Yes, it’s a name that tells you nothing.
https://www.dccomics.com/dcuniverse
DC Universe is a first-of-its kind, immersive digital experience
designed just for DC fans. One of the many incredible things your
membership will include is unlimited access to the following
exclusive original series.
For now, it seems to be just Young Justice: Outsiders, Titans, and an Harley Quinn show.
Well I love DC, but I dunno…
Well shit, they’ll have my money…
Lead buried: a Swamp Thing series!
I assume this is their comics subscription service as well? I’m intrigued.
I think it’s only streaming movies and not comics. I would be interested if it included a DC version of Marvel Unlimited though.
Put the Lois & Clark show on there and they’ve got a deal.
Pricing and a few more details are up at https://www.dcuniverse.com/coming-soon/ and you can preorder now. Launch date is still just “Fall 2018”.
$7.99/month, or $74.99/year. Includes their new original shows Titans, Doom Patrol, Swamp Thing, Young Justice: Outsideres, and Harley Quinn, as well as a selection of existing stuff from the DC animated movies, cartoons, and live action movies. Content will rotate “quarterly, or close to quarterly”. And it includes some selection of digital comics, I didn’t look hard for specifics on whether that’s new or old or what.
I have pretty much no interest in a new way to watch older stuff because I already own everything DC related that I care to watch. But at $8 a month, I’ll probably subscribe for a few months just out of curiosity. I’ll admit I kind of want to see this train wreck for myself.
I’ll subscribe for Young Justice AND NOTHING ELSE.
Wait, Doom Patrol and Swamp Thing are full series? I read a week or two back that DP was an episode on Titans. I loved that comic back in the day. So weird.
Holy crap. That DC Titans show looks like the worst thing ever.
I don’t know, just regurgitating what’s on the site:
I think some of those are animated? I haven’t kept up.
They say there will be “a curated list of comics” available but of course that doesn’t indicate how deep the back catalog will be.
So this is available now. I went with a full year’s subscription which got me an extra 3 months for pre-order. It’s now $74.99 annual or $7.99 monthly. I’m probably not the best person to review it, since I’m not very familiar with DC comics, but as no one else has posted, I thought others might want to know what it looks like.
As far as the actual comics app goes, it seems to work fine. I’ve accessed it both via iOS and in Chrome on Windows. iOS requires downloading comics before viewing them (similar to Dark Horse’s App), which is a bit more of a pain then Marvel Unlimted, which allows viewing without pre-downloading. No download needed on Windows. Other than that it allows viewing either entire pages, or individual panes. Image quality is very good. I have seen some User Interface oddities — on iOS, occasionally tapping on a page, it fast forwards through several pages, and on Chrome on Windows, it sometimes seems to reload the comic instead of going to the next page (I suspect, it’s not doing a good job loading the upcoming pages, and sometimes it hasn’t loaded the next page yet, so it redisplays the current page while requesting more pages).
Probably the biggest issue is how deep is the library, and that’s something I can’t answer well, not knowing DC. Just to give some numbers, currently there are over 30 different Batman series listed, with a variety of different numbers of issues in each ranging from Batman Eternal with 52 issues and Batman Legends of the Dark Knight with 103 issues down to Batman Unseen with 5 issues and Batman and the Joker’s Daughter with just one. (That’s not including various Batman related characters like Batgirl, who has three series up). There are seven Green Latern series, with the biggest one (listed as Green Latern 1960-) having 76 issues. Wonder Woman on the other hand only has 5 series up with a maximum of 17 issues in one and 11 in another. Superman also only has 13 series up, with some of them having only a single issue (like Red Son). They released the whole thing on “Batman Day” so it may be that they deliberately went heavy on the Batman.
One thing that’s not clear to me is, is this like ComiXology Unlimited, which seems to be an opportunity to sample stuff and then see if you want to buy the rest of the series, or is it more like Marvel Unlimited. Superman Red Son they only have 1/3rd of the story up. Similarly, I started reading Batman New 52 (2011) (with the Owls) and discovered there were only three and that wasn’t enough to finish the story. So I’m left wondering if I’m supposed to buy the rest, or if I’m going to get more of it next month.
Also how much are they adding each month? How much are they removing. There was a rumor that Identity Crisis was there for a limited time, so I went through all seven issues last night (boy that was depressing), but it’s not clear where that rumor came from or if there’s any validity to it. If they’re removing stuff regularly, are they going to give us advanced notice (because if they don’t I’ll be pissed).
Movie and TV wise, there’s a fair amount of stuff up, but again, I’m probably not a good judge of this. There are a few oddities, they have Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, but not The Dark Knight Rises (they also have all the late 80s to 90s Batman movies along with Superman I-IV from the late 70s and 80s). They seem to have a good selection of animated movies, including some new stuff like Batman Gotham by Gaslight and Batman Ninja which I think were both released this year.
Overall I’m pretty happy with it, since it gives me a good opportunity to explore a lot of the DC Universe, for what I consider a pretty reasonable price (with the pre-order discount it comes out to $5/month and $6.25/month without preorder seems pretty reasonable). If I run into a lot of incomplete stories though, my opinion could change pretty quickly. We’ll also have to see what happens with them adding and removing comics from the collection. In theory I don’t think it’s that unreasonable for them to only provide a large but rotating collection of comics (Marvel Unlimited is amazing, and I don’t see how the economics on that even work). But it remains to be seen if in practice, a rotating collection leaves us with lots of unfinished stories and lots of stories we really want access to with no idea when they’ll show up.
Swamp Thing cancelled after one episode. They’ll “air” the rest of the filmed season, but that’s it.
TIL: Multi-national corporation Warner Brothers needs fucking funding grants to make multi-million dollar TV shows like they’re a lower-middle class kid hoping to get into college.
A multi-million dollar TV show that was never likely to have an enormous audience, to be fair.
Is it any good? (Is it that bad?)
Swamp Thing is one of my favourite comics, visually and ideologically.
Surprising approximately no one…
Kinda obvious this was coming, once HBO Max launched with the shows.
Disappointed they never made it available outside the US.
I actually wanted to subscribe to this for awhile.
But hey, 24,000 comics… that could be a great service.
