About Author: Andy Yen

Last week, Marvel comics unveiled its new digital comics service, “Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited“. Users who pay the $9.99 monthly fee (or $4.99 a month with a 12-month contract) will have access to full-length digital scans of over 2,700 comics from Marvel’s illustrious catalog, including such iconic titles as Amazing Spider-Man and Fantastic Four. The comics will be viewable only in your web browser via flash. So far, though, only the first 100 or so issues of those titles are available. The publisher promises to add new comics every week, albeit only older titles. It has instituted a rule that only comics older than six months will be available online, presumably to not draw the ire of every comic retailer on the planet.

I applaud Marvel for dipping their feet into the digital distribution arena. Piracy is a serious problem in the comic industry, more so than the music industry because a majority of a comic’s value comes from the first read. Digital scans of comic books proliferate p2p sites everywhere and are more likely to represent lost sales because once you have read a comic once you are a lot less likely to read it again and again, whereas a large part of a music file’s value is being able to play it whenever you want and wherever you want. This is a big reason why I am not too perturbed by currently being limited to reading the comics only through your web browser. More often than not, when you’re reading your comics you’re sitting in a home or place with a computer anyway. Reading a comic on an iPod or even an iPhone would be pretty painful given the medium’s reliance on large art panels and carefully crafted page breakdowns to tell a story.

Where it would get interesting, though, is if a portable e-book reader like Amazon’s Kindle were to get an upgrade with full color and maybe a larger screen. That would represent a full-fledged paradigm shift in the industry if you could take and buy your comics wherever you wanted. You could pay a subscription fee or even buy the comics a la cart and have them downloaded via a 3g or 4g network. This would probably result in the demise of the brick and mortar comic book store, so some compromise (such as a paper copy + digital copy bundle) would have to be worked out.

But goddamn. Just thinking about that gives me a huge geek boner.

Check out the service [Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited]