I am a diehard DC Comics fan. I can remember all the way back to when my dad brought me to the E-Z Mart in Longview, Texas, and bought me my first few comics: a Superman comic; an old Star Trek adaptation; and Legion of Super-Heroes #311, the comic that forever changed my life and turned me into a Legion fan.

That said, I have to give Superfly TNT props to Marvel for its Digital Comics subscription program. I’ve grown lukewarm to the stories and shenanigans Marvel’s pulled over the years, such so that I barely pick up one or two series in print anymore. Because of this, I’ve missed out on a lot of stuff, and it’s great to go back through their digital archives and check out a lot of what I missed. Plus, at the price offered (~$40 on holiday discount for a year), I end up saving tons of cash on expensive hardcover collections I’d otherwise have to buy sight unseen. It’s the ultimate “try before you buy” program.

Image courtesy of dailyskew

While there are some obvious gaps in the online archives (Marvel tends not to put a lot of new comics online, which I suppose makes sense from a business perspective), there are some pretty good runs on here. I recently finished reading Warren Ellis and Adi Granov’s six-part Iron Man: Extremis, and I’m glad I read it online instead of forking out the cash to buy a trade paperback. It was decent, but not up to the standards I expect of Ellis. But I don’t feel cheated about this since I acquired the story through the Digital Comics subscription.

The digital reader Marvel employs is a little clunky, and I find it crashes or slows down on browsers or systems it wasn’t designed for. Running it on an uncluttered Dell Latitude E5400 with a Chrome browser seems to work pretty well though.

Marvel’s foray into digital comics has had me thinking on the issue of comics distribution for the future. I tend to believe that comics are going to price themselves right out of the industry soon, so that only diehard fans pick up actual print books anymore. For periodical series to survive, companies must turn to digital distribution, where new audiences live. IDW Publishing has stepped up their game in this arena considerably lately by publishing comics directly to the iPhone.

This is good fodder for a future post on digital comics distro. More to follow.

I am totally stealing this idea from author and futurist Warren Ellis, who so eloquently resurrected the idea of “station identification” from the annals of radio history to the mixed media malfeasance of today’s Interwebs.

This is Must. Be. AWESOME. Dot com.

[Pic HT: Something Awful]