Spider-Man takes on the Evil File Sharers
Although superhero comics often seem in danger of drowning in their own history, this long heritage is also in many ways their greatest treasure. Perhaps with this in mind, Marvel Comics have just launched Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, an online subscription archive of more than 2,500 issues going back to the 1960s.
Marvel, like the record labels before them, are reportedly alarmed by the popularity of illegal file sharing - although this is an oblique response, since Marvel comics are mostly pirated when they're brand new, while their new archive won't carry anything under six months old.
It will include some of my favourite modern titles, like Brian K Vaughn's Runaways and Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men. But more attention will probably go to the very early comics, which feature the first appearances of heroes like Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, and Daredevil.
Some of this older stuff is sensational - the pulp imagination at its fevered peak virility. As John Byrne, a celebrated Marvel writer, recently wrote: "In the span of just 50 issues [of The Fantastic Four, Stan] Lee and [Jack] Kirby gave us Doctor Doom, the Sub-Mariner, the Skrulls, the Frightful Four, the Inhumans, Galactus, the Silver Surfer, the Black Panther, the Watcher - a foundation which would be mined... for the next 40 years."
On the other hand, even Tom Brevoort, a high-ranking editor at Marvel Comics, had to warn this week that a lot of older comics simply don't justify their resurrection. "The people creating those stories were just trying to sell that month's issue and put food on the table ... It was designed to be read, enjoyed and thrown away, disposable entertainment. And these stories still have their quota of fun. But it can be sort of brain-deadening to read a whole chunk of issues back-to-back-to-back."
Presumably Marvel will keep the quality high, at least at the beginning. The real problem, though, is that this service is like iTunes without the iPod. There exists no remotely satisfactory way to read comics on a screen; and even when (as is excitedly promised every single year) somebody makes affordable a little newspaper-reading gadget that has a screen as sharp as print, no one will have one big enough to fit two adjacent pages of a comic at full size. Of course, I also think there exists no remotely satisfactory way to listen to hip-hop through mobile phone speakers on a crowded bendy bus, but the youth of the nation clearly disagree, so what do I know?
