Marvel releasing some 700 No. 1 issues digitally

It's a good idea from a business sense. Marvel (and other comic book publishers) need to do something to not only revive flagging sales of actual honest-to-goodness, hold-it-in-your-hands comic books, but to also create new generations of fans that otherwise never would have looked twice at a comic book.

I was a devoted fan of comic books for some 20 years of my life, but not so much anymore. The primary reason is that they're just too darned expensive now. From my first comic purchased in 1981 at 50₡ to 1991 at $1.00, comic prices doubled. From 1991 to 2001, prices tripled to $2.99. And in the past decade, they've already jumped to $3.99 for the same 32-page story that went for 50₡ back in 1981. Granted, the art, paper quality, and story-telling are more sophisticated, but this is a pretty big jump in price, almost 700%. I love comics, but just can't justify the cost anymore.

The irony is that prices are going up because readership has gone down, but readership continues to fall because prices continue to rise. It's a vicious but depressing cycle.

the app does not work - is this some kind of free and misleading advertisement? It says it can't connect to the network, while all my other apps connect without any problems.

The iOS app works just fine on iPad4. Downloading isn't easy on a pocket router. You have to "purchase" the comic first and then try the download. I imagine Marvel's system is overloaded now. Once in the comic, tap on the panes and they show up full screen.

Working now on my nexus 7. It seems they are completely overloaded, leading to network timeouts. Did their marketing did not prevent their IT department about this event?

I've always thought that Marvel and DC should take a page from Japan's manga publishers and produce low-cost reprints of old issues so that today's readers can get caught up on old stories. Here in Japan you can buy a paperback compilation of 10-12 old episodes of just about any manga for under $5.00; that's unheard-of in the USA.

I remember as a kid in the '80s and '90s wanting to see what Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four were like back when they got started in the 1960s, and the only option was to seek out the lowest-grade copies of the original I could find. Fortunately they weren't that hard to find, but still, it should be possible to get non-rare-collectible "reading copies" like you could with any other book.

Junk. They did this before. They did this with the playstation network. I purchased over $300 worth of comics to have them pulled and no longer supported by the PS network. Same ol virtual promises repackaged.