Marvel CyberComics

» see marvel.com/fun/cybercomics as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

aol was not something you could have in turkey. it was an american dial-up service reached through american local access numbers, and the marvel comics that lived inside it in 1996 were about as available from here as a cable channel nobody carried. the whole first year of cybercomics happened behind a wall that had nothing to do with money or language. it was a phone number.

marvel started making them in the summer of 1996 as part of a promotional arrangement with america online, and they went into the aol marvel zone for subscribers only. in 1997 the company built marvelonline.com and moved them onto marvelzone.com, still gated, now behind a registration form rather than an isp. the archive records what that felt like from outside: the page at marvelzone.com/members/cybercomics answers http 401 in april 1999 and again that october, which is a server telling the crawler, and everybody else, to log in first.

by 2000 they were finally free to anybody with a browser and shockwave installed, which was the year marvel stopped making them.

~ the case file ~

~ what a cybercomic actually was ~

it was not a scan. each one was built in macromedia shockwave, so a panel could hold a few seconds of animation and a sound cue, and you moved forward by clicking rather than by scrolling. the reading rhythm was closer to a slide deck that occasionally moved than to a cartoon, which is roughly where the technology of 1996 could get you over a modem.

the line ran real characters and real writers. spider-man, wolverine, daredevil, gambit, blade and deadpool all had stories, and the credits include tom defalco, larry hama, d.g. chichester, joe kelly, john cassaday, joe quesada and kevin smith. deadpool's was called ride my hard drive, baby, which dates it more precisely than any timestamp could.

~ the sponsor ~

on 17 september 1999 nextplanetover.com announced a deal with marvel that included sponsoring a monthly exclusive cybercomic. it was the point at which the line had an outside party paying to keep it running, and it lasted less than a year. npo was bought out and then went bankrupt in 2000, and the money went with it.

after that the comics were renamed webisodes and put on marvel.com for free with no registration at all. the capture from 6 december 2000 shows them under that name in the fun and games section, with sandblasted and jungle warfare on the shelf beside doom control, each described in one sentence. it reads like a section being kept alive rather than one being built.

~ how the pages came off ~

production ended in 2000 for the reason most things end, which is that nobody was paying for it. the removal took longer and the archive can date it. marvel.com/fun/cybercomics is still answering 200 on 19 january 2001, individual comics like jungle warfare and sandblasted are still serving on 17 april 2001, the directory index is a 404 by 22 july, and the comics themselves are 404 by december. the section was dismantled from the top down over about six months with no announcement anywhere.

~ what did not survive ~

marvel did not keep all of them. when the pages went, some of these comics stopped existing, because there were no backups for every title and no shockwave files anywhere outside the server. the successor line, dotcomics, eventually became marvel digital comics unlimited in 2007 and then marvel unlimited, which today holds tens of thousands of issues going back to the 1930s and cannot show you a comic marvel published in 1998.

that is the part worth saying plainly. a company with one of the most carefully managed back catalogs in publishing lost four years of its own output because that output happened to be in a file format the web moved past. paper survived by being ignored in a box. shockwave did not get a box.

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