Week End Fanboy: Special Marvel Archive Edition

So all I had in the chamber for this week's weekend fanboy reviews was the advanced screening of BSG Razor, and since Coddy is stuck in the conundrum of wanting a spoiler free viewing on SciFi and being compelled to read every single word I write, it's probably for the best we belay that review for a few more days for the fish's sake.

Instead, we'll provide a weekend rap up to our semi-exclusive* coverage of the "Dr. Stranging" of Marvel.com, with special graphics provided by reader Red Vader (Herr Vader, if there's a better URL through which to link you props, let us know).

So, the story so far as Bostodelphia understands it: earlier this week Marvel.com launched the beginnings of its digital archive. Early reviews were largely favorable, with a few complaints about access wonkiness and Free Culture Revolutionary vows that this archive will be torrented in proper .cbr format for the common cultural good or whatever justification.

Starting Friday, not just the archive but Marvel Comics' whole website has become inaccessible. It's not clear whether this is internet wide block or something affecting a substantial chunk of would be Marvel Zombies. Over at Newsarama it's become a discussed issue, with some people claiming no problem, but readers writing about difficulties specifically within this weekend's time frame seem to be growing. Discussants over at Comic Book Resources seemed ignorant of any problems with Marvel or the archive until early this morning.

So perhaps it is a limited hack of Marvel, or indeed some internal server problem that coincidentally has rendered a cute URL glitch for Firefox users. Complaints are also starting to rise up about problems with credit card subscriptions as well. In Bostodelphia's opinion, none of this makes Marvel look good. While they are masters at talking the talk of fanboy culture, they aren't a basement operation. They're shrewd transmedia retailers of their character brands. While making an image archive of the nature and scope Marvel's trying to roll out is to my knowledge unprecedented in the comics industry (and kind of cool), setting up a secure storefront to subscribers is not, especially to a company with contacts like Marvel's. What could have been timed as a cool early Thanksgiving present has left the folks over at Marvel looking like Turkeys unable to deliver the goods to their gobbling fans.

Special thanks again to Red Vader for the image and tracking down the Newsarama forum. It's great when readers help this blog write itself.

*Looks like someone over at Stuff We Like has also caught onto this.

Marvel Comics Hacked?

At the time of this writing, Marvel Comics' website is down. Oddly, when my Firefox browser reached Marvel as instructed, the address bar added a string of "docstrange"'s, 20 of them, to the URL. A Marvel Dr. Strange promotion gone awry in the coding, or someone having a little destructive fun with Marvel's web presence? Anyone else? Anything different on other browsers? IE "cannot find server" but no mod to the URL.

Update, 9:10 p.m. EST: Marvel.com is still "Dr. Stranged" and apparently we here at Bostodelphia can actually say "You heard it here first," since no one online seems to be reporting this. I would have discounted it as run of the mill technical difficulties, if 1.) the outage hadn't been going on all day (generally if a commercial site's experiencing technical difficulties that's sandbagging them for the long run, they still have enough control of the site to explain that they're down for maintenance) and 2.) the "doctorstragedoctorstrange..." string redirect seen in Firefox's address bar (this has only been seen in Firefox, Internet Explorer still takes you to an unavailable page error message, but no URL modification). We've been digged, and commentator Redvader over there laments that this event has come "after I plunked down $60 for the digital archive too."

My first thoughts were that this might be some sort of not quite well planned special Dr. Strange roll out announcement; but "something" more substantial, or at least advertorial, would have happened by day's end. So, let's assume some sort of hack. Now is this mere pranksterism, or something more invasive jeapordizing those with account information linked to Marvel' digital archive subscriptions? Also, I'm not very well plugged into the online comics fanbase, but really, no one's mentioned this but us?

Update #2: Further Bostodelphia Coverage can be found here and here.