Monday, August 25, 2014

Marvel (Sorta) Unlimited:

Last month, around SDCC, Marvel had a sale on it's Marvel Unlimited subscription: $.99 for a month of all the digital comics you can read. For that price, I was willing to give it a shot.

And I'm pretty sure I got my ninety-nine cents worth. I read all of the 2008-2010 Abnett/Lanning Guardians of the Galaxy series; two Moon Knight series, as much of the new Thunderbolts and Uncanny Avengers as was available. Some oddballs like Deadpool Kills Deadpool or the Marvel Knights Deathlok or the Power Pack limiteds. I even read some old Spider-Man and Thor comics I hadn't seen in years.

The downsides? Well, sometimes the selection isn't as deep as you'd expect. Some books that were formerly licensed by Marvel are not available now, no matter how much you may associate them with Marvel; like Micronauts or Conan the Barbarian or ROM. Likewise, I'm not sure how much MAX stuff is available--I had looked for the recent Dominic Fortune series, and that wasn't in there. Nor did I find a lot of 80's Punisher.

The other problem may just be me, but sometimes the load would stall. Or the book wouldn't be found. More than a couple of times, a book would load, but then the word balloons wouldn't! (That is a great way to check out the art, if you like, but not a great way to read!) So sometimes I'd click a book, wait for it to open, try again, reload...I had a pretty low success rate for a while there. Oddly, Marvel offers Bonus Digital Editions with a number of their titles, but I never had that sort of load trouble with them.

Still, for the price, I quite enjoyed the trial. I definitely got my money's worth, and read a number of books I might not have otherwise had the chance to. There were some annoying bugs, but they weren't a complete dealbreaker--I just don't have the time right now to read enough books to make the regular price worthwhile. The next time Marvel offers a subscription deal with an action figure as a sweetener, it's going to be a lot more tempting.

1 comment:

Mr. Morbid's House Of Fun said...

That really does sound like a pretty damn decent deal, especially for the digital comic-loving crowd.
I guess it's also not a bad way for Marvel to make some extra scratch off their back issue inventory. I hope the issues you briefly had aren't typical, as that sort of thing will definitely put people off.