O.K., so I love comics.  Before there was the home computer or the internet to keep the minds of our young occupied, there was the comic book or as some refer to them the graphic novel.  I spent many an hour deeply immersed in the exploits of the X-Men or Iron man or any number of super hereos of the day.  If you didn’t keep up with all of the comics or got into one that had been out for awhile, it could could get down right expensive catching up on the back stories.  Well, Marvel has taken care of all of that and didn’t do to shabby of a job getting it done, either.

 Marvel has begun to post all of their rather extensive comic collection on line, and to tease you into joining they offer a “look” for free.  I decided to check it out to see exactely what you get.  If you go to Marvel.com and scroll down, you will find the link to check it out.  For some reason they don’t make it easier to find, so here is the link to the online comic collection.  They offer 250 free samples for you to check out. 

The kicker is, you can only see the first four or five pages before they want to you join to see the rest.

Just being able to see those first few pages was what I was looking for.

 What Marvel did was to scan every page directly from the original casting made of the comics.  So you get the best quality possible.  A big plus for me is that there are no longer to pesky, yet sometimes cute, adds for you own seamonkey farm or the one thousand piece army man set complete with tanks and fighter jets.

*Side note - I bought every thing from the seamonkeys, x-ray glasses, model kits, and whatever else they could intise me with.  Lots of paper routes and yards mowed help pay for my horrible, horrible addiction to the trinkets and toys of those comic book advertisements.  So, good riddence to them once and for all.  Although I would still like to get the army set…

 Back to Marvel.  There is no software to download to view the comics and the page to page navigation is ultra simple.  Simply click on the left or right arrow and the pages turn, ala, story book fashion.   You can zoom in on one pane if you want and quality is still quite good.

Once you’ve seen the first five sets of pages, a new window pops up prompting you to register with Marvel.com to gain access to the full sets.

 This is where the cost comes in.  For $9.99 a month you can have complete access to every thing they have.  To sweeten the deal, if you sign up and pay for one year, it only costs $4.99 a month.

Now, I don’t know how many of you have ever tried to find back issues of even some to the more mundane and less popular comics but it can get expensive.  Even at $9.99 a month, this is a smokin’ deal.  At $4.99 a month, I’m jumping in with both feet.

Marvels two biggest competitors, DC Comics and Dark Horse, both offer similar types of services but in my opinion Marvel offers the best.

At $4.99 a month and more comics than you can shake a Gryphon’s Wand of Might at you can’t go wrong.  I know I have a lot of catching up to do.

- Don

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 12:57 am and is filed under Comics, Sections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.