Posted in: Comics | Tagged: marvel, marvel unlimited

Marvel Unlimited is the Perfect Gift for New and Lapsed Readers, But…

Marvel Unlimited is probably the best deal in comics today, offering unlimited access to a huge portion of Marvel's back catalog, including recent issues on a delay, for $9.99 a month or less. If you're interested in, for instance, reading the entire history of the X-Men, you can do most of that with Marvel Unlimited and a tablet with a nice display, as we've previously discussed. As also frequently mentioned in our weekly X-Men recap column, X-ual Healing, Marvel Unlimited is a great way to explore references to past stories in current comics, making Marvel's long and often convoluted continuity an asset rather than a burden. Marvel Unlimited makes Marvel's back catalog accessible in a way that its constant reboots and inconsistent numbering of series and collections, as well as the high cost barrier of entry, do not.

So we were thinking, in the spirit of sharing, that we might pick up some Marvel Unlimited gift subscriptions and give them away to help share the joy of comics, both for new readers and for those who may have fallen out of love with them. Unfortunately, it seems that you can't do that.

Looking on the Marvel Unlimited website, there is no longer an option to purchase a gift subscription, which was previously available, producing a code that could be shared and redeemed by the recipient of the gift. Marvel.com's help section still refers to the gift option, but it's no longer accessible. We decided to reach out to Marvel Unlimited support and find out what's up. They told us:

Hmm. We asked for more info on the timeline, learning:

That sounds good… except, a little google searching seems to show that people have been having trouble purchasing gift subscriptions since at least December 2017. A thread on Reddit cites a similar response to the one above back then:

Thank you for contacting Marvel Online Support Services.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. The gift subscription option is temporarly unavailable, as we are working on some changes for our subscription management software. We appreciate your patience with this matter, as we continue to work hard to bring back this option.

If you have any other questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact us back.

As does another response from Marvel's Twitter support:

We asked Marvel Support whether this same issue has been blocking gift subscriptions for six months, but at that point, they had stopped responding to us:

Technical issues happen, and they can be difficult to resolve. We understand that. But we hope Marvel gets Unlimited gift subscriptions working again soon. They really would make the perfect gift, provided you could actually buy one. Preferably before rival DC Comics starts offering one of their own.

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