Marvel and Spiderman Come to Disney

Walt Disney is to buy Marvel Entertainment in a deal valued at $4bn and will give them ownership of 5,000 Marvel characters like, Spider-Man, Captain America, Thor, The Fantastic Four and the X-Men. Marvel have some great intellectual property in their characters which will now be able to be exploited and licensed in many forms to a full greater audience.

Only last month we wrote about Marvel’s smart move to bring their content onto Sony’s PSP. Marvel.com also hosts games, videos and content as the Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited portion of the website, with more than 5,500 comic books available for subscription, including web-exclusive content.

It will be interesting to watch how Disney now exploit their new assets and the impact this move will have on digital comics and graphic novels.

Marvel Digital Comics

Marvel Digital Comics have announced that Spider-Woman will be the subject of a digital motion comic with voice actors playing the part of various characters from the Marvel Universe. The new comics will be available for purchase on iTunes will be released with the motion comic will coming out first, followed by the print comic a week or two later. Astonishing X-Men, War of Kings: Warriors and Dark Reign: Made Men will also be released as a motion comics soon

Marvel.com now hosts games, videos and content as the Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited portion of the website, with more than 5,500 comic books available for subscription, including web-exclusive content.

Marvel is hopeful that using these motion comics as a gateway to print comics and will get people interested in reading comic books. They have also adopted a streaming approach as opposed to a downloading one. This gives them additional from a piracy standpoint.

The graphical visual nature of the comic book combined with the story length offer a real opportunity for a migration to digital form. Interesting they offer a potential co-edition between print and online where comic fans will always want the paper as a collectable but probably enjoy the convenience of digital. Digitisation also offers a new audience, further rights extensions and merchandising tie ins and potential extensions into games and film. We believe Marvel is clearly taking logical steps and that comics are entering an exciting era.