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Marvel Opens a Digital Archive

All work and no play makes Jack one sad rhino. When you get tired browsing through academic digital archives, check out the new Marvel Comic Vault, available at http://www.marvel.com/digitalcomics/ .

Make no bones — this is a pay site. You can pay either $4.99 a month for a year of access (that’s if you pay for a year at a time) or $9.99 a month, billed monthly. There is a sampler of 250 comics available for free, with over 2,500 comics available in the archive and about 20 titles being added every week. (The way the press release describes it, I do not get the impression that Marvel is going to try to make this an absolutely complete archive.

Oh dear, I haven’t read comics in a long time, and I don’t want to search for something obvious like Captain America. Oh, I know — how about Captain Marvel?

No, not THAT Captain Marvel. The female, African-American Captain Marvel who I think was a police officer named Monica? Wikipedia informs me that I am thinking of Monica Rambeau. I did a search for Monica Rambeau and got only four results, with what appears to be for other characters named Monica. There is a place where you can browse by character/artist names, but it appears to be available for subscribers only. A search for Jonah brought about 15 results, mostly (as you’d expect) for Spider-Man comics.

The viewer appears to be Flash-based, allowing you to page through the comics. Even if you’re not a subscriber, it looks like the first two or three pages are available. This is pretty comfortable except sometimes it takes a few minutes for the page to load (I guess the vault is rather busy at the moment.)

I’m sure I’m a bit too old — okay, dammit, way too old — for the demographic that’s being aimed for. Browsing the free samples did find some amusing offerings, like a Love Romances comic from 1960. (Who can resist the line, “Come here, you beautiful little ninny”?). If I were the demographic, however, I think I would agitate for an advanced search that allowed you to do more complex date/title/character searching and a faster load for the comics viewer…

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