Marvel CyberComics

Marvel CyberComics or Webisodes were Shockwave comics, produced from 1996 to 2000 by Marvel Comics.

CyberComics were created by Marvel in the summer of 1996 as a part of a promotional deal with America Online. The CyberComics were placed into the AOL/Marvel Zone and were exclusively available to AOL users. In 1997 Marvel built their own website at MarvelOnline.com and the CyberComics were freely available to all users through registration on MarvelZone.com (due to the contract with AOL).

On September 17, 1999 NextPlanetOver.com (NPO), a now-defunct online comics store, announced a one-year marketing and content licensing deal with Marvel Comics. Terms included a year of run-of-site advertising on Marvel.com. In addition, NextPlanetOver.com was sponsoring monthly CyberComics created exclusively for them by Marvel. NPO was bought out less than a year later and went bankrupt in 2000; the CyberComics were renamed into Webisodes and made available at Marvel.com for free without any registration.

The first characters to star in CyberComics were Spider-Man and Wolverine, soon followed by several others. The comics were not only canon to the mainstream but also tied in directly with Marvel's newsstand offerings. They came out on a monthly basis, in four parts consisting of eight pages each.

Using Macromedia's Shockwave software, readers guided the action by clicking through word balloons and following panels complete with animation, sound effects and music. CyberComics were still very much in the comic book or strip genre - the result was a cross between comics and animation.

The Cybercomics were made by taking penciled pages and transforming them through a program called "Electric Image Painter" and form-Z into the digital comics, colored in digitally in Adobe Illustrator. Simple animations were created in Macromedia Shockwave, and Garry Schafer of grimmwerks created the soundscapes which drove the animations. Done at a time previous to mp3 compression as common as it is now, only 4 channels of small, short soundscapes could be used at one time.

Due to financial reasons the production of new CyberComics ceased in 2000 and Marvel removed them from their website.

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