Thursday, November 22, 2007

GIT Loses Marvel Liscense, gains Archie

From Newsarama...GIT LOSES MARVEL LICENSE, GAINS ARCHIE



According to a letter to retailers posted on his company’s website by GIT Corp President Raymond K. Pelosi, GIT will no longer offer Marvel comic books on DVD-ROM. The question of how the collections would work in conjunction with Marvel’s new online comics initiative had been raised by many fans when the publisher’s plan was announced.

Over the years, GIT had released collections of Marvel titles from Fantastic Four to Amazing Spider-Man, the X-Men, Avengers, and more. Popular with many fans, the issues in the GIT collections were scanned in copies, presented in pdf format. Utilizing the technology, GIT would collect decades worth of issues on single DVDs.


A poster in the a.b.comics.dcp group (Santa Cthulhu) put it well by saying:

...removing the legitimate option for people who want to legally purchase a digital
version they can own and enjoy at their convenience instead of waiting for Marvel's site to get back up so they can read a rented copy from a spotty selection.

My opinion on this is that it's bad and shortsighted marketing to promote the product you want to sell by removing all other even vaguely related alternatives that could possibly take away sales from a non-competitive rival, especially when the previous product has decent sales *and* customer demand and the new one is still an unproven test with a noticeably flawed implementation.

And already on various message boards and such, a lot of people are expressing disappointment that the upcoming Thor and Daredevil or whatever collections they were looking forward to/saving up for will no longer be produced.

I was saving up for Avengers, X-Men, and maybe FF, myself. I think this kind of puts recent events into perspective, and I'm petty enough to hope that Marvel's subscription service tanks just because of all the DVD-buyers they're letting down so they can push their shiny new subscription model.

Guess I know what I'm not spending my holiday money on this year.

Best regards,


I agree with Santa Cthulhu, this strikes me as a bad move, unless Marvel is intending to offer such collections on their own. Regular readers of this blog know how I feel about PDF comics, but even I must admit the GIT Marvel collections were a great idea. I'll be sorry to see them go.

On the upside, it will be nice to have The Archie library available in this format.

4 comments:

Jovial1 said...

This is a shame. I've got three of these collections (the original Spider-Man collection on 12 or 13 CD's, and the Uncanny X-Men and Avengers DVD collections.)

Having seen the difference between the .PDF and .CBR formats, I'd prefer having the .CBR format, but even PDFs are something that you can carry with you if you don't have any internet access.

I'm disappointed in Marvel, though this may push me over into picking up the Fantastic 4/Silver Surfer collection while I can.

Caine said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Phil Looney said...

I will definitely get the Archie stuff - there are no good collections for that stuff.

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