Marvel Comics became a digital pioneer way back in the age of dial-up Internet. In 1996, it started putting stories starring Spider-Man, Wolverine and Daredevil online via a deal with AOL — the first time readers could get new Marvel titles by logging onto their computer. Like most things online back then, it was a slow and sometimes clunky experience, but it gave Marvel a taste of the future.
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Almost thirty years later, on-demand TV shows, movies — and yes, comics — are the norm. And rather than treating digital as an offshoot experiment, Marvel sees it as an important part of its business. In 2021, it launched its Infinity Comics line, with creators designing comics to be read vertically on a phone or tablet.
“The Infinity Comics have been a very significant for Marvel Unlimited, because those launch exclusively on that platform. They also provide slightly different demographic reaches,” says Dan Buckley, president, Marvel Comics and Franchise. He notes the mix of readers is closer to fifty-fifty male/female, vs. the print product, which still skews more male.
According to the company, Marvel Unlimited has enjoyed strong growth for the past three years after it launched Infinity Comics, with paid subs up 30 percent. Marvel does not disclose how many people pay for the $9.99 a month service.
Since the 2021 launch, Marvel has published 1,000 issues of Infinity Comics titles across 57 series. They tend to have a more humorous bent, with hits including a Deadpool comic focused on pet versions of the character, another focusing on Alligator Loki, a fan-favorite creation from the Loki TV show —and books centered on Jeff the Landshark.
In all, more than 32,000 comics spanning Marvel’s history are also on the service, with Marvel employees even using it as a research tool when looking for old comics.
Print still accounts for the vast majority of Marvel’s publishing sales, but in a conversation with THR , Buckley explains how the digital side of things is becoming important for informing its moves on the print side, and vice versa.
Netflix and other streaming services analyze their data to inform what they produce. How much are you using data from the app to inform your decisions?
We get a better feel for the interest in our product, and it does influence what we’re willing to do on the print side. We know there’s slightly different demographics and broader gender reach. So we want to keep on feeding that. We use both worlds to inform each other. These two mediums are not mutually exclusive. They’re very inclusive and they complement each other. Digital is becoming a bigger and bigger part of that mix of what will bring more people in. Anybody with a phone or an iPad is somebody who we get to read a comic.
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Was it hard to get your creatives to buy the idea of working on exclusively digital comics?
I challenged editorial staff to start making vertical comics for Marvel Unlimited — as a unique marketing angle for Marvel Unlimited, but also as a way to challenge our creative people to say, “This is a format that we need to be in. So teach yourself how to tell stories in it.” And I got some pushback originally, but everyone’s really embraced it and has a lot of fun with it. And some people are really enjoying approaching books in a different way. And it’s also attracting more creative people who have been growing up in that Webtoon space.
Who do you see as your competitors for attention in this digital comics space? Is it Webtoon?
Webtoon is a competitor with Marvel — they have their brand and logo on content that’s on shelves or in the digital space competing with us. But at the end of the day, Webtoon is much more of a platform than a publisher. We’ve talked about exploring partnerships and what we can do to leverage their platform. We’ve done some work with them in the past, and we’re both working through what’s the best relationship for the two of us to have before we engage in anything larger. But there’s a healthy amount of respect there.
Netflix talks about hours viewed as its metric for success. What is yours?
I don’t want to get into the specifics of it, but it’s definitely a measurement of engagement. And the more you have people engaged with stuff, the more sticky it is, the more they’re going to explore other things on your platform. We had to learn to tell stories in shorter snippets because that’s how people digest it. So, we do look if we get enough engagement. That eventually leads us to printing a collected version (of digital comics. We’ve done It’s Jeff and reprinted that vertical material into comics.
What’s the biggest misconception people have about digital comics?
It’s not an afterthought. Graphic fiction is a growing, thriving medium. The world is a very large opportunity for all graphic fiction publishers. And Marvel is very excited to participate in it. And we see a lot of growth in here — digital being a huge part of that growth. And digital has multiple different ways in which to engage — between Marvel Unlimited, Webtoon. Comixology is an important partner on Amazon. It’s a thriving and growing business with a lot of creativity for a lot of consumers to engage in.
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