Reflections on Marvel CyberComics

I've talked before about Marvel's early attempts at webcomics which they dubbed CyberComics. (It was the late '90s -- everything was "cyber.") I came at those very much from an outsider perspective, reading them as a Marvel fan with no real professional contacts in the industry. David Gallaher was an intern at Marvel at the time and worked pretty directly on many of those projects. In a post over at LinkedIn yesterday, he reflected on that work a bit, sharing some insights in both the prodution and the lack of preservation around them.

It’s disheartening to know that even Marvel no longer has copies of many CyberComics, but the quest to find these lost gems continues. Over lunch a few years ago, John Cerilli, the initiative's editor suggested to me that original copies might still be tucked away in archives. Sadly, as time marches on, the likelihood of recovery diminishes.

It's a curious mirror of pamphlet comics' Golden Age. There was little monetary value placed on them and, as a direct consequence of that, there was little care or effort put into saving any of the work that went into them. We often barely have examples of the actual published comics from the 1940s, for example, much less the original art used in their production. Even as late as the 1960s, Stan Lee would just gift pages of art from the likes of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko to any random kid who happened to visit the Marvel offices; Jerry Bails got several pages of original art mailed to him from Julie Schwartz largely just by asking nicely. There was no concern about preservation because the medium itself was viewed as disposable.

Likewise, CyberComics were considered valueless. At least pamphlet comics of the 1960s cost ten cents to the reader; CyberComics were literally given away for free -- as a reader, you didn't even have to give up your email address! Back then, no one had figured out how to monetize webcomics so Marevl essentially used CyberComics as a loss leader to draw people to their site, where they might hopefully see a promotion about a Spider-Man comic they could go to a comic shop to purchase.

And so now, thirty-ish years later, there's barely any record of their existence. One commenter on Gallaher's post notes that he's got 40 gigabytes worth of the finished CyberComics saved locally, but he can't even open them with any current software and even when you could still open them in Adobe Director, they were small compared to monitor sizes at the time and didn't have any of the original interactivity. Because readers didn't have to pay for them originally, and because business (writ large) couldn't think of how they could profit off them.

Anyway, go read Gallaher's post for a little more insider knowledge/reflections about Marvel's first foray into webcomics from the 1990s.

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