Tag: Marvel

Marvel and NCSoft Settle Lawsuit Over “City of Heroes”

Not much in the way of details, but late last year Marvel settled its lawsuit against NCSoft, makers of MMORPG “City of Heroes.”

Marvel had sued NCSoft saying the ability of players to make characters that looked very similar to Marvel heroes represented copyright and trademark infringements.

This was pretty clearly a defeat for Marvel given that a press release from NCSoft announcing the settlement said,

The parties’ settlement allows them all to continue to develop and sell exciting and innovative products, but does not reduce the players’ ability to express their creativity in making and playing original and exciting characters. Therefore, no changes to City of Heroes or City of Villains’ character creation engine are part of the settlement.

I’ve actually been playing a bit of CoH ever since I kicked my WoW addiction. It is a pretty good game, though not nearly as compelling or enjoyable as WoW was.

At least when I play, I rarely see rip-offs of DC or Marvel characters. That’d be pretty boring anyway. Currently I’m playing The CandiMan. After all, who can stop criminals in their tracks? The CandiMan can!

Source:

Marvel vs. City of Heroes lawsuit settled. GameWinners.Com, December 15, 2005.

Marvel Severs Its Odd Relationship With ToyBiz in Favor of Hasbro

In December, Marvel severed its odd relationship with ToyBiz and reached an agreement with Hasbro to produce toys based on its characters. The relationship was odd because Marvel owned a ToyBiz sister company, and essentially ToyBiz manufactured the toys which were then sold to the sister company which in turn handled distribution. ToyBiz was expected to ask for a lot more money when its contract expired in December 2006, as its deal with Marvel was generally seen as extremely favorable to Marvel.

Regardless, ToyBiz produced pretty much hands down the best superhero-related toy line over the life of its contract with Marvel, although some of the DC Direct stuff comes close (like the Alex Ross JLA figures). Apparently the designers of the ToyBiz figures, however, were in-house at the sister company so hopefully Hasbro will tap that talent.

What is amazing is the amount of money that Marvel was able to coax out of Hasbro,

In conjunction with the signing of the Hasbro license agreement, Marvel will receive a non-refundable advance of $100 million.

Damn. Hasbro stockholders better be hoping that X-Men 3 and Spider-Man 3 are enormous hits if the company is ever going to recover that kind of advance.

Source:

Hasbro Awarded Five-Year Strategic License to Marvel’s Library of Over 5,000 Characters; Product Inspired by Spider-Man 3 Movie to be Among the First to Market. Press Release, Hasbro, 2005.

Next up for Marvel: 40 Years of the Avengers DVD-ROM

The other day I was wondering what Marvel would follow-up its 40 Years of the X-Men DVD-ROM with, and it turns out my speculation was right. The latest issue of Previews has a listing for a 40 Years of The Avengers DVD-ROM that will “collect over 535 complete Avengers comics spanning September 1963 through December 2005. Scheduled to ship in April 2006.” Suggested retail price is $49.95.

40 Years of X-Men on DVD-ROM

The other day I finally picked up the 40 Years of X-Men DVD-ROM at the local comic book store. That’s 480 issues of X-Men/Uncanny X-Men (the first series) from 1965 through 2005.

Like the previous offerings of Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four, all of the comics are scans of actual comics in PDF format. There is some lite-DRM in that you have to use Acrobat 6.0 or great to view these properly and when you print them, there is a watermark added to the printout. As with the Spider-Man and FF collections, however, it is easy enough to just use a screen capture utility to get high quality color print-outs without the watermark.

For $50, a package like this is just too good to pass up, though it is not quite as useful as the Spider-Man or Fantastic Four editions since the best years of the X-Men series often involved stories that spanned across multiple different X-Men related comic book titles.

No word yet that I’ve seen on if there’s going to be another in this series or, if so, what it might be. Avengers Assemble?

Fantastic Four DVD Comics Collection

In March I posted my brief review of the 40th Anniversary Spider-Man CDRom Collection. That was a 9-CD set for about $40 that contained 501 issues of Spider-Man going back to Amazing Fantasy #15. Marvel followed that up with the 44 Years of Fantastic Four on DVD-ROM which collects 550 issues of the Fantastic Four title through 2004 (alas, no Ultimate FF).

I picked a copy up for $50 at the local comic book store (unlike the Spider-Man collection, I haven’t seen this for sale at computer superstores yet).

My first experience with the collection was not happy. I could not get my HP to recognize the DVD-ROM. I sent an e-mail to the tech support folks listed on the box, but did not receive a reply. Fortunately, a Dell machine I use did recognize the DVD. The DVD turns out to be double-layered and I imagine my DVD drive has some sort of incompatibility.

Anyway, although Marvel has gone to a different company to produce the Fantastic Four package, its basically the same. These are high resolution scans of comic books put into PDF files (one PDF file per issue). They include everything — covers, advertisements, letters columns, etc. If it was in the print version of the comic book, its here. The only drawback is that, as with the Spider-Man collection, some of the early issues are scanned from less than pristine comics and the printing method they used in the 1960s wasn’t the greatest to begin with.

On the upside, no copy protection as far as the files are concerned. I simply copied all 5+ gigs to my hard drive and store the disk. Where copy protection does come in is printing. Acrobat will insert a “Marvel” watermark overlay on top of the printed page which is quite ugly. There are, of course, plenty of ways around that, so it’s not much of an issue for me. A non-technical user who wants to do a lot of printing of these comics, however, is likely to be disappointed.

I have never been a big fan of the Fantastic Four, but I was very happy to have the entire run of the book for about $50 after taxes.

But the best news is yet to come. In October, Marvel and Graphic Imaging Technologies will be releasing probably the coolest such set to date — 40 Years of X-Men on DVD-ROM. All 480 issues in that title through 2004 (but again, probably no Ultimate X-Men).

The big question is when is DC going to get in on this? Where is the 65 Years of Batman on DVD-ROM set?

40th Anniversary Spider-Man CDROM Review

Back in September I mentioned the 40th Anniversary Spider-Man CDROM Collection — Amazing Fantasy #15 plus issues 1-500 of The Amazing Spider-Man all in one CD-ROM collection for about $40.

I finally managed to pick up a copy recently. Basically, what we have are 501 PDF files containing relatively high-resolution scans of each comic book. This has its advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, everything is included in each book, including inside covers, advertisements, letter pages, etc. If its was in the book, its in the PDF. Unfortunately, many of the comics that were used for the scans are clearly showing their age. Even more recent books tend to show quite a bit of wear. This is in contrast to Topic Entertainment’s previous Marvel Comics CDROM collection which achieved stunning images by scanning the black-and-white original art in Marvel’s archives and then adding a digitally colored layer which could be turned off.

Storing the scans in PDFs creates a number of issues — the most annoying is that the books were scanned in landscape which means each page in the PDF usually represents two comic book pages. I find this a bit annoying. It does preserve the occasional two-page layout, but for the most part I’d have preferred to have my monitor filled with one page rather than two.

The user also has to use Adobe Acrobe 6.0 or later, or a “Marvel” watermark will appear superimposed on the pages. That watermark always appears when you print the page, so if you really want to print anything you’ll need to grab a screenshot. That’s stupid behavior IMO. What’s the point in nerfing printing like that, especially since its trivial to circumvent?

Other than that, the PDFs aren’t DRMed, in that you don’t need to register the Acrobat Reader or anything. I quickly copied all 6+gb of PDFs to my portable hard drive so I can read them on any computer I happen to be using at the moment.

Overall, its not perfect, but at less than a dime per comic, this is the bargain of the century. And coming soon is a Fantastic Four CDROM reproducing the entire 30-year run of that book. It truly is a great time to be alive.