Pretty amazing that they have 700 #1s. They have 56 #1s of spiderman alone. Good call by Marvel - close to zero loss of income on their part and massive "taste this, and see what you think" advertising.
Well that's written by Greg Rucka, who's really good, so anything by him. He did a new Punisher about a year ago that was fantastic, not sure if that's included in this or not.
Could you explain this? How are they the EA of comic books? They have great original content is all I know. Though I read comics am not too focused on them.
I think he meant they insisted on DRM and crippled online experiences. I'm not incredibly familiar with post-2005 Marvel, but untol then they had been extremely reluctant to embrace the web, which resulted in massive online piracy (and crappy community standards like cbz/cbr).
There's that, and then there's the fact that working for them was a such a soul crushing experience that a bunch of their most talented artists left and founded Image. The artists were unappreciated, poorly paid, overworked, and restricted from working on anything that didn't fall well within the norms of the classic superhero archetype, even if it was a personal project.
When a company that deals in art gets to the point where they care more about protecting and propping up existing franchises than they do about producing original works, that company's usefulness has been exhausted.
Couldn't check comixology because it's down but from what I gather they're charging $3.99 for digital comics? Everybody wants to see the creators get paid but that just seems like bad business to me. Seems like they'd make more going totally ad supported. How many people out there are dropping four bucks on a digital comic book?
To be fair, they also offer a digital library of many (kind of randomly selected) 6 months and older issues for $10 a month or $5 if you pay for a year. Marvel's digital strategy is kind of confused right now.
