What SUCKS about Marvel Comics Unlimited

Dear readers,

There are some drawbacks to the MDCU platform at this point. It reminds me quite a bit of HBOGO and Amazon Prime videos when they came online. First, you can’t “subscribe” to a comic book series. You can add individual comics to your “library” and you can even have up to six comic books offline if you are using an iOS device, but this is not something that is really helpful.

Surely there needs to be a better way to organize comic books in libraries for users of the service. Marvel doesn’t want to discourage people from buying paper comics (or digital ones) monthly, so they delay digitizing of new issues. That makes sense. What doesn’t make sense is how sometimes a single issue will be missing from a long line of old issues. I noticed some in Uncanny X-Men that were missing, so you lose parts of story arcs. That sucks.

Another big drawback is one of the reasons for this blog: searching for comic books sucks. The web-based interface is better than the iOS app, but it’s still a real bitch to use.

As you can see, searching for “uncanny x-men 266” gives you a lot of results. Luckily for this particular search, the first one is the correct link. If you click it, you’ll get the following screen.

With many other searches, the results aren’t quite as useful. When searching for age of apocalypse, you get this:

As you can see, it’s not exactly easy to find the comic book issues you want to read. The only way to improve the search is to click the Comics option under the By Category heading on the left.

Although you will still have trade paperbacks and other content (like variant cover editions) that are not available on the online service.

Marvel - please consider adding a U symbol to the listings as shown below where the link contains any MDCU content.

Until next time,

Excelsior!!!