Marvel Comics is opening the floodgates to their massive online comics archive, Marvel Unlimited—for only 99 cents. For the next week, a dollar will buy you a month of total access to Marvel’s online cache of over 15,000 comics, which range from books that hit the stands six months ago to the Golden and Silver Age classics of yesteryear.
While most are simply digital versions of printed issues, Marvel Unlimited access also offers some more experimental content designed specifically for the digital format, like Marvel’s Infinite Comics, which are designed exclusively to be read on screens, and behind-the-scenes video content for select comics like Jonathan Hickman’s The Avengers. The six-issue Captain America: The Winter Soldier storyline, which helped inspire the recent blockbuster film, also includes adaptive audio that changes as you swipe through the panels and pages.
Ryan Penagos, the editorial director of Marvel’s Digital Media Group, compares it to the same sort of dynamic sound you hear when you’re playing a videogame: that is, the music changes as you move through different spaces and events. “If you’re just standing in a room the music is kind of mellow, but as you go along and enemies appear, the music ramps up and adapts to what you’re doing. So we took that concept and put it into the adaptive audio for the comic. As you go along from panel to panel, it changes, whether you’re going forward or backwards.”
The comics can be viewed on PC and Mac, as well as iOS and Android devices through a Marvel Unlimited app. Readers can download up to 12 comics at a time for offline reading—although like many digital subscription services, you’re paying to view and not to own. Newer comics tend to be added to the Unlimited archive after 6 months, and include comics from the recent Marvel Now! initiative that relaunched many of the publisher’s most popular titles with new #1 issues.
Typically, a subscription to the Marvel Unlimited service costs $69 a year or $9.99 a month, but 30 days seems like seems like ample time to evaluate whether or not it’s worth subscribing at full cost. After all, says Penagos, “if you have a month, you can read a hell of a lot of comics.”
