A week ago or so Marvel started teasing this image, which caused quite a bit of speculation as to what it was, exactly. The Marvel Now line has been rolling out for a few months and has been pretty much hugely successful. So what was this #1? A new series? Unlikely given the huge number of creators listed. An omnibus collection of all the Now #1s? Maybe, yeah, but that's not anything new and all us diehard fans would have all that material anyway. And so on.
Yesterday was the big announcement, and it turned out to be a huge, really huge, digital giveaway of 700 Marvel comics, all first issues of series from the original Marvel comic, Fantastic Four right up to quite a few of the Now titles. 700. Anyone with an account with either the Marvel store or the linked Comixology store could get them. Within minutes pretty much everyone jumped on to redeem, causing the servers to crash.
Comixology spent all day working on the situation, and had their Twitter account suspended for too many tweets as they assured fans and customers personally that they would fix the issues. A few people were disgruntled but mostly everyone was like, "Hey, they're trying to give us free comics for no reason other than that they're cool, so we're good." As of now the giveaway has been suspended while they fix it up. Originally it was only supposed to be until tomorrow but sounds like they'll extend it to serve everyone. Glitches happen, but ultimately I think this will be a win for Marvel, for Comixology and comic book readers in general.
One guy definitely lost, though, and I feel bad for him. I don't know any details so I won't speculate, but I do know that Ruwan Jayatilleke, who was the Marvel VP of digital publishing or somesuch, was let go by Marvel last week. As far as I know, this whole thing was his baby. Again, I know no details but I do know Ruwan was an amazing guy on Twitter, interacting with fans as a fan, and not as some corporate suit who had to stay on message. He gave away digital codes for comics all the time and built up a pretty large following. He wiped his Twitter account but didn't delete his account so hopefully he'll pop up sometime with new opportunities for himself. If you're out there, Ruwan, thank you for all you did.