This weekend Marvel unveiled 3 exciting new initiatives at the South by South West festival in Austin, Texas as they look to ‘re’-evolve’ the world of digital comics – their words, not ours! by releasing them at SXSW’s Interactive event, which is primarily focused on technology and interactive web design, Marvel made a clear statement of intent that the world of digital comics is one that will be the real driving force for them in 2013

First up was Marvel Unlimited, which we saw launched on Friday and many are touting as being the Spotify of digital comics. The comparisons are obvious as it allows you to stream, rather than download, an entire library worth of Marvel Comics to your iPhone or iPad (with selected titles available for offline use). You can search for your favourite titles, creators or characters and although it lacks many of the most recent titles, (the most up to date issues we found were April 2012) it features a huge collection of classic issues and storylines.

(For our first impressions, click here or you can view their launch video below.)

Next up is Project Gamma which looks set to bring sound to the Marvel Universe‘s digital comics for the first time. We’ve already seen digital comics with sound via app exclusive titles like Upgrade Soul, Bottom of the Ninth and the Madefire titles, but this is the first time we have seen it on a major publishers platform. Marvel are claiming that the sound in their digital comics is adaptive audio, in other words they are not loops or soundtracks, and so you can control the pace as you read. All of this sounds intriguing, as sound in comics is one of the last great problems to solve, so it will be interesting to see how they combat it.

Finally, Marvel announced that in July we’ll we’ll be getting an epic 52 new Marvel Infinite Comics released on a weekly schedule, featuring major stars from the Marvel Universe in their own titles – starting off with Wolverine. Up to this point Marvel have used the Infinite titles sparingly as extras for major crossovers (as in AvsX last summer) or as one-shots, like this week’s Guardians of the Galaxy, so we’ll be intrigued to see how this works out over the following weeks and months. If anyone can blaze a trail with digital comics then it’s Marvel!

To cap all this off, Marvel announced they would be releasing 700 number 1s for immediate download via their iPad app – that’s not 700 copies of one issue, that’s 700 different first issues, including many of the Marvel Now titles such as All New X-Men. This promptly caused ComiXology‘s servers to crash, which goes to show the demand for digital comics on the iPad is there – especially if the price is right!