You’re right that Daredevil (nor most Marvel characters) didn’t debut in the 40s or 50s. Nevertheless, the first issue of Daredevil came out in 1964. Even so, with this week’s addition, you can read nearly sixty years worth of Daredevil straight through, without interruption. Ignoring whether it’s a complete run or not, I’m not sure that’s true of any DC character or series. Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Flash, Green Lantern–none of those characters’ series have a continuous sixty years worth of material on DCUI.
This Daredevil upload is admittedly the largest I’ve seen from Marvel in awhile. But, I went back and compared the uploads from both MU and DCUI for the prior six months. Here’s the breakdown:
I mean, those numbers are pretty crazy, honestly. In August and the six preceding months, Marvel uploaded 135 more new archive issues than DC. And, each week in which Marvel uploaded older books, it was almost uniformly multiple issues of one book, like this latest Daredevil drop. Multiple issues of Generation X, X-Factor, Dazzler, and Wolverine were also added (plus other titles, those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head). So, where we get ideally four issues of one title a month, spread out weekly, on DCUI, Marvel is dropping multiple issues of the same series in a week.
I get what you’re saying about Sandman and, before that, Fables, but I don’t really count those, honestly. The main reason for that is because they should have already been on here, as both titles have been digitized for YEARS. Sandman was available for free to read on Comixology Unlimited before DCUI came about, and I believe Fables was too. There is a mountain of content that is already digitized that could be added to DCUI and for some reason isn’t, especially when it comes to Vertigo titles. 100 Bullets, Transmetropolitan,The Invisibles, The Dreaming, Jack of Fables, and Shade the Changing Man have all been digitized for years, but none of them are on here. Again, that’s off the top of my head; check out the Digitized Comics Unavailable (or in Alternate Locations) on DC Universe Infinite: A Directory thread for more.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m being overly dramatic. I have just been frustrated with this service since the very beginning. The entire reason I wanted DCUI was to read DC’s back catalogue. But it’s practically impossible to read any older series because of large gaps within any given title. It bothers me we only get four to five issues a week. It bothers me that we generally get one issue of any given series a week, meaning that it could take years for some titles to be complete. It bothers me that titles start to get uploaded and then are abruptly cutoff before they’re finished. Why are books like H-E-R-O, Captain Carrot, Batman Confidential, Batman Family, DC Comics Presents, World Without End, Azrael: Agent of the Bat, The Batman Strikes, Justice League Unlimited, and Tiny Titans mostly uploaded, but then abandoned? Why did they upload all of the Milestone material, but skip the Worlds Collide one-shot? I don’t know, I just find things like this to be really frustrating. But, again, I admit that I may be expecting more than is reasonable. Who knows.