IN-DEPTH
An iPad is the best and most cost ef fec tive way to read comic books these days
Comic books are cool. They’re also extremely pricy, with single issues costing upwards of $6.99 / £4.99. This can cause the hobby to be extremely expensive, and mean that fans of these characters can only ever experience their adventures through movies and TV shows rather than through the original print medium.
There are people who absolutely adore characters such as Spider-Man who haven’t been able to pick up a single issue of Spider-Man, nor a trade of his adventures due to the perceived inaccessibility of comics.
Luckily, and thanks to modern technology, iPads are able to emulate and enhance this experience at a fraction of the price, mainly thanks to the subscriptions that both DC Comics and Marvel offer.
The Digital Knight
Digital comics had a place in the industry, with Comixology being the best way to read comics on your phone, tablet, or laptop. You could get both mainstream comics from the Big Two (DC and Marvel) and indie comics from smaller creators. But recently, Comixology self-destructed. Amazon had a stake in Comixology and decided to merge it into the already-existing Amazon Kindle app, which had unintended and extreme side effects when it came to Comixology itself. People lost their libraries, the ability to view their comics in panel-by-panel view, and just generally the ease of access. Luckily, other services stepped up to fill that void.
Marvel Unlimited and DC Universe Infinite are some of those options. For an affordable fee every month ($9.99 / £9.99 for Marvel Unlimited and $7.99 / £6.99 for DC Universe Infinite), you get access to the entire back catalog of both Marvel and DC (up until a certain point, more on that later), and the ability to read those books on any compatible device. This means that you can turn your iPad into the perfect e-reader for comics and catch up on all your favorite characters without needing to destroy your bank balance to do so.
I myself have been catching up on the X-Men, and it’s so much easier to work out the current status quo of both the team and mutants as a whole without having to buy seven different books, keep up to date with several different events and buy books that also happen to feature the characters. Everything is also in a specific order, with reading orders meaning that you don’t have to deal with the complicated continuity of characters that people always fear.
The biggest drawback with Marvel Unlimited is that you only get books three months after they release. So for example, you can get all of Brian Michael Bendis’s seminal Ultimate Spider-Man run since that ended back in 2015, but if you want to read up to date on Zeb Wells’ much-maligned Spider-M
