As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a big proponent of digital media and especially of digital comics. But also as I’ve said before, the DRM restrictions that many publishers place on their comics have turned me off. I won’t be making a return to Marvel and DC until they stop treating their customers like criminals. The logic behind it is senseless, as a simple search over at the Pirate Bay would show that DRM has done absolutely nothing to curb comic book piracy, just like it hasn’t curbed piracy of movies, TV shows, books, or video games. I don’t trust ComiXology to be around ten years from now, five years from now, or even one year from now. I don’t want to end up in a situation where Marvel or DC switches digital comic providers and then I lose my collection, or in a situation where ComiXology goes out of business and I lose my collection. If you’re not going to allow me to back up my collection to my hard drive or to view it in a comic library other than ComiXology, you aren’t getting my money—it’s as simple as that.
But one thing that did intrigue me was Marvel Unlimited. For an annual fee, you get access to over 13,000 comics in Marvel’s library (or at least that’s what they advertise as). They’ve got old books as well as issues released six months ago. It’s also available for tablets and smartphones, so what this amounts to is a Netflix for Marvel Comics, and I’d be totally willing to opt into something like that. At least this way, I’m paying a rental fee for these comics, whereas with ComiXology, I’m being charged full price for a product I don’t own.
Now that I have an iPad, I thought I would check out the Marvel Unlimited app. I was really excited, downloaded it, and fired it up. And then I went to try some of their free samples.
And dear god, it is horrible.
Marvel Unlimited has three views for comics—single page, double page, and smart panel. I assumed the smart panel would be akin to ComiXology’s, but unfortunately it’s not. It basically zooms in on a portion of the page and it seems like a generic zoom, as it doesn’t have ComiXology’s smooth panel by panel reading feature.
To make things worse, on my iPad, which has retina display, I’d expect the comic pages to look pristine. Instead, they’re extremely blurry. The pages are not up to the standards of the tablet’s display.
This is a great idea, but Marvel has clearly not put a lot of thought into this. Crappy resolution and a jerky interface make for a product that is definitely not worth the price they’re charging.
Why is this so hard to get right?