Marvel starts putting comics online

Tuesday, November 13th, 2007

Well, it looks like Marvel has bungled its first day of putting comics on-line. It was already a popular site, but they just could not handle the demand generated by a USA Today article about their new on-line offering of tons and tons of old comic books, now readable online, through an annual or monthly subscription service. Meanwhile, there has also been plenty of grousing.

A lot of people looked at Marvel’s new effort as a way for old media to make a little more money on-line, while still protecting their old media (that is, paper) niche. The fact that they weren’t ready for a deluge of hits certainly supports that case. I can’t believe they weren’t ready for the server attention to really, really spike. They weren’t.

Which sucks, because they are probably missing a lot of potential new subscribes who won’t pony up the cash once they get a chance to think about it or read some of the blogs (like mine) making fun of them for screwing up.

That said, I’m really writing this to take the broader view.

I participated in a little of the conversation at THE BEAT and looked at what folks were saying on Newsarama, too.

A lot of people seem to think that with people already willing to do the work to scan pages for free (why they do this, I have no idea. It must be very time consuming), no one is going to want to pay to use Marvel’s service. Moreover, most people seem to think that the illegally scanned versions are more readable than Marvel’s. I haven’t really read scanned comicbooks much, but I can tell you that I was not very impressed with the level of quality on Mavel’s site, before it went down.

That said, there’s a decent chance I’ll pony up the $60 to read the stuff on-line for a year. Mainly, because there’s probably well over $60 worth of material that I would be able to avoid buying as a Trade Paperback or in Quarter Bins. I mean, in my view, $60 is just two or three trade paperbacks off the shelves in the comic book shop. Yeah, yeah… believe me, the price of trades is too high, too, but that’s another topic for another day.

That’s right… I want to avoid buying the paper copies. A lot of people on-line have been talking about how nice it is to own these books. How people want to own them. I agree, in a lot of cases. But, look, maybe most of these guys just haven’t been collecting as long as I have. If you saw how many comic books I have there’s no way you’d think “more is better.” There’s a lot of things out there that I’d just like to read once and I doubt I’ll ever read them again.

For example, The House of M. The story that killed off most of the mutants. I’d like to read it. I don’t need to own it. I just want a better sense of what happened. I know the basic story, but I don’t have a feel for it. Clue me in. Let me skim it on a website.

That said, there are three problems I’ll have to overcome before I can get into this on-line comics thing:

1) Comics don’t look good as a full page on a computer screen, so you’ve really got to Marvel’s little “Smart Panel” innovation (which I daresay has applications for online catalogs, too). The Smart Panel gives you the Zoom you need to make out the letters, but it’s a little tricky. Can I master it? Will I have the patience to try.

2) Comics laying next to my bed cry out to be read. Comics sitting in an abstract Internet Universe don’t. I’m likely to forget they are there and not keep up. Of course, that’s how I used to feel about blogs, and now I can’t wait for the latest post over at Livin’ on the Vedge.

3) I’ll miss seeing the whole page. You can sort of get an idea, but bouncing around through zooms is likely to be annoying.

All and all, comics in Flash just don’t look as good to me and I daresay that they never will. I still don’t really get into webcomics and I hate the look of comics that computers have been too heavily involved in (I’d rather they weren’t involved at all).

It’s easy to make the case, from the other side, that people had similar complaints when Apple launched Itunes. I only recently became an Itunes user, and I think Itunes stinks in a lot of ways, too. That said, I still use it. I use it because I don’t want to hunt for music for free elsewhere and I don’t really like to steal. On the other hand, music is a little easier to manage on-line than comics are. It’s much more of a square peg into a round hole issue, but I still support Marvel’s attempt.

Moreover, I can tell you the one objection that a lot of people have made on-line that I could care less about: the fact that you can’t download. OK, I guess it would be nice to load a bunch of comics up on my laptop and read them on my next plane trip, but, mostly, a downloaded comic does not make me feel like I “own” it. It’s not the same experience at all as having a book. A download would just be more clutter on my harddrive. Apparently, some people like the feel of having that junk in their computer. I don’t want it, for the most part. Leaving it in someone else’s storage shed is fine by me.

And I won’t miss paying for shipping, either.

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