Commentary by Richard Renteria
As a subscriber to Marvel’s Digital Comics Unlimited, it’s nice to see more original content for the site. The newly announced War of Kings exclusive online content has me really excited, as it has the potential to introduce the storyline to an audience that may not pick it up on their weekly trip to the comic book store.
The stories will be written by Christos Gage and Jay Faerber, with art by Carlos Magno (Gladiator), Adriana Melo (Crystal), Mahmud Asrar (Blastaar) and Timothy Green (Lilandra). Now, normally the announcement of a new Christos Gage story would be great, except that Marvel’s online content suffers due to two flaws in their presentation.
The first problem concerns the almost archaic viewer they force subscribers to utilize. It is very cumbersome and is so user unfriendly that it makes reading certain titles challenging to say the least. The other problem concerns their exclusive online content. If these stories are indeed online exclusive, is it really necessary to design the page as a standard comic book page? Regardless, giving War of Kings an online presence should help the title in the long run.
What say you, readers?
February 6th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
My stance remains the same: Put them in a .cbr and stop trying to force crappy viewer programs on me.
Also. Stop trying to charge me for all your comics for a month when I just want to read two or three. Come up with something iTunes like, and charge me a buck or a buck-fifty for each one.
February 6th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Sageshini, what you are asking isn’t practical from business standpoint. Sure illegal scans are in .cbr format and iTunes sells songs individually, but neither is from a legitimate publisher. What’s stopping a online comic shop from selling .cbr files of Marvel comics claiming they are official product when clearly they are not. If Marvel sold comics in .cbr format, they would be utterly useless when some punk can scan them and pass it off as official Marvel product.
So until you can figure out how to get rid of the illegal .cbr files, there won’t be official .cbr files from Marvel. Quite frankly I’m surprised the music industry didn’t do what Marvel did.
February 6th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
I love the comics.
I love that they’re online.
I hate the viewer.