Saturday, December 01, 2007

Marvel Comics online

[12/5/10] I notice in the latest Edward R. Hamilton catalog, they are featuring some of the Marvel Masterworks volumes for $9.95. I was especially interested in Avengers and X-Men, so those were comics I bought when I was first starting to buy comics and I missed buying the earliest episodes. I still hope to sell my old issues on eBay (maybe... I'm hoping they don't disintegrate when I take them out of storage). Then I'll still have the issues and can sell the originals. That's the plan.

Apparently there were both hardcover and paperback versions of these. And there's a pretty comprehensive website devoted to these books.

The Avengers might become pretty popular now with the upcoming movie. There's also a new cartoon series now running on DisneyXD with a lot of the characters/plots adapted from the early days.

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LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Marvel is putting some of its older comics online Tuesday, hoping to reintroduce young people to the X-Men and Fantastic Four by showcasing the original issues in which such characters appeared.

It's a tentative move onto the Internet: Comics can only be viewed in a Web browser, not downloaded, and new issues will only go online at least six months after they first appear in print. Still, it represents perhaps the comics industry's most aggressive Web push yet.

... The publisher is hoping fans will be intrigued enough about the origins of those characters to shell out $9.99 a month, or $4.99 monthly with a year-long commitment. For that price, they'll be able to poke through, say, the first 100 issues of Stan Lee's 1963 creation "Amazing Spider-Man" at their leisure, along with more recent titles like "House of M" and "Young Avengers." Comics can be viewed in several different formats, including frame-by-frame navigation.

Ring expects Marvel's effort to put a slight dent in the back-issue segment of the comic shop industry, where rare, out-of-print titles sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay and at trade shows.

Though most comic fans are collectors, some simply want to catch up on the backstory of their favorite characters and would no longer have to pay top dollar to do so.

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