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 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
good way to catch up (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:yeah (Score:2, Interesting)
-A
$10 pm (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was around 10 years old, someone got me a subscription for the reprinting of the first 12 X-Men comics. Even though some of it was dated (this was almost 15 years ago), I was still hooked and pretty soon I had subscriptions to the latest X-Men and FF comics. I think this is a great way for them to get new kids interested, and it's very low risk for them. All it costs is some scanning and a webserver.
My only hope is that this doesn't lead to the death of the physical copy of a comic book. I still go back every few years and read through my old collection, and the fun of reading a physical comic book never gets old.
get thee to http://komics-live.com/SMF/index.php (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:No downloading? (Score:2, Interesting)
I have often thought that I would be very interested in a subscription service for comics, but now with these complete packages the service would need to offer new comics to get me to subscribe. But if they did it, I'd be all over that as far as reading new monthly comics. I don't want to buy them and instead wait for trades, but it would be worth $5 a month to me to be able to read whatever comes out and follow along instead of spending $100+ a month on single issues and having to go into the comics shop every week.
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.
Re:No downloading? (Score:3, Interesting)
All you need is a minimum of security through obscurity on your product and most people will either pay for it or do without.
Re:Not gonna happen (Score:2, Interesting)
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:No downloading? (Score:2, Interesting)
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 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.
Re:Content creators: (Score:2, Interesting)
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 set milestones. The problem with "free" is that it's a gamble, and it's lacking the real numbers that they need. There's not a huge amount of data on it. I wrote an article on "Increasing Your Market With the Creative Commons" on the subject of books for Writing World, an established writing resource website. The article actually influenced the owner of the website to release a lot of her own content (hundreds of articles) under the Creative Commons.
One of the biggest questions I get in email though is what data there has been on this. Every few weeks I'll get someone emailing me telling me that they'd like to go the Creative Commons route but their publisher is hesitant, or wants numbers. Writing World has a bit of emphasis on self publishing, so hopefully people take note of the Creative Commons when licensing their work on Lulu.com and the like, but as for old school media outlets I think this is still a ways off. The only exception being Baen Books and the Baen Library, as mentioned in my article.
For those interested, article link: http://www.writing-world.com/rights/commons.shtml [writing-world.com]