The Four Color Media Monitor

The AP Wire reports that Marvel is publishing some of its older archives on the internet. DC and Dark Horse have had some of their own publications go online too.

LOS ANGELES -- Marvel is putting some of its older comics online today, hoping to reintroduce young people to the X-Men and Fantastic Four by showcasing the original issues in which such characters appeared.

It's a tentative move onto the Internet: 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.

Still, it represents perhaps the comics industry's most aggressive Web push yet. Even as their creations -- from Iron Man to Wonder Woman -- become increasingly visible in pop culture through new movies and video games, old-school comics publishers rely primarily on specialized, out-of-the-way comic shops for distribution of their bread-and-butter product.

I'm of mixed minds about how this being done, since, as great as it could be to read a lot of the old stuff online, I still would rather own it all in book format, as that's actually easier to handle, and much more relaxing too, to sit on a couch and be absorbed by the great old stories of yesteryear.

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 be viewed in several different formats, including frame-by-frame navigation.

First, I personally think I'd want to have that money around to buy an archive collection with in book format, and not just to spend for an online readership subscription, also because the comics may not be savable to disk. Ten dollars, depending on what that's needed for, is a lot of money, pretty much what plenty of movies can cost today. Second, I think the AP made a big mistake mentioning something like House of M, one of the most needless crossovers of recent. Anyone who wants their money's worth in products online would be making a big mistake to subscribe to read that dreadful miniseries!

Labels: dc comics, marvel comics, technology