I see alot of people asking what the difference is between DC Universe and Comixology Unlimited here it is:
Comixology Unlimited operates for the most part as a preview service. The idea is that you read a few trades worth of material to whet your appetite and a discount to encourage you to buy the rest of the series. When a series shows the Comixology Unlimited banner across the thumbnail and a number of issues that number is NOT the number included with your subscription. Take the current Aquaman series for instance. There are 53 books in this series at present. Of those 53 only 8 are part of Unlimited. Further those 8 include the first trade and its component issues. And don’t assume the other volumes will ever be on there or that you will care when they arrive if you read the first issue today. The first volume of SAGA has been on the service since its launched and they only added the second last month. Its still worth it as there is enough stuff that does stand alone and there is great stuff from other publishers too including Boom and Valiant who do use it as a true unlimites service.
DC Universe is much more committed to providing us with full series or story arcs. Everything up is part of the subscription and though there is a lot of further addition and/or subtraction that needs to be done to make the library fully readable its much easier to search. There is less new stuff here but there are more classic titles. It also has the video library, original series and the community boards which provide much better access to customer service channels.
Honestly Valiant alone makes Comixology Unlimited worth it. If you’re a superhero fan in general you’re really missing out if you haven’t been reading those books. CU has everything from the reboot back in 2012 to pretty recent plus most of the classic Valiant from the 90s (aside from the Gold Key characters that they lost the rights too) Some of the artistic talent that DC in particular now has, have been poached from Valiant (Clay Mann probably being a big one right now thanks to his work on Heroes In Crisis) and you’re going to get some great writers too like Jeff Lemire, Robert Vendetti, and Matt Kindt.
Valiant was the main reason I signed up for CU after Christmas. Boom has some really good stuff there as well, especially their Archaia imprint. I’m not particularly crazy about the way alot of the other publishers including DC are presented since its really inconvenient to browse what’s available on the service.
I don’t like paying for individual digital comics because I feel my money is tied up in something I don’t own that can be taken away at any time without notice. Whether intentionally or because of a glitch. I used to buy a ton on ComiXology back in the day when day and date was a new thing and I stopped cold turkey after I lost the copy of Dark Knight Returns I bought and ComiXology customer service’s response was basically “tough luck”. I prefer the subscription model because it cost less and the money isn’t tied up in a singular book I may or may not read again.
That only makes sense. Part of the deal when day and date release became a thing was that new digital comics would not be discounted until they had been out a month to avoid undercutting comic shops.
Some of the information here about CU is just wrong and misinformation. How is dcu more about complete arcs than CU? The common complaint about the library on dcu is that there are not near enough complete arcs. CU library is based on trades. Most individual issues are the single issues of the trades. Trades are 99% complete arcs.
Posters say dcu has 2000 comics and CU only has hundreds. But those hundreds are mostly trades with 5-8 issues each.
As for the 15% discount, I have CU and get the 15% discount on anything (new issues, old issues, trades, sales, etc.). And I have checked and the discount already works the same with dc. So I don’t know what the poster is talking about with the starting point for the 15%.
Right now, CU for comics, is far superior. More issues, more complete story arcs, other publishers, 15% off purchase including new releases.
I understand most here signed up for a year. If people enjoy dcu for the other things offered, good for them. But the comic library is, and continues to be a disaster with unfulfilled and broken promises. I understand people want to justify their purchase. I understand that people are upset that after months of promises regarding the library, the complaints and issues were solved but unfortunately on another service.
And yes there are only 8 issues of the new aquaman series on CU. That sucks and I wish the whole series was on there. But guess what? That’s still 8 more issues than is on dc’s own service
I think if you look at it you’ll see ComiXology does probably have more trades than CU. That said I don’t think you can say that a trade is neccessarily a complete story because most trades especially modern ones assume you have read everything before them and will read what happens after. There are certainly exceptions to this rule (Batman Year One, Hush and Court of Owls are good examples) but for the most part a trade should be thought of like a season of a long running TV series flowing into and out of the other trades of the same title. What’s particularly annoying about CU is that they don’t have the trades in order. They may have three volumes of Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corps but those are volumes 1, 4 and 5 so you have to buy volumes 2 and 3 to fully appreciate 2 out of the three titles they give you with the membership.
It looks to me like what DCU has is more series that are either complete from the first issue to the last with maybe the odd annual or special missing or complete runs by a given creator/team. They also have a lot of golden and bronze age titles that do workas single issue stories.
CU skews towards newer stuff because they are set up to sell you additional issues. Its pretty clear that DC Universe was originally set up to work that way as well but enough people complained that DC thought better of that strategy and shifted that part of the plan to ComiXology. They then decided to work on filling the limited space they’ve alotted for the library to complete storylines.
CU is not a bad service for what it is but I would not subscribe to it for the DC content because I have no interest in paying Amazon money to preview a book. I subscribe to CU for Unlimited access to Valiant, Boom and a graphic novel here and there so I’ll certainly use it to check out some DC stuff I’ve heard about. DC Universe even with all its flaws still offers me more as a consumer and I think that it will improve as DC gets their act together and either fills holes or removes titles that no one reads because of missing issues. Comixology Unlimited is pretty much always going to be what you see now. The specific books may change but they are probably never going to give you any more issues of those series with only one volume in Unlimited.
I try to use the online stuff to reduce what I blew on fun money, and CU was the worst of both worlds for me. Either I kinda forced down books I wasn’t really enjoying, or I got so into a partial collection I bought the rest.
Nah, between this and my library offering Kindle books I figure $75 a year gets me all the reading I can realistically make time for.
Here’s the main difference between DCU and CU: CU has far superior books. No, it’s not a complete selection, but they do drop new books on a monthly basis and give you a good idea when those books are going away. They don’t have any two week nonsense (or at least have not–we’ll see how the DC books are handled). Plus the initial DC selection on CU is a lot of stuff people want to read. All the Vertigo titles in particular are things I wanted to see from DCU, but I am instead reading on CU. Is CU a perfect service? it’s not. It is very much skewed toward getting you to buy additional books. Plus, you can only borrow 50 books at a time, which isn’t all that many when you have several series you want to follow and some older favorites you want to hold on to. But it’s also just $6 a month and you get a ton of value from it for that $6. Even more so with the addition of DC. And in my opinion much more than you get with DCU.
Superior is a subjective term. They have more recent books but for someone who is looking for gold, silver or bronze age books DC Universe is superior as there is almost none of that on CU.
I am not a CU member, but I see a ’ get. an additional 15% off. Learn More’ which links to the CU sign up page, for some comics
comics that are in CU, some very popular Graphic Novels, DC Comics older than four months and Marvel Comics. I don’t see it for most current DC Comics.
I emailed Comixology Customer Support and they said current. DC Comics are covered in the 15%, giving Adventures of the Super Sons as an example.
I emailed back that the 15% tags were not there. No response yet.
If you bought 10 DC Comics a month, that would pay the monthly fee, so it matters. It is very bad for the comic book stores.
The HELP PAGE for CU says the buying pages are different for CU and non CU.
I have DCu CU and MU and love them all. I try not to focus on what is missing and just read what is there.
DCU exposed me to the silver age aqua man Mera is Missing and Death of a prince. Plus it has a ton of The Legend of the Dark night which has not been collected well.