I’ve been collecting comics since I was 13 years old. I am now more than two decades older so you can just imagine the kind of storage problem I have with regards to my comics. In fact I actually stopped collecting comicbooks a couple of years ago because I just could not bear the look of both horror and resignation etched on my wife’s face whenever she looks at the large amount of comicbooks in our house.

Fortunately, the digital age has not neglected comicbooks. One can now readily get digitally scanned comics from various P2P sources. This is a wonderful idea because it not only reduces the amount of clutter in your house, it also makes it easier to file away comics (heck, you can even file it chronologically based on the branching and confusing storylines of those crossover events).

Marvel.com may have finally admitted that the trend towards digital comics is not just some fad. The company recently announced Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited, a digital archives service that will let comicbook fans access comics as recent as six months old to as old as 40 years. The subscription fee for the service is $59.88 for a whole year or $9.99 a month. The digital comics will be shown in high resolution but it cannot be downloaded. Marvel will use a proprietary “Smart Panel” applet for reading the comics.

The service officially opened last November 13, 2007 and as a sign that the company has either underestimated the popularity of the service or it has established a crappy infrastructure, its servers have already slowed down and eventually crashed because of the large amount of traffic the service is generating.