I’m getting back to buying and reading comic books and Marvel has a couple nifty things going on right now: Marvel LEGACY and their digital redemption system. They’re both great ideas with some minor problems with the LEGACY idea and some pretty massive issues for the digital redemption system.

First though, I got Punisher #218, which is is actually the first issue of this new series and comes with a lenticular cover, which is that plastic cover type of cover that as you move it back and forth it appears to move. DC is doing them right now on Action Comics to great success, but Marvel is really falling flat on their implementation, I’m finding it nearly impossible to see the Punisher part of the cover, all I’m seeing is the ‘legacy’ version of it, which features War Machine. Worst of all, as far as I can tell, this is the ONLY cover that really makes much sense for the two covers, check the full group of them out on Marvel.com (side note, I look forward to visiting that link in 2 years and seeing a 404. Corporate websites are the fucking worst at link rot.)

Final complaint about this specific comic is that this is the cover:

 (fucking awesome Punisher War Machine Armor)

You can clearly tell they’re showing off the classic Iron Man inspired War Machine armor. This is what they have as the big reveal after about 30 pages of build up:

 (why is his face so stupid)

Is that the alien armor that popped up towards the end of the original War Machine series? What happened to the armor from the original War Machine or even from the cover of the book that I bought?

 (alien armor for reference, it was stupid then and it’s stupid now)

Ugh.

My other compliant is about the digital redemption system they have. I’ve only done about 10 or 15 of them so far, but I think about 7 of those have ripped in some way and I had to spend about 10 minutes per redemption trying to figure out what the code is.  For the remaining ones it usually only takes about 5 or 10 tries to make it go through correctly.  Why that main times? They use duplicate looking characters, which any serious redemption program simple does not do.   The difference between 2 and Z are minor even on a computer screen, but inthe font they’re using, they’re impossible to tell apart.  Same with O and 0, S and 5, ugh.  Horribly thought out there Marvel, those duplicate looking characters need to be removed completely.

The worst offense that the digital redemption system doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get the comic book that you’re getting the code from.  Here’s the redemption page from Slapstick #4:

See the problem?  Why did I even bother buying the physical copy if I have to buy it again to have the full set on the digital system?