Original Marvel Comics Going Online 172
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."
No downloading? (Score:5, Funny)
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Works with everything I've tried it on.
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In this situation, a man would walk up to the front door of marvel's HQ, debate the morale issue of breaking in, and, depending on who wins the argument, would break in or piss on the door handle and leave.
A geek would do the following: use wireshark to see how it is requested. It is probably just tunneling it over HTTP/HTTPS to avoid firewalls from breaking the flash file. If it is http, no brainer. Look at the requests, find the patterns, write your script.
If it is HTTPS
Re:No downloading? (Score:5, Informative)
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I have often thought that I would be very interested in a subscription service for comics, but now wit
Re:No downloading? (Score:4, Informative)
Plus, once you have 500 comics in PDF format, they just scream to be put onto a mobile device, or eBook reader, but I haven't figured this part out yet. Maybe I can load a few issues at a time onto a flash card and read them from my OLPC =D
Re:No downloading? (Score:5, Informative)
Ahhhhh!
PDF is a horrible format for comics, unless you intend to print them, and you should only think about doing that if you access to a very high quality printer designed specifically for this kind of work.
Scene rips of comics use the excellent Comic Book Archive file [wikipedia.org] format, which is an archive (usually ZIP or RAR) with an image file (usually JPEG) for each page of the comic. The archive is typically renamed with a different extension to identify that it is meant to be viewed sequentially (.cbr for RAR archives and
Viewing comics on a laptop can be great, especially if the laptop is widescreen - you simply rotate the desktop 90 degrees and you've got the perfect aspect ratio for comic pages. I regularly read comics on my laptop fullscreen at 800 (width) x 1280 (height).
I imagine it would be great on a machine like the XO because the screen folds right over, giving you a very convenient read.
DjVu? (Score:2)
How does DjVu [wikipedia.org] compare to CDisplay's ZIP/RAR archives?
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CBR/CBZ archives are RAR/ZIP archives containing any image format you can read
in your preferred viewer. If CDisplay/Comix/whatever supports DjVu, the CBR could
easily contain that.
Tagging (Score:2)
DjVu can also contain an OCR layer. I'm looking for a time past CDisplay's "dumb" mode, where we can run OCR and hand enter character tags with dialog. Make the archives searchable. It would be cool to be able to do a search for some combination of heroes and villains or specific dialog that would let me open that actual page. Kind of the way text-based subtitles were added to DIVX rips of DVDs.
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I've never used DjVu, nor seen archived comics using that format.
However, based on the wiki, it does seem to be superior, if indeed it can compress a color comic page to "40-70kB". As the wiki states, around 500kB is standard for comic rips (unless you're one of the super-anal collecters that do lossless PNG rips of their stuff, as well as buying an extra copy to keep in mylar on acid-free paper), so the format looks interesting.
However, one of the pr
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All you need is a minimum of security through obscurity on your product and most people will either pay for it o
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Those old nearly dead cartoon characters have no where nea
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Re:No downloading? (Score:5, Insightful)
I was almost done with Judge Dredd complete run with Demonoid went down.
Why mess with a page at a time when you can get gigabytes.
The media companies are overpricing this service.
They need to charge a low price for "any time, reliable" download access.
$9.99 for that amount of content is a joke.
It reminds me of when I used to work in long distance billing software.
Cost of the call... $.011 cents
Cost of billing the call $3.75
Same thing here-- the cost of simply putting the content up on a server is probably under $1000 and any money above bandwidth costs would be pure profit. However, the effort of surrounding it with DRM probably cost $100k in analysis, salaries, extra DRM servers, licenses, etc.
Read all comics for free with no DRM (Score:2)
My favourite place for comic downloads is zcultfm.com. Get yourself a membership there and check the "newest submissions" forum every day. You'll never lack for comics again.
Or, if you don't want to bother with that, just go to the bittorent site of your choice and type in "dcp" for "digital comics preservation". You'll see weekly packs of new releases there.
To read the nifty
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Re:Comics will be on Bittorrent anyway (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Comics will be on Bittorrent anyway (Score:5, Funny)
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Hell, I was out of comics for 20 years or more (Heavy Metal excepted) and this is what got me back in.
Thing is, I have bought over $4K worth of Ultimate collections (X-men, Spider-man, House of M, Civil War, etc.) because I want the quality books in my own hands. So if Marvel doesn't over-react, I think they have nothing to fear from those of us who want the re
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Ha, I am 41. I started collecting the X-Man again after I searched in 2006 after the comic heroes that I once had 30 years ago. Once I figured out it where the X-Man, I had to look for what I could get. It took some time before I discovered Marvel Masterworks. A bit pricey, but I can afford it, and like you say, somewhat neater than buying the comics themselves.
However, I like to scrounge around in second-hand book shops and online, and I am collecting the Dutch versions of the X-Man. It takes time and pat
Can't Be Downloaded? (Score:1)
Re:Can't Be Downloaded? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Can't Be Downloaded? (Score:5, Funny)
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Hmm... (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, from the article:
Even as their creations -- from Iron Man to Wonder Woman
Ahem.
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When I was around 10 years old, someone got me a subscription for the reprinting of the fir
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As for the digital back prints, I find that a very fascinating prospect. I was always curious about how those original series kicked off but never so curious to spend the time and
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There's no reason to think that comics will stop being published. They clearly sell enough of them to make money even though the number of people buying them today isn't a tenth of the numbers from 20 years ago.
There's nothing bad about this idea (having started a subscription last night, I
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In the US. Many other places in the world comics sell just as well. In Europe even small markets like Norway (4.5 million people) have comics that far outsell most US comics, though US style superhero comics don't appear to do that well despite much better presentation (both Marvel and DC comics get republished in Norway as magazines with anywhere from around 6
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yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
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-A
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Out of curiosity, did you try rotating the PDF 90 degrees, so that the long axis of the page was along the long axis of the monitor, then rotating the laptop?
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With comics, you are very much correct. I tried reading some comics (manga) on a 15" laptop... It was the most portable thing I had that was big enough. A PDA is way, way too small, and sitting at a computer to read is annoying. I came to the conclusion that a $2000 tablet PC (possibly a ModBook Pro) would be the best solution... And that it wasn't worth spending $2000+ to read a few comics.
For comics to look right on a computer screen, they'd have to be able to a
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Old comics (Score:2)
I think the older comics, before they split up all over the place.
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Crossover issues
If they want to do a crossover issue, they should publish the story in both product lines. Then, maybe if I'm interested in the other characters / storyline, I'll start following the other series.
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Human Torch, meet Server Torch (Score:5, Funny)
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No demand for the newer stuff. (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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I'd agree with you on the New Mutants, but I still remember Uncanny 175; the last issue of the X-Men I bought. It's the one where the Jean Grey clone (Madeline Pryor?) turned out to be another bloody Phoenix. X-Men 137 (I think) was one of the finest stories ever to come out of marvel, and by resurrecting, reinventing and cloning Phoenix (initially for the poxy X-Factor, and later for other inane reasons), Marvel served only to piss off its loyal fans
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At that time, Madelyne Pryor was just a girl that looked like Jean Grey. Frankly, I thought that was pretty interesting in and of itself.
Madelyne Pryor actually being a clone was a later retcon, if I recall correctly.
good way to catch up (Score:2, Interesting)
$10 pm (Score:5, Interesting)
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I still do get graphic novels from time to time. The bonus is that the good stuff usually gets into a GN.
If I had time, $10/month is a deal.
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Not gonna happen (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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You're obviously not the target market (Score:2)
If I had the comic-book fan mentality, I'd be really excited by this. After the first Spider-Man movie came out, I was sufficiently impressed to go out and buy some reprints of the early comic books.
Two big disappointments: the reprints are available only as line drawings, which destroys a lot of the impact of this kind of comic. And the stories were just plain dumb. (I mean jeez, they show a Mercury space capsule flying around like a
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You missed my point (Score:2, Interesting)
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 12
Sounds like a dare (Score:2)
get thee to http://komics-live.com/SMF/index.php (Score:1, Interesting)
My new comic book villain (Score:1, Funny)
It's already been done -- for free. (Score:4, Informative)
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Either your jedi mind trick worked, or your database met Thor's hammer. The website only lists 6 comics (which I've never heard of) as freely available. Where's X-Men? Ala Hocus Pocus? or Subscription Locus?
"young people"? not the ones I know (Score:2)
I leave them laying out for my grandkids (10-13yrs old) to read at their leisure.
I thought they would go "WOW! COMICS!" and then curl up in a corner to read for hours and hours....
They browsed through them, then left them to go do something else.
If they go on the computer, they want to play games or watch funny things on YouTube.
"Hey Kids, look! Here are some static images on the computer! Look!"
I don't know, maybe there is something wr
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The old comics are terrible. (Score:2)
Missing their market (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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They can make money via advertising, via "premium" accounts with value-added featuers, via merchandising (where the money goes to the author, but they get a cut), etc. That seems to be the model that a lot of web comics follow. The problem is that the barrier to entry is still particularly high. Imagine if the barriers
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On the contrary, "comics fans who don't already download" is probably 98% of the comics market. These are precisely the people they're going after. Most people don't download because they don't know it exists, it is inconvenient, or they don't want to
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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.
A community-created standard would maybe be less technically advanced due to funding issues, but I think that in the end, they will probably more user friendly.
I would prefer to watch movies as bundles of video, sound and a wide range of subtitles.
Let me play a Japanese movie with Spanish dubbing and Norwegian subtitles. And no, I don't want every single language on earth encoded into a single file. Can we get some modularity, please? I want to keep some 3-5 languages to cover anything in my family, but no
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PDF would have had strikes against it due to the overhead. When the standards were established it would have still been Acrobat 4 and 5, which had big overhead at the time. Also, the community has always had a Linux and Mac component. Acrobat has not always been available for all.
Tiff is just a brutal format. Its compatibility betwee
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the interesting thing is: (Score:1)
Starting to make sense now... (Score:1)
Should they do it for free? (Score:3, Insightful)
If they put up the old comics for free, maybe ad supported, it might generate more interest in the movies.
Beating Piracy (Score:2)
I personally think it's great, and plan to buy in. It won't put a huge dent in comic piracy, as it won't in
Content creators: (Score:4, Insightful)
"...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.
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Part of the problem is the bean counters. They need real data, real numbers which they can then aggregate and present to shareholders and investors and use to help s
These were all on CDROM recently (Score:2)
DVD set (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Flame on! (Score:2)
Only six months??? (Score:2)
Only six months?
C'mon, guys, we follow a strict "OYATM" policy to let the publishers get their fair share! Let's not go undercutting...
Oh, waitasec... Heh. Nevermind.
More seriously, what gives with only putting "teaser" issues online? As with almost all traditional media, they just don't seem to grasp that I can already obtain their entire back-catalog in high-res (higher than the original printing, in most
Re:no thanks marvel, you blew your several chances (Score:5, Interesting)
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.Re: (Score:2)
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I think you misunderstood my comment. I *love* Vertigo comics. My point is that DC trumpets their big flagship titles while Vertigo quietly works miracles in the corner.
Actually, Hellblazer (and Sandman) are DCU, don't know about the rest. DC tries to to handwaving to make people forget it most of the time, but once in a while a good writer manages to sneak so
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Re:They really think this will grow their readersh (Score:2)
$4.99*12/2 = £30. Sounds good to me.
I'll bite if they can quickly build up their portfolio so that I can catch up on the last 20 years of comics that Ive missed. And if the format is c
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He was the last artist on the classic X-Men before they went on hiatus -- yes, folks, before the late Dave Cockrum and Len Wein brought them back, and before Chris Claremont, Cockrum, John Byrne and Terry Austin turned them into the hottest thing since Superman, the biggest prize puppy in the entire Marvel kennel had been cancelled.