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Marvel puts original comics online
The publisher has already increased visibility with movies and video games. The Web is the next step.
Associated Press
Published November 14, 2007
LOS ANGELES - Marvel put some of its older comics online Tuesday, 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 to 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. "You don't have that spinner rack of comic books sitting in the local five-and-dime anymore," said Dan Buckley, president of Marvel Publishing. "We don't have our product intersecting kids in their lifestyle space as much as we used to." Translate "kids' lifestyle space" into plain English and you get "the Internet." Marvel Entertainment Inc.'s two most prominent competitors, Dark Horse Comics and DC Comics, currently offer online teasers designed to drive the sales of comics or book collections. "We look at anything that connects comics to people," DC Comics president Paul Levitz said. "The most interesting thing about the online world to me is the opportunity for new forms of creativity. ... It's a question of what forms of storytelling work for the Web." Marvel is hoping fans will be intrigued enough to shell out $9.99 a month, or $4.99 monthly with a yearlong 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. About 2,500 issues were made available at the launch of Marvel Digital Comics, www.marvel.com/digitalcomics, with 20 more being released each week.
[Last modified November 14, 2007, 01:10:02]
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