The Marvel website used to be pretty pathetic. For the most part it was a glorified ad for subscriptions, mixed in with tons of corporate press releases. But they’ve certainly kicked things up a few dozen notches, offering a slew of interactive features, downloads and information. Most impressive of all to me is their Digital Comics section. I’ve seen it before with companies like CrossGen, but reading comic books online always just seemed a bit too much effort, too slow or just not cool enough to make it worth my while. I’d still rather hold an actual issue or trade paperback in my hand, but the Digital Library that Marvel has going will certainly get me thinking a bit differently.
While still a little slow, there are a bunch of user options to make reading easier, including viewing the issue as a single or double-page spread. If you have a giant monitor you won’t need to zoom at all to read any of it. But with the zoom buttons you can go in and out fairly easily. The “Smart Panels” mode is what really impressed me (though I did find the minor lag to be a little annoying). You read a panel, click on it and the screen shifts automatically to the next panel. No need for scrollbars. Navigation to go back and forth through the issue is relatively simple and straightforward. And yes, you do need to be registered with the site (which is free) to access the entire issue; though you can read a few pages of each issue without even logging in.
But what good is an digital comic reader if the available titles are lame, limited or outdated? No good at all. Which is what I expected when I saw a mere four titles available, none of which interested me. But then I clicked on the View All link and saw the full library of dozens of titles ranging from way back in the ’60s to today. And it’s a great mix of good and bad like Avengers #51! Devil Dinosaur #1! Champions #1! Captain America#247! Ultimate Spider-Man #72! Sure there’s a lot more recent books, but that’s not such a bad thing, as readers can get a feel for a series they may be considering picking up.
The only real downside that definitely needs improvement is the “searchability” of the comics library. There is none. Yes, you can kind of arrange the list in order of the different columns’ headers (title, family, year first published, etc.), but upon trying these, it didn’t seem to really work 100%. I’d get half the recent titles alphabetized, but then it’d start again halfway down. A simple search box for keywords would be great too. I couldn’t figure out a way, say, to find solely the Captain America issues available. Instead, I just had to eyeball it myself, or look at all titles in the Avengers family until I found them all. But if that’s the worst of the Digital Comics problems, then I’m looking forward to a new era of online comics, that’ll hopefully keep the current fans happy and bring in a bunch of new readers.
One minor suggestion (which is a bit counter to the entire concept)… I’d love to see an option for users to either download or print out PDF versions of each issue. Perhaps Marvel can create some sort of subscription base where you pay per issue or for a set number of downloads a month, and each file can be encrypted or watermarked or something with the user’s info so you don’t get people downloading and selling these things on ebay… Or it’d be neat to have a virtual comic collection on Marvel’s site, so I can add issues from their digital library into my own for easy reading later on.
What do you guys (and gals) think? Do you like digital comics? Hate ‘em? Impressed like I am with Marvel’s Digital Library, or is it too little too late?
