The company hopes to draw in younger readers. In addition to the 2000+ older issues that will be available, newer comics will go online as well, but only after six months or more have passed.
At $60 a year, I might go for that. The question is, will they be the same issues that GIT Corp has been releasing? If so, then I've already got them in a pretty convenient format.
At $60 a year, I might go for that. The question is, will they be the same issues that GIT Corp has been releasing? If so, then I've already got them in a pretty convenient format.
It's a great price and I joined up in about the first hour it was available. I scanned through what is available and it's like someone took lists of comics from the last 46 years and fired a shotgun at it to determine what to put up. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially since older comics didn't typically require more than issue or two to get a full story - especially during Jim Shooter's run as Editor-in-Chief, when he famously instructed creators that they were not to stretch a story past two issues unless it was going to be as good as Fantastic Four 48-50 - "When Galactus Came to Earth and Got Indigestion." The bottom line is that the selection available is extensive and covers many more titles than the DVD-ROMs available so far, but the collections aren't complete.
I think the service is solid. It's not going to be as great for 21st-century comics thanks to decompression and issues not yet available online, but the comics that are available look good, read well in Marvel's reader (use single-page mode, though, because the fancier options aren't really ready for primetime), and there are so many of them. I've wanted an affordable, legal alternative to buying comics for a long time, and now I've got it. I signed up for a month because I wasn't ready to commit, but I'll be going yearly before the month is through.
The weaknesses of the service are vastly outweighed by the strengths for my purposes, and I hope DC follows suit.
