Netflix for comic books! Geek heaven!

I love comic books. I started collecting them when I was in grade 8, about a thousand years ago, but stopped when Marvel turned Illyana Rasputin back into a child, also the price of the books I was buying had more than doubled from when I started.

Several years ago Marvel comics started a subscription service where you could pay a monthly fee to have access to all the comics they had digitized. It was an interesting deal, but I don’t like reading books, even comic books, on a PC monitor.

When the iPad was released, I got one immediately, and one of the first things I did was download the Marvel comics app. Sadly, it had no connection to the subscription service. They released several comics for free each week, and I downloaded them all, because they looked great. The iPad is fantastic for comic books, it’s not quite the same dimensions as the paper books, but it’s close, and being able to zoom in and out is a huge plus.

The only problem I had with the app was the price. Not the price of the app, it was free, but the cost of the digital comics. Sometimes they went on special, but most of the time they cost $1.99 each. That’s more than the paper books were when I quit collecting because they cost too much. I’m not going to go on about how I think comics books have become insanely over priced, that’s a rant for another day, I’ll just say that spending two dollars an issue on a “collectible” that cannot be traded or re-sold makes absolutely no sense to me. I love e-books, and now buy them almost exclusively over paper books, but buying digital comics, (even on special at .99 each) is still something I cannot justify on a cost/minute of entertainment scale.

So, that was long, what was the point? The point is, I love reading digital comics on the iPad, but am unwilling to pay per issue to read them. I thought I’d be able to use Marvels subscription service, but the app did not support it, and the service was not web based, it used a dedicated PC based application.

Earlier this year Marvel released a separate iOS app for the subscription service called Marvel Unlimited, and I finally got what I’d been waiting 3 years for. So, how is it? The service is fantastic, the app is crappy.

Not much to say about the service, access to over 13,000 issues from anywhere I can get a wifi connection for less than what I spend at McDonalds per month. That’s awesome.

The app however is slow, missing important features and buggy as hell. I won’t harp on the slowness, I have a first gen iPad so it’s not exactly speedy, but if they implemented a cache for recently viewed series info, and the cover thumbnails, I’m sure we’d see an improvement in speed.

I will complain about the bugs though. The app crashes… a lot. Some comics seem to trigger a crash more than others, which makes no sense since they should all be nothing more than a collection of pictures but they do. I could try opening a comic unsuccessfully 5 times in a row, then try the next with no problem, go back to the other, and crash. Many times I have also encountered a problem where I would get an error that there was no Internet connection, which was untrue, and it prevented me from opening specific books.

My biggest beef is that the app does not remember the state it was in between shutdowns, it doesn’t even have a bookmark feature. If you are in the middle of reading something, then switch to other apps, it won’t remember even what series you were in the middle of, let alone which page of which book, and let me tell you, when the damn thing crashes as often as it does, it is infuriating to have to find your place again. Uncanny X-Men has over 400 issues in it. To have to load the list and scroll through back to the issue you want when you’re in the middle is a royal pain.

Another annoyance is trying to follow story lines that weave between series. The various X titles are notorious for this. When you hit browse, there is a tab that allows you to view the titles in a specific “Comic Event”, but it only seems to be good for major story lines. I’m reading my way through Uncanny X-men and when I get to something like Second Comming, I have to go in and out of the 5 series the story touches. Would it really be that difficult to add meta-data to a book, with a button that would link it to the next one in a storyline?

Speaking of buttons, how about if I’m reading a book in a series, you provide me with a button that starts the next book in the series when I get to the last page of the one I’m currently reading? Even better would just be launching straight into the next one when I try to turn the page when I get to the end of a book. Instead, I have to tap the screen to bring up the done button, tap that to close the current book, tap the next book to bring up it’s info panel, then tap “read now”. That’s a lot of tapping. I’d suggest the developers check out Comic Zeal to see a nicely implemented reader, it’s what a lot of people are using to read the comics they’ve stolen via torrents. You want people to pay for your digital comics? Then give them tools that are at LEAST as good as what they are already using to read the pirated ones.

Also, quality control. There are many comics that have the wrong thumbnail pic, images that have strange errors, like corruption, or the speach bubbles being out of place. None of those are show stoppers, they aren’t even really annoyances, but it shows a lack of professionalism and polish. They give me the impression that Marvel isn’t really serious about this service, like they don’t have someone assigned to this full time, just an intern who isn’t really paying attention.

So, lest I leave you with the wrong impression, I love this service, I’m reading piles of comics and will definitely renew my subscription when it expires. I think this is the future of comics, but the app needs serious work.