There is a way to access more comics than Marvel is now offering through Comixology, although not its very latest ones: Marvel Unlimited. For a subscriber fee of $9.99 a month or $69.99 a year, would-be readers can shuffle through 15,000 comics in Marvel's digital library. DC Comics has never offered anything like this. Unlimited does have a limitation: it doesn't carry anything Marvel has published more recently than six months ago. However, if you're interested in the comics that inspired the latest movie or the classic creative run that everyone's always talking about, this is a fantastic deal, generally paying for itself within its first hour of use, depending on how fast you read. It's also now available on iPhone, iPad, Android and anything that acts like a laptop or desktop. As long as Marvel Unlimited exists, it's hard to see savvy shoppers buying Marvel comics through Amazon in the kind of numbers that would see Marvel dominate. And less than a week after the Amazon deal was announced, they still aren't. So what's Marvel's real goal here?
T Campbell has written quite a few online comics series and selected work for Marvel, Archie and Tokyopop. His longest-running works are Fans, Penny and Aggie-- and his current project with co-writer Phil Kahn, Guilded Age.
