They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. It’s a shame they didn’t get it right.
Several months after ComicMix started posting serialized new comics for free, several weeks after ComicMix started posting complete previously-published comics for free, and, what, about a year after Newsarama started posting Powers and Kabuki and other titles for free, our friends at Marvel Comics have started reprinting their classic fare online – for ten bucks a month.
"We did not want to get caught flat-footed with kids these days who have the tech that allows them to read comics in a digital format," Marvel president Dan Buckley told USA Today. "Our fan base is already on the Internet. It seemed like a natural way to go."
Well, Dan, welcome to the club. We’ve been saving you a seat for a while now. By the way, since you’re charging so much money for all this, how much cash do the writers and artists get?
DC Comics April 2012 Solicitations
PREVIEW: “Jim Henson’s Tale Of Sand”
DC Comics March 2012 Solicitations
Preview: “Darkwing Duck” #18 — Like A Fenton From The Ashes!
Preview: “Daredevil” #6
Preview: Betrayal Of The Planet Of The Apes #1
MICHAEL DAVIS: David
MINDY NEWELL: Great Books! And 1 Movie!
JOHN OSTRANDER: 101 Mistakes
MARC ALAN FISHMAN: Justice League Light Vs. Justice League Dark
MARTHA THOMASES: George Lucas, Black History, and African-American Comics
Dennis O’Neil – Sick, Sick, Sick
MIKE GOLD: Stupid Logo Tricks
REVIEW: “Wally Wood: Strange Worlds of Science Fiction”, by Glenn Hauman
REVIEWS: “Annie Hall” and “Manhattan”, by Robert Greenberger
REVIEW: “In Time”, by Robert Greenberger
REVIEW: “Bloom County: The Complete Library, Volume One: 1980-1982″ by Berkley Breathed, by Andrew Wheeler
MARC ALAN FISHMAN: Justice League Light Vs. Justice League Dark, by Marc Alan Fishman
Primeval Volume Three, by Robert Greenberger
Busting, by Robert Greenberger
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Robert Greenberger
Transformers: Dark of the Moon, by Robert Greenberger
Star Trek: The Next Generation – The Next Level, by Robert Greenberger
For ten dollars a month, one would hope that you could actually reach the website, too. I've been getting loading errors all day. You'd think the folks behind Spider-Man would be able to build a better web application.
You'd think the people who published Namor, The Sub-Mariner would know about scale.Don't get me started on Marvel outage puns…Anyway, the site seems to have recovered from its early struggles. Just wait until it gets Slashdotted or Dugg today.
They are definitely miles ahead of DC, whose Zuda line is more like an American Idol for web comics. When DC finally does something online with DC characters in it, I'll consider them to have a web comic presence. The closest thing I've seen them do was to put every #1 from their Vertigo line online as PDFs.Our own online comic reader is DRM-free, made purely in JavaScript. No PDFs, no Flash, no downloads. Plus we're open sourcing it.If you need to grow an audience from zero, you lower the barriers to entry. If you own several decades of characters, your legal team probably dictates what you can and cannot do DRM-wise.Again, it's a great first step for Marvel. It's tough for a big company with billions in intellectual property to do something that truly respects the audience.Interesting comment at the end about the creator fees. Having written hundreds of creator checks for online comics and having watched the Zuda launch be all about "what's the creator's cut?" I'm happy to see someone asking that about Marvel's efforts.
It's new media so they have to wait and see how much, if any, money actually comes in and — wait, that's what the Writer's Strike out in H'weird is about.Since THEY haven't decided that out there, I'm willing to bet that artists and writers in comics will get, oh, say NOTHING from the Big Two. It would be SILLY to give them guys money based on actual viewing — oh, wait, that's what ComicMix is doing, isn't it? And we let people read the comics for FREE to boot. Ah well, people love to pay for things on the Internet. We all know that. Best of luck to Marvel.
There's always the 'teaching old dogs new tricks' part of it.It's such a step outside of they way they're stuctured. Someone has to tell them there's a new box to think outside of.
WashPost article* today.*http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti…