Thoughts on Marvel Unlimited

Despite my high-minded protestations that I don't really "do" Black Friday or Cyber Monday, this year I snagged some "deals" on the types of things that I usually buy compulsively. One was a set of fancy underwear that usually gets recommended by Wirecutter, another was a set of fancy notebooks from Field Notes (also inspired by some research on Wirecutter, and now among the 113 fancy notebooks I own, but so it goes).

The final one, which wasn't strictly a Cyber Monday deal because they seem to offer it to everyone who signs up for the first time, was a $19 discount off a year's subscription to Marvel Unlimited, Marvel Comics' digital comics archive. I've gone on a bit of a buying spree this year, having discovered a comic shop in Sunnyvale, but I'd been meaning to check out digital comics for a while. I could have chosen DC Universe Infinite, but I've been buying and reading more Marvel comics lately, so I decided to check out Unlimited instead... or rather, first, since I'll probably try out the DC one at some point soon.

As I said, I've been interested in digital comics for a while, especially since a coworker at a previous job told me about Marvel's subscription service. One of the things he mentioned was being able to go straight to crossover issues, which struck me as a good feature.

Alas, I haven't discovered that feature in Marvel Unlimited. It may be available only in the web version, or it may be available only in DC's app, or I may even have misunderstood what he was saying. On the other hand, when I have gone looking for a specific issue because it crossed over with something else I was reading, it's been quite easy to find. That's important because the archive on Marvel Unlimited is over 30,000 issues, most stretching back to the early 1960s but in the case of Captain America Comics, going all the way back to 1941.

So in this post I'm going to talk about my experience with the app so far. Overall, it's totally worth it, even if you pay the full $69 for a yearly subscription, but there are a few snags that are worth highlighting.

Starting with the positives, the first one is that huge archive. Assuming there are exactly 30,000 comics available (it's actually somewhere over 31,000, but bear with me), you'd have to read about 83 issues per day over 365 days to get through the full archive. That may or may not be feasible because, assuming 10-15 minutes to read each issue, it'd probably take between 13 and 21 hours per day to maintain that pace. For early issues written by Stan Lee or Roy Thomas (or indeed later issues written by Chris Claremont) you might need more minutes per book, because they're somewhat verbose.

Take that thought experiment for what it's worth, but the point is that there's almost everything you could think of if you're a Marvel Zombie. There are some gaps here and there, but as far as I can tell, none are particularly important, unless you're a fan of Alpha Flight or want to catch up on non-Marvel properties like Rom the Spaceknight or GI Joe (which was actually a pretty decent comic). The MAX line, for "mature readers", is also missing, but those books never really fulfilled their promise to compete with DC's Vertigo, so it's not the biggest loss. Big-name characters like the X-Men are pretty well-represented, as I found when I counted out the entire run of Uncanny X-Men from 1963 to 2011.

There are gaps in secondary series even in that family of books, like issues 51-54 and 55-59 of the original run of X-Factor, or a bunch of later issues of the original run of Excalibur. From what I understand, those gaps are because those issues have never been collected anywhere, but Marvel is constantly adding new issues to the archive. Most are actual new issues, as it adds books 3 months after physical publication, but some are also older, such as those Excalibur back-issues I mentioned.

The comics themselves look pretty good, at least on my iPad. My reading so far has focused on stuff from the early 60s (Uncanny X-Men) and from the mid- to late 80s (X-Factor, Excalibur and various books that cross over with them). The scans are smooth and high-quality, so you don't get that dot effect in the old issues from 1963; in a couple of Thor issues from 1988 or so, the colors seem to have been remastered via computer, so they look a lot fuller than they probably would have on newsstands at the time. The X-Factor issues that tie into those Thor books don't seem to have had the same remastering, but they still look pretty great.

In terms of quality they remind me of the Epic Collections I started buying in recent months, although for the X-Factor and Excalibur collections, the bulk of the coloring remasters seems to have been saved for the covers, which do look amazing. When I compare prices, I'll be comparing to these versions, instead of the hardcover Masterworks collections or the black-and-white Essentials.

As far as value for money, I was looking up the costs of physical collections of these same books, and I think I've already more than broken even. Volume 1 of the Epic Collection of Uncanny X-Men, which includes issues 1-23, costs $50, so it's taken me less than a month of reading one issue per day to just about break even on Uncanny alone. However, in that time I've also read the equivalent of Volume 2 of the X-Factor Epic Collection, which probably costs between $35 and $50... or it would if it were available anywhere, which it isn't.

If I manage to read all the books I've saved to my library in this coming year, I'll probably save the equivalent of around $1,000 in trade paperback collections. This is on top of the fact that not all collections are in print all at the same time, as mentioned - there may be gaps in some series, but the archive is still more complete than what Marvel makes available in print.

There are some negatives, though. The first is more a problem with Marvel's way of doing things, namely the way they restart series multiple times to get more "collector's item" first issues out there. There seem to be a lot of Daredevil series, for instance, so it can require the Wikipedia page to determine which series to read in which order.

The app is a little buggy, and comics don't always load when I tap on them, so that I either have to wait a long time or quit the app and open it again. One time an issue got stuck transitioning between two pages, so I had to quit out again. However, it's never lost my place in a given issue or series, so that's already a plus.

As I mentioned, I read the comics on my iPad. I prefer to read them in full page mode, with the screen depicting a single page of a print issue, but you can also set a book to "Smart Panel" mode, which shows one main panel at a time and includes transitions. Smart Panel is not a bad way to read a book, because it makes the images larger and guides you through them without your eyes skipping forward or back as you read, but it's tough to get out of the mode when you choose it. Full page mode is the default setting on the iPad, but Smart Panel is the default on the web version, and I never figured out how to transition to full page mode.

Speaking of the web version, it doesn't synch with my iPad, so (unless I'm missing something) I can't pick up my library on other devices. The search function is also a lot worse on the web than on iPad - on the app, I can search for a specific issue and it'll come up, but on the web there's a lot more wading through long lists of issues. This is a big problem when looking through a series like Fantastic Four, which ran to hundreds of issues.

These problems with the web version don't affect me as long as I have my iPad and an internet connection, but I feel like there's more tinkering I should do on the web. At the very least, though, it's disappointing that logging in with one credential on my laptop or tablet doesn't show me my library.

Overall, though, it's been a good investment and a fun way to delve deep into the X-Men archives. If I stick with one issue of Uncanny per day, I'll only get to about #365, so sometime in the 90s, and it won't give me time to catch up with the other characters I want to follow, like Spider-Man, Daredevil, the Avengers or the Fantastic Four, unless I keep my subscription for the next ten years or so. But as I said, sticking with the X-Men family of books and the stuff I've saved to my library, I'll save hundreds of dollars compared with buying at the store.

Of course, that's only saving me money on Marvel books. DC has a longer history of packaging storylines for collections, and has recently been collecting entire runs in one or two volumes, so unless I also get a DC subscription, that comics budget is likely to go to Volume 2 of the Dennis O'Neil/Denys Cowan Question series, among others.

Still, I like having the majority of the Marvel Universe at my fingertips, and I'm enjoying reading these old comics in a format that makes the art and lettering look great, even for older books. If you're at all a fan of Marvel's big-name characters, you should definitely get this subscription. Even at the full price of $10 per month, it's an amazing value.