Tag: Marvel

Marvel Alters “Essential” Tomb of Dracula Comics

Marvel has been collecting the run of its 1970s-ish Tomb of Dracula in relatively cheap softcover volumes. Groovy Age of Horror has the lowdown on how Marvel has been altering the comics as it reprints them.

The originals included a number of scenes featuring bare-breasted women, but in the “Essential” reprints, either new artwork has been added to cover the offending parts or the frame is cropped to eliminate the nudity.

Yet another reason to simply stick with downloading comics.

What’s Next for Marvel Comics on DVD

Despite Wired’s insistence that digital distribution of comic books is non-existent, the other day I picked up the 40 Years of Avengers DVD-Rom.

On the one hand, the problem with distributing these on DVD-ROM is they use dual layer DVDs and only 2 of the 5 DVD drives I have would properly read the DVD. On the other hand, that’s balanced by the fact that there’s almost no DRM so once you find a DVD drive that works, you can copy these to an HD and archive the DVD.

Notice I said “almost no DRM.” The comics are in PDF format, so the August 1972 issue of Avenger is in a single PDF file. The only DRM restriction is that there is a watermark that appears when you print the file, and you have to have at least Adobe Acrobat 6.0 or you’ll see the watermark on the screen. You can get around that restriction by using any old screen capture program, so I’ve never understood what the point of this half-assed DRM is.

And, of course, the price is right. The DVD includes full scans of 535 Avengers comics and I paid just over $50 for it — or less than a dime per comic. Compared to alleged “bargains” like overpriced, heavily DRMed iTunes downloads, Marvel’s practically giving these away.

Apparently the previous Spider-Man, Fantastic Four and X-Men releases have done enough for Marvel and GTI to plan at least three more comics-on-DVD releases this year. Along with a DVD version of the previously CD-only Spider-Man package, a 2006 release schedule included on the DVD touts,

  • 40 Years of The Incredible Hulk
  • 40 Years of Daredevil
  • 40 Years of Captain America

Fine, but where’s my 40 Years of Iron Man?

Wired’s Tired Article on Digital Distribution of Comic Books

I opened up the May 2006 issue of Wired Magazine to see an odd article by products editor Mark McClusky arguing in favor of digital distribution of comic books. McClusky writes,

The two biggest comics publishers, Marvel and DC, control huge back catalogs — as in 70 years of content. But if you want to read old issues of a venerable franchise like Spider-Man, your choices are either to hunt down expensive original copies or to buy costly paperback compilations. . . .

But imagine what these publishers — and smaller imprints — could do in the digital realm. Last year, thousands of readers snapped up The Complete New Yorker, a $100 DVD set containing scans of every issue of the magazine . . . If DC were to release The Complete Batman, fans wouldn’t just be excited — there would be mass hysteria. Comics lovers aren’t averse to spending money; it’s easy to imagine them happily paying $300 for such a compilation. I would. And while it might cannibalize sales of the trades, the radically lower production costs of a DVD set would offset the difference.

Yeah, imagine if instead of having to buy an expensive trade paperback to read all those early Spider-Man comics, you could buy a CD or DVD set that had the entire 40 year run of the book?

It’s such a good idea, Marvel did just that in 2004. It followed that up with DVD collections of the entire run of The Fantastic Four and X-Men with an Avengers DVD-ROM on the way (and for about $50 rather than $300; sadly, there was no mass hysteria or UFO sightings accompanying the release of any of these products).

Here’s an article idea for Wired — what if companies would create programs that would scan incoming e-mail and files for viruses and notify the user or automatically delete them before a user’s computer became infected? Wouldn’t that be a great idea? Probably worth a cover story, even.

Marvel & DC’s Super Powered Trademark

In the latest issue of Reason (not online yet, unfortunately), Matt Welch has an article about his early, misplaced optimism of the role that blogs and amateur journalism would have. If anything, I was even more optimistic than Welch. Take a tool like Google where it is almost trivially easy to track down and fact check any bit of trivia along with blogs and open source CMS systems that reduced the cost of publishing to the entire world to next to nothing, and the result should have been a journalistic renaissance.

Apparently not. The reality is that if a given claim fits a person’s preconceived notion of the world, then most people will not factcheck it. So if you survey a random sample of blogs, I suspect you would find far more misinformation therein than in any comparable sample of traditional media (which is definitely not a compliment to traditional media).

A good example of this involves a series of inaccurates posts on the extremely popular techno-culture weblog Boing! Boing!. A contributor to news aggregation site Digg.Com submitted a link to a Boing! Boing! article about Marvel’s trademark of the word “super hero.”

Another contributor to the Digg site responded that a) Boing! Boing! looked like NASCAR (I counted no less than 20 ads on the front page) and b) that the information on Boing! Boing! was factually incorrect.

The response from other Digg.Com contributors was to mod such comments down with responses largely being variations of, “How could you mod down a Boing! Boing! article?”

But if you look at Boing! Boing!’s post on the trademark issue, it leaves out an important detail,

Marvel Comics: stealing our language

Marvel Comics is continuing in its bid to steal the word “super-hero” from the public domain and put it in a lock-box to which it will control the key. Marvel and DC comics jointly filed a trademark on the word “super-hero.” They use this mark to legally harass indie comic companies that make competing comic books.

First, the trademark at question is for “super hero” and “super heroes.” A number of sites have falsely concluded from Boing! Boing!’s ambiguous post that Marvel and DC have just recently applied for a third trademark for “super-hero” and “super-heroes.” The hyphenated version is so similar to the non-hyphenated mark, that it is almost certainly already covered by the claimed trademark (in the same way that Marvel doesn’t have to trademark “Spider-Mann” to prevent another comic book company from publishing that title about a web slinging wall crawler).

Second, Marvel and DC don’t just claim such a trademark. Trademarks for “super hero” and “super heroes” costumes and toys was granted 40 years ago, and DC and Marvel were jointly granted the trademark for “super hero” and “super heroes” for comic book publishing purposes in the early 1980s. Both trademarks and their history can be freely examined on the USPTO web site.

A little fact checking, please.

Now on the bigger issue, Boing! Boing! is absolutely correct — it is absurd that Marvel and DC were allowed to register such a common term as their trademark. They have used their trademark to enjoin a number of publications that wanted to use “Super Heroes” in the title of the publication, typically leading companies to come up with new titles. For example, if I wanted to create a parody book, “The Secret History of Super Heroes”, Marvel and DC could force me to change the title.

This is ripe for a legal challenge on the grounds that super hero was already sufficiently diluted as a generic term when Marvel and DC registered it and that they’ve done nothing to establish “super hero” as referring exclusively to Marvel or DC properties. Certainly they don’t incorporate it in their logos or any of their publications on a consistent basis.