Tue Nov 13, 2007 10:58AM6 comments ›
Tue Nov 13, 2007 — by Mike Gold
Mighty Marvel MONEY Society
Online thrills for $10 a month
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?
Jump to comments (6) 
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Comments (6)
Glenn Hauman (11:33 AM on Tue Nov 13, 2007)
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.
Brian Alvey (11:39 AM on Tue Nov 13, 2007)
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.
Brian Alvey (11:37 AM on Tue Nov 13, 2007)
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.
John Ostrander (11:42 AM on Tue Nov 13, 2007)
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.
Rick Taylor (12:44 PM on Tue Nov 13, 2007)
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.
Marilee J. Layman (4:46 PM on Wed Nov 14, 2007)
WashPost article* today.
*http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007...