More on Marvel’s subscription service
In an interview between ICv2 and Marvel president Dan Buckley, the following exchange takes place:
Do you plan to put up all new issues of the titles that are on the "Current Favorites" or "Young Reader Series" lists?
No, we do not plan on putting up the new issues of "Current Favorites" nor do we plan on keeping complete runs of top selling trades like Astonishing X-Men up on the site for prolonged periods of time.
Did you catch that? We don’t plan on keeping complete runs up for prolonged periods of time. In other words, they plan to remove titles after you’ve already paid for your subscription. If those titles are too successful, you should go out and buy the trade in addition to the money you’ve already paid for the subscription. Nice.
And from our earlier article about Marvel’s new online archive, we quoted Marvel president Dan Buckley from USA Today saying "We did not want to get caught flat-footed." What he should have said is that Marvel didn’t want to get caught flat footed with the Internet again.
Marvel has never been the fastest company to adopt to the Internet. They weren’t the original registrants of marvel.com, for starters. That had already been registered by a software company in Washington by 1995, and later had to be acquired by legal manuverings. Nor were they the original registrants of what the obvious fallback name was, marvelcomics.com.
I was.