Marvel brings comics into the digital age

Thousands of classic issues are now online.

By GEOFF BOUCHER

LOS ANGELES TIMES

In summer 1977 I was handed my first comic book, a 35-cent issue of Detective Comics, and I was transfixed. There was a caped corpse on the cover, and in grim letters it read, “Batman is Dead ...” (he wasn’t, to my relief). In the bottom corner a contest advertisement announced “YOU could be in the Superman movie” (I wasn’t, to my disappointment). Three decades later, I still have that comic book, in all its torn, spindled and Slurpee-stained glory.

I couldn’t help thinking about that beloved and tattered newsprint artifact as I got my first experience wivth the new “digital comics” from Marvel that made their splashy premiere earlier this month at marvel.com/digitalcomics. In essence, Marvel has taken thousands of classic issues (among them every 1960s issue of “The Amazing Spider-Man,” “The Avengers” and “The Fantastic Four”) along with selected current titles and re-engineered them panel-by-panel to make them into something akin to a sleek Internet slide show.

The elaborate venture is a bold one, but it was driven as much by anxiety as ambition; even though comic-book heroes now bring robust returns as film and video-game franchises, the printed comic book is fading from the cultural consciousness of youngsters. Next year, the super hero comic book will celebrate its 70th year as a uniquely American contribution to pop culture, but it’s now a foreign object to most kids.

The glut of slick magazines and the quirky business history of comics distribution has made it hard for kids to stumble on a comic book if they aren’t looking for one. “We don’t have a natural lifestyle intersection point for kids anymore,” says Dan Buckley, president of publishing for Marvel Entertainment. “We think we can find one online.” In other words, Marvel is banking on the idea that it can catch passing youngsters somewhere near the corner of YouTube and MySpace .

Well, the archive certainly looks good. These aren’t photographs of faded old pages or unwieldy images that spill off the screen; Marvel has converted the glorious old artwork of Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Jim Steranko and Neal Adams into bright, burnished panels. To check out this e-resurrection, I went straight to an old favorite, issue No. 33 of “The Amazing Spider-Man” from February 1966, which has a classic Ditko cover of the despairing hero being crushed beneath machinery. The art now seems to glow from within, which is precisely what’s happening on a computer monitor. The Web site is easy to search and use, and there’s a deftly designed zoom-in function and “smart reader” feature, so a reader gets a smooth progression from panel to panel in a natural flow.

The archive opened with 2,500 issues, and 20 more are added each week. There’s a free offer to sample 250 of them, and then there’s an all-you-can-eat subscription price of $9.95 per month; if you sign up for a year, it goes down to $4.95 per month.