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."

Comments

No downloading?

[HalifaxRage]

"Comics can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded" - except for the fact that they have already been downloaded. Print screen, anyone?

Re:No downloading?

[TheCycoONE]

Or use Mozilla's media properties to find the path to the image and then paste that into IE, right click and save to get the original. (I've noticed that sometimes a page of image data isn't recognized as an image in Mozilla but it is in IE.) Or submit a request over telnet and pipe the response into an appropriately named file. There is no way to provide content using existing cross-browser compatible web technologies which cannot be saved locally by a knowledgeable individual.

Re:Can't Be Downloaded?

[Funkcikle]

What's to stop people from screenshotting the pages and placing them into a pdf?

A visit from Dr.DMCA and his sidekick Kopyright Kid, of course.

Not gonna happen

[Womens Shoes]

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!

Re:no thanks marvel, you blew your several chances

[Chibi Merrow]

this company just wants money. ... they have stories run in multiple books to milk the cash cow even more.

Gee, DC would never do anything like that. DC invented the universe-wide crossover event spanning multiple titles. Such things have become summer fixtures for both companies.

their dated characters rehash the same stories over and over to infinity.

You mean like having WWII-era superheroes fighting a multiverse-shaking battle-to-end-all-battles? Yeah, never seen that before...

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...

they have forgotten about making a comic into a engaging story and relied upon art to sell the books.

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.

marvel attracts kids, dc keeps the adults.

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...)

the company has nothing left to offer and it has not created anything significant in decades.

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.