I need to confess something right of the bat here, I am a 33-year-old father of two, a professional in the telecom industry and I am a huge, HUGE comic book fan. So huge in fact that my oldest son (who is 6) thinks I am the smartest, coolest person alive because I, and I quote, know everything about superheroes. When I was younger I used to collect about six titles a week, when I hit 18 years old I was up to about ten titles a week (all Marvel titles except for some Batman and Superman). I quit when I was about 23 solely due to financial reasons, as a result I missed out on a lot of the new (sometimes horrible) storylines in the past ten years or so, I have no regrets that I missed the whole Ben Reilly clone saga in Spider-Man though.
Despite the fact I was not buying new comics my love for comics and the Marvel Universe never faded. I watched every Marvel (and DC) superhero movies (even the really bad ones, ugh Captain America), bought some ultimate graphic novels and I may have seen a scan or two of the Civil War and House of M series. Collecting though is something I never did again, when I stopped comics where approaching three dollars each and the amounts I was buying was really eating into my funds. Fast forward to a few months ago and the announcement of the Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited subscription service. Pay $9.99 per month or $59.88 per year and you have access to thousands of digital comics any time you want, as much as you want, sounds like a dream come true.
I was a member of Marvel.com already and had read a number (all of them) of their online comics when they were called Marvel dot Comics so I was pretty familiar with the systems they had in place. On day one of the launch I signed up for their new service, or rather tried to, see there where some pretty serious launch issues with the service. When I began the signup process it was VERY slow (which is understandable) and there were security errors with their certificates, which had me doubting whether to provide credit card details. Once I finally got to the information page the billing address form was missing some important fields, which once you tried to pay would cause the payment to not be completed because it could not verify your address.
Article comments
1 - Ryan Meals
I hope not, but personally I think Marvel is skipping issues, which creates gaps in continuity, in order to frustrate the reader into going out and buying the Trade Paperbacks that compile the entire story.
2 - Michael Prince
eesh, I hope not, my big beef is with Civil War, they only have #1 up at this time and it is over a year since the series ended...
Also they really need to add a section that has all the crossovers linked in one section (annihilation, house of m, civil war, etc...)