Last month just before Thanksgiving I decided to give Marvel Unlimited a try, and after spending some time with it, I thought I'd write down some notes on how it's going.
This is a subscription service that will let you access Marvel comics, old and new, from the web or from mobile apps.
My worry was that the interface on phones wouldn't be very good - it's a pretty small screen after all compared to the page comics are designed for. However there's a nifty 'smart panning' feature where the gesture for moving forward will zoom in on the right portions at the right order and block out the rest of the page, so it's actually very good.
I imagine there are some designs that wouldn't translate very well, but I haven't run into anything in practice that I've been unhappy with.
I suppose this will largely come down to how much you care for the content once the tech gets out of the way.
I've never been an avid comic reader - the handful of times I've gotten into a comic, it was always based on some media. For example, I've read most of the Walking Dead and Fable comics, but that's because I played the TellTale Games first.
Similarly, all the Marvel characters I first came across via the X-Men and MCU movies.
I thought I'd start with the older comics, like the Avengers from '63, and there is definitely some nostalgia-from-before-my-time associated with it that makes it interesting, but I found the writing style distracting - there is just so much exposition in dialog about what characters see or think or the silly assumptions made to move the plot forward. Maybe it's a genre thing, maybe it's a style-of-the-time thing, maybe just a way to keep the action going without slowing down - or perhaps just a combination of things.
In any case, I decided to read a She-Hulk series from 2022, and even though I didn't know a few of the key characters, I found the story quite compelling, and found myself eagerly reading one episode after another. Same thing with the Loki series.
It sure is fun for me, at least a few weeks in.
And that's really the bottom line. Something that I find interesting and keep coming back for more.
Happy marveling!
Tags: review