Customer Reviews

Captain America the Complete Comic Collection Win/Mac

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a pretty neat product. It's a digital collection of all of Captain America's Marvel Comics adventures, beginning with his solo adventures in Tales of Suspense (later renamed Captain America). The collection doesn't include his comics from World War II and the 1950s, back when Marvel Comics was called Timely or Atlas. Nor does it include every Captain America solo adventure Marvel ever published. It does include every issue of his regular series, however.

The collection includes over 500 issues of Captain America comics, from 1964 up until Cap's death just three months ago in Captain America Volume 5, issue 25. The packaging serves as a fitting tribute to the star spangled Avenger, with the back cover showing his shield and reading "In memory of a fallen hero." A nice DVD case is included in the package (unlike some of the earlier GIT Corp releases).

I had purchased a big new LCD monitor before I bought this collection, but I was surprised to discover the comics were also quite readable on my average sized CRT monitor at work.

There were quite a lot of great stories told in the 43 years worth of comics included in this collection. And I love the fact that the complete comics were digitized, including the ads and letters pages. All in all this is quite a good deal.

GIT does it again - this time giving us a thorough offering from Captain America's title. I was pleased to see it is very current - through the April 2007 issue of Cap's comic. I also enjoy seeing the early Tales of Suspense issues (with co-star Iron Man who is slated for his own DVD-ROM set later this year).

GIT did a nice job with this. As mistergoodman notes, it does indeed include all the Cap series from TOS in '64 to his death (I still hope it's not true) here in '07, plus annuals and a great bio. Definitely get this if you're a Cap fan.

The user interface uses PDF files with hyperlinks--anyone with Adobe Reader 7 will be able to use this easily. For me, reading was a challenge initially, certainly not GIT's fault. On my widescreen laptop, my highest res is 1280x800. By default Reader opens these up to fit the whole page, which is about 90% of actual size and a little hard to read, especially for the older comics. If I use the fit width setting instead, the pages are about 125% of actual and much easier to read, but there's a little bit more work to do to navigate the pages. I got used to it quickly.

Great product but really, $600.00 dollars? REALLY? I mean REALLY?
I have seen this elsewhere for much less than this so I know if you look around you can find it cheaper than this outrageously ridiculous price. If someone does buy this for this price please let me know what you're reasoning is for paying that kind of price. Once again I would like to offer some swampland I have for sale to those who are willing to pay such prices ; )

This collection, as well as the collections for the other Marvel characters is simply astounding. Not only do you get every Captain America Comic from 1964 to the infamous Captain America Vol V issue 25 Death of a Dream, you get them with the original ads intact, plus the few annuals cap had. This is really a dealand I would highly recommend it to any comuic book fan wanting to catch up on the comic book.

GIT is doing a great job with these Marvel Comics collections. I bought the Spider-man collection a little over a year ago. Closely followed by X-Men and Fantastic Four. In the past couple weeks I picked up The Incredible Hulk, Captain America and Avengers compilations. I'm looking forward to the Iron Man disk coming out soon. My only regret is that after I bought the FF collection they came out with a second set with more issues plus the Silver Surfer runs (I'm sure to coincide with the movie).

A few reviewers of these disks have complained that the images are just scans of original comics. All I can say is get over it. You are getting thousands of dollars worth of books for $40 or less. You couldn't have even bought the first 25 issues of the most recent run on Captain America (which finish the Captain america disk) for that. If Marvel was going to re-color and computerize their entire libraries to put on disks, I can guarantee you that they would not sell 40 years worth of a series for $40. They would probably charge that for every 3-5 years worth of the series. I think it's great that you can see these old comics along with the old ads. I'm a kid of the eighties so seeing ads for some of the old computer games is really cool. Yes, a few pages have some smudges on them, but whose comics don't - it just adds to the new age feel of cracking open your old comics that have been boxed/bagged for years.

Pros:
1) years of comics for pennies an issue
2) simple category menus: decade - year - issues

Cons:
1) If you don't have at least a 17" monitor you will likely have to scroll around the page to have it large enough to read
2) might have to wait another 40 years for the next compilation

Wish List:
1) X-Men Family = compile New Mutants, X-Force, X-Factor, X-Men & Generation X on a disk
2) Marvel Minis = Secret Wars 1 & 2, Infinity Gaultlet/War/Crusade + tie in issues, Age of Apocalypse, Civil War, Annihilation, etc...
3) Showcase = Marvel Comics Presents, Marvel Fanfare, Marvel Team-Up etc...

UPDATE 4/20/08: AFTER USING THIS PRODUCT FOR SEVERAL DAYS, I WOULD REVISE MY RATING FROM 3 STARS TO 4. IT'S GREAT TO FINALLY READ THESE OLD ISSUES, AND ONCE I GOT READER SET UP JUST FOR READING THESE (TURNED OFF ALL TOOLBARS AND PANELS, "FIT WIDTH") IT'S ACTUALLY A PRETTY NIFTY EXPERIENCE. I STILL WISH THE PDF'S WERE SINGLE PAGES AND THAT PRINTING DIDN'T HAVE THAT AWFUL WATERMARK SMACK IN THE CENTER OF EACH PAGE. BUT OI HAVE TO ADMIT I'M ENJOYING THIS PRODUCT.

Pros:
1) 500 comics for $50 = 10 cents an issue!
2) Complete comics are scanned, so you can read ads, letters pages, etc
3) Since they're scans from real comics, they have that nice desautrated quality you get from ink printed on newsprint (as opposed to the garish colors in the Marvel Masterworks volumes which are printed on highgloss white paper.)

That said, here's why I'm only going this three stars:

Cons:
1) Even with a 17" monitor I find I need to zoom in and scroll around. It's too bad they hadn't developed a "smart panels" feature like they have at Marvel Digital Comics. But, this is basically just a DVD with 500 PDF files on it, so you're stuck using the standard Adobe Reader interface. Not bad, but no nifty navigation tools.

2) Although the files are printable, there's two problems with printing:

FIRST, they print with a big fat MARVEL watermark on the center of each page -- the watermark isn't visible on screen -- which really takes away from the image integrity. I suppose I see the need for this for copyright protection, but still, it's a drag when they advertise these on the box as "printable comics." Of course, if you have a lot of time on your hands, you can do a screen capture, paste them into Photoshop and print them out from there. But sheesh! Not that I planned to print out 500 comics, but it would've been fun to print out some of the old 60s issues.

SECONDLY, the pages are scanned as full spreads. It would have been much nicer if the PDFs were single pages (with "facing pages' turned on in Acrobat). Why do I say that? When you print out a full spread onto typing paper, the individual pages come out quite a bit smaller than a standard comic book. If the pages were separated in the PDF, each page could be printed slightly *larger* than a comic book. (Admittedly, you'd have to trim some margins for the occassional full-spread splashes.)

Every issue of my fave, Captain America. I can't really complain can I? It's pretty awesome to have all of these in one place even if it's not anywhere near the experience of reading the real thing. However, if you don't have zillion bucks to shell out for all the originals, this is the next best thing. I love that they are scanned cover to cover (ads included!) and you also get the full Tales of Suspense including Iron Man. I've read complaints about the DVDs on PCs but I've had absolutely no problems on my Mac. If you have Acrobat Reader, you're good to go. So when can we get the Mighty Thor?

Great dvd-rom comics from 1960 to 2006 thats to his death. If you like Captain America than get now whal you can its really hard to find new much less used it can be bought for $189 wich is much less than that 1,000 price tag it has now. if you ever want to read all the cap you want with the good & the bad this dvd-rom is for you.

tales of suspense 39-99 where already included in the iron man, so putting in issues 59-99 wasn't very necessary. Anyway, this comes with cap 100-454, v2 1-13, v3 1-50, v4 1-32, and v5 1-12 pretty cool set go ahead and buy it if your a cap fan. The only thing I wish this came with is CAC 1-78 from back in the 40s