Marvel Dotcomics

Overall score:

by: various Marvel guys
dotcomics.marvel.com

One Sentence Synopsis: Dozens of issues of Marvel comics, posted online and Flash-enabled, all for free.

Art:
Category: Traditional Comic Book
This isn’t a fan-based take on comicbooks—these are actual, professional comicbooks posted directly from Marvel’s bullpen to the web. Nothing groundbreaking, but all of it very solid.

Story:
Category: Continuous
There are actually several different stories involved, as there are several different comicbooks. As of this writing, some of them have only a few episodes (Tangled Web has only one) while others have lots (Ultimate Spider-Man has 21, making for quite a long and impressive story). All of them are ongoing and up to the high standards you should expect from Marvel comics. Except for Elektra, which had a pretty stupid story, but I get the impression that you don’t really read that one for the story….

Humor: N/A
Category: Humor not intended
You’ll occasionally find humor in the comics, but that’s not the point. The stories are intended to show superheroes saving the world and dealing with the moral issues superheroes so often deal with. The humor is fine when it decides to show up, but it doesn’t really matter.

Frequency:
There is at least one new issue almost every week, and often two, but they cover a full dozen comicbooks so there’s no guarantee that the one you’re looking for will be updated when you want it to be. It’s not any slower than if you got the comics at the store, but it’s not any faster, either, and on the web we’ve come to expect such things. Since the updates are huge when they come (an entire issue, rather than a couple of panels), it’s like ignoring a webcomic for a month or two and then reading all the archives you’ve missed.

Website/extras:
The website is a different case than most we deal with, since the comics are an extension of a much larger site rather than the other way around. No matter what you’re looking for regarding Marvel comics, you’re sure to find it eventually (except for the cover of one of the issues of The Hulk, which I wanted to use for wallpaper on my desktop).

The downside to the website, and the main downside to the comics, is that they suck up bandwidth like greedy little eels. These aren’t gifs or jpgs, these are full-blown Flash extravaganzas. They look great, but I pity the fool who tries to read them on a dial-up connection.

Overall:
Dotcomics doesn’t have the feel of the really good webcomics—there’s nothing to keep you going back every day. If you follow every single comic they post, you’ll have new stuff every week; if you don’t, updates will be sporadic and require a lot of waiting. But just because it uses a completely different model than other webcomics doesn’t mean it’s bad—I recommend Dotcomics to anyone with a fast connection, and I do so most fervently.

Content: PG-13 What can I say? Women in comicbooks are very top-heavy, and have a tendency to wear clothing that accentuates this—and, in some cases, to wear no clothing at all and rely on angles or intervening objects to keep themselves decent. There are also a couple of instances of vulgar or suggestive language and themes, but not too many, and none particularly harsh.

Three reasons to read Dotcomics:
1) You love comicbooks but can’t afford to buy them.
2) You like involved, serial plots.
3) You’re intrigued by my mention of top-heavy women.

Three reasons not to read Dotcomics:
1) Your computer is anything less than really fast.
2) You don’t like comicbooks.
3) You think Spider-Man has shallow characters.

Yes, I know, it’s not really fair to include Dotcomics in our webcomic section—they are, technically, webcomics, but they are done professionally by large teams of artists, writers, and marketers, and are backed by an enormous corporate conglomerate. Goats and Sluggy and Chopping Block and Megatokyo, meanwhile, are slaving away in their bedrooms with scanners and photoshop in what is essentially a lonely labor of love. So the two don’t compare well, and it could even be said that one has an unfair advantage over the other—phooey, I say. I still read them all, and just because I love Dotcomics doesn’t mean I love the indie comics any less.

There’s not much to say about Dotcomics that you can’t glean from the following basic statement: it’s a bunch of actual comicbook issues from some of Marvel’s most popular titles, modified for flash and put on the web for free. If you become a member (which requires no money, only an email address) you have access to even more issues, letting you get into the long and detailed stories comicbooks are famous for. If there’s a downside it is the Flash itself—as cool as it looks on the screen, it’s murder on a slow connection.

The way the flash works is this: When you click on a comic you want to read, it opens a new window and loads the comic in Flash. You see the cover and a little sign that says "click on cover to open." You click, and the cover folds open, revealing the first page (which is always an ad) and the second, which is the beginning of the comic. The ad zooms up so you can get a really good look at it, and when you click on it it goes away, replacing itself with the first panel or series of panels of the comic. The panels zoom up toward you, just like the ad did, and the word bubbles float over them. When you’ve finished reading, just click on the panels and they’ll disappear, allowing the next series of panels to zoom up and make themselves known. If your computer can handle it, it’s a wonderful way to read and a very easy interface to use.

The comics they have available are pulled straight from the top of the line: titles like The Amazing Spider-Man, Daredevil, Captain America, Cable, and (my personal favorite) The Incredible Hulk. I imagine most people think of the Hulk as a raging Lou Ferigno breaking stuff for thirty pages, but you’d be surprised—the key character, as always, is Bruce Banner, and the writers have all kinds of malicious fun duping him into dilemma after dilemma, trying to help people while avoiding anything that would turn him into the Hulk. Very good stuff.

They also include a bunch of new comics, called the Ultimate series. These are modern updates of classic comicbooks, similar to what they’ve done with the movies for X-Men and Spider-Man. Spider-Man, you see, first came out in the 60s, and his early origin story reflected that. For the movie, they set his origin story in 2002, altering it subtly where necessary to account for modern technology (such as the internet). The Ultimate series is the same idea—a sort of alternate universe where all of the big heroes get there start now instead of forty years ago. There’s an Ultimate Spider-Man, an Ultimate X-Men, and a version of the Avengers called only The Ultimates. I admit I don’t like this last one very much at all, but that’s probably due to the fact that Bruce Banner is a sniveling idiot and the Hulk is a bad guy—I have to be loyal to my Hulk. On the upside, though, they "recast" Nick Fury as a black Samuel Jackson clone, which is heretical but very, very cool.

I imagine that most of the purpose behind Dotcomics is to help revitalize interest in comicbooks—not to mention keeping up the excitement sparked by the recent movies, and drumming up excitement for the movies still to come. On some level they may well be trying to compete with indie webcomics, or at least take advantage of their popularity. The new marketing plan behind the Marvel machine is a powerful one indeed, and if it means we get to read comicbooks for free, I’m all for it. The constant ads in the comicbooks are forgivable for that reason—they help keep the good stuff free. They have given me quite a hankering for Spider-Man pop-tarts, however.

There are no sample strips today, since Dotcomics doesn’t use them, but I will suggest a sample issue to start on: The Incredible Hulk, issue 34. And tell me—wouldn’t the cover for Issue 37 make the coolest desktop wallpaper?

Written by Fellfrosch on September 10th, 2002