david sidlinger

I subscribed to Marvel Digital Comics yesterday. It’s nice to have a very extensive library of material without taking up any space. I’m busy catching up on content that I missed during the time I was either broke or thought I was too cool to be buying comics.

The comics are read with a flash “player”. It seems to do a pretty good job with the images. I believe that the comics have been scanned and then vectorized, but I may be wrong. The reader provides you with three ways to view the comic: two page, which makes the text too small to read on my MacBook, single page, and smart panels. The smart panel mode works pretty well, zooming in to a panel or two.

Nothing’s perfect, though. While I think this is a nice move towards an online distribution model, I do have some complaints.

At this point, the issues available online are spotty, and it’s hard to find contiguous runs of a title that are more than a few issues. Inexplicably, limited-length series and story-lines are not complete. For example, Secret Wars was an eight issue limited series. Marvel has made issues 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 8 available. I can only hope that the gaps will be filled in over time.

There isn’t any way to get access to content off-line. I understand Marvel’s concern about “secondary” distribution, but I think a move to watermarked PDFs, like those available on Safari, would be well received. Restricting the comics to an online-only player will not stop the people sharing them through Bitorrent or Usenet, and only lowers the usefulness of the service to paying customers.

The player is a little buggy. The size of the navigation bar at the bottom of the window doesn’t seem to be taken into account when calculating the rendered size of the content. This results in the bottom of the content being clipped in smart panel mode. Usually, I can deal with this, but some letterers seem to like placing dialogue at the bottom of the panel. I’ve provided feedback to Marvel, and, hopefully, they’ll address this soon.

Update: Marvel has responded to my email, and they are working on a fix. In the meantime, resizing the window to have a standard aspect ratio seems to work.

All in all, I’m fairly happy with the service, but I’ll wait for a couple months to see how it progresses before committing to a prepaid, year-long membership.