it won't take much interest for Marvel to at least break even. Costs on this have to be minimal, and much of it can be written off as basic archiving work that is necessary anyways or possibly already done for other projects in the past. It is also good to see them start to look at new distribution channels. As an industry, they have been fossilized for the past 20 years.
Still, you would think that after a watching each other, one of the various entertainment industries would work with, or at least follow, the communities when it came to digital media.
I don't really care. But, it seems to me that the real money is in the movies.
If they put up the old comics for free, maybe ad supported, it might generate more interest in the movies.
This post reminds me of a DC panel at one of the Cons where a fan asked some DC execs "How's it feel to be whipping Marvel's ass?" (during the post-Infinite Crisis DC sales implosion) and was promptly laughed out of the room by the entire audience. Seriously, besides JSA and Hellblazer (which is Vertigo, so it doesn't count), there's not much worth reading on the DC side of things. Well, except the couple times a year an All-Star Superman sneaks out...
Even assuming that were true, then at least they still remember the damn art, unlike most DC stuff. And to say the company that's printing Daredevil/Captain America/Hulk/New Avengers/Iron Fist/New Universal is the one which has forgotten how to write an engaging story is the same as saying "I don't (ever) read any Marvel books but I'm going to give you my opinion anyway." I'll take the company with Bendis/Brubaker/Ellis anyday. See, funny thing is, I work at a local comic shop on occasion. Spend a lot of time there when I'm not working. More adults do buy DC comics, than kids, true, but that's because no one's buying DC comics. Meanwhile both adults and kids are snatching up Marvel titles so fast I'm actually having trouble getting some of my regulars (boss stole an Iron Fist out of a customer folder for me this past week, for instance...) At least they're not strangling under some parent company that won't let them do anything interesting with their characters out of fear of ruining the movie properties based on them (ala Warner Brothers and Batman). Give me a break.Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Can you GET THE FUCK OVER YOURSELVES?!?!?
"...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... For that price, they'll be able to poke through, say, the first 100 issues of Stan Lee's 1963 creation "Amazing Spider-Man" at their leisure... Comics can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded..."
So: the shit is forty-four years old. What's the big fucking deal if people print it? Or download them so they can read them while on a flight? You don't have to give up your copyrights. It's not like you're releasing the characters into the public domain and all of a sudden you'll see stickers on the backs of Chevy pickups depicting Spider-Man pissing on a Ford logo. (Not that copyright laws have prevented Bill Watterson's 'Calvin' from being abused as such anyway.) You're not making it available to all to print infinite copies--just your typical "personal use" type of thing. And what if people do start printing them, binding them, and selling them? Guess what: that means there's a market, shitheads! Print NICE collections at REASONABLE prices and watch them fly out the door.
I can only assume that Stan Lee and the others learned a lot about their craft by a) reading old stories and myths and b) looking at old art. What if the complete works of van Gogh, da Vinci, Homer,* Shakespeare, and all the rest were under such draconian control? Would you even be an artist if Sonny Bono had been alive in 1000 BC? Why even charge at all, you hypocritical fucks? You've already made some money once. Releasing them for free might actually grow the comic audience. That would inspire some new fans (and probably some new artists.) Rather than always trying to get a bigger slice of the pie, why don't you try to make the whole pie bigger?
"The publisher is hoping fans will be intrigued enough about the origins of those characters to shell out $9.99 a month, or $4.99 monthly with a year-long commitment."
Consider the other angles. I am not a huge comic fan. But, it's a big part of our culture and yes, I would kind of like to see how Spidey, the X-Men, and all the rest came about. If I did, maybe I'd become a fan and start buying the current stuff. But I do not care enough to pay and jump through a lot of hoops. So I'll continue to be the non-comic-buyer that I am.
It's a very simple question: do you want to a) gain new fans or b) milk your existintg fan base? I think we all know the answer. Probably because that's an easier sell to the bean-counters: rather than possibly making a huge pile of money by exponentially increasing the market, they'd rather just have a smaller but predictable amount--"Lucas has shown us the way. X% of existing comic buyers will pay $Y per month for whatever we shove down their throats. That will net us $Z in 2008."
Also: "can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded"? I guess these douchebags never heard of screenshots, either.
* no, not Simpson, I mean the old Greek guy.
PS: sorry for all the swearing, but this stuff really, really, really pisses me off.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I know they also have X-Men, Iron Man, FF, Captain America sets and probably more. Seems much more economical than renting them for a monthly fee.
I meant that discussion deserves a thread of its own and shouldn't derail this thread.
Now in order to get this post marked off-topic, I need to give my opinion.
Personally, I think "a limited time" in a legal sense is sometime less than the maximum human lifespan. The oldest verified living person was Sarah Knauss who died at 119 years of age just two days before the Y2K scare. From time to time there are claims of people living past 120. If I were a court, I would immediately strike down anything over 120 years as clearly "not limited."
Below that, there is a lot of wiggle room for the lawyers. A "fair" copyright limit would be the longer of the "average remaining lifetime" of creators, that is, the average time it takes between the time a work is created and the time the person dies, or the life of the individual creator, whichever is longer. For corporate or collaborative works, use the "average remaining lifetime."
The "average remaining lifetime" is probably something on the order of 40-60 years, more or less.
A simplistic copyright would be a flat 50 years.
Of course, there is also the whole problem of orphan works, which is also deserving of a thread of its own.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
with assistance and intial input from Jack Kirby.