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Playstation 3 - Marvel brings digital comic subs to console

Wednesday 19th of August, 2009 - 20:17:03 GMT

The other interesting announcement was from Marvel, which is tightening its association with Sony by bringing the comics, such as Spider Man which the company has already made into successful movies, and the rest of their mutated highly colourful collection of heroes and villains, to the console in book form. It's a service Marvel already offers directly over the internet, so its influence on the console remains to be seen. DC, owned by Time Warner, has yet to strike a similar deal.

I can't see indie comic sellers being too pleased about the news, they have enough problems sustaining their business as it is, and it's a move that serves to turn the PS3 into a gaming version of Amazon's Kindle and the comics as the loss leader. The collector's market would basically revert to the hardest core of professional collectors and I would love to see anyone sit through the 104 pages of the recent 600th Anniversary issue of Spider-Man - by flicking through it at their flatscreen television.

The other issue is, the pricing model. If it's fixed like iTunes and never changes according to story length as the print editions do, then unless the price is right for the UK, buyers will forever lose out on the good side of exchange rate fluctuations with the US dollar or eBay resales of back issues. The same question remains of the price of trade paperback collections of entire stories. At least this latter market could happily survive Marvel's digital competition with itself, as they are sold like proper books on the internet and at retail.

Patience is at the heart of the concern with the monthly releases; the largest titles are now released twice monthly to counter impatience and piracy. For an enclosed digital service to suceed, the same release pattern would have to be maintained, or even made fortnightly depending on the series. Even then, like downloaded music, legally or otherwise, there would have to be some cachet in having files on a hard drive, as opposed to the comics in a bag.

For all the celebration of gaming technology meeting an 90-year old storytelling medium, the stories have to be engaging in the first place, which is debateable when reading the latest volume of, say, Iron Man compared to the separate War Machine strand, or your chosen series of Spider-Man. We'll bring you more details when pricing and subscription methods are properly explained.

- Ken

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