Customer Reviews

Spider-Man Newspaper Strips -Volume 1

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Ah, the 70's. Spider-Man made a few appearances in various different media in the 1970s. Some good, (Spider-Man Rockcomix),some not so, (the terrible TV show). These Newspaper strips were one of the high points. Written by Stan Lee, drawn by John Romita. Although it followed a different continuity than the books, it felt like an continuation of Lee/Romita run from the 60, prior Spider-man 100.
Romita was at the top of his game, and the art was fantastic. The Sunday strips were half pages in full bright color. The New York Daily News at the time had a great Sunday Funnies color section, with bright pages.
Here my problem with this collection. NO Color. The Sunday strips should have been represented in the original Sunday size and Color. With this collection, all the strips are formatted as daily black and white strips. Bummer. Come on Marvel. My review, poor presentation-though great content.

My review rating is heavily weighted on book presentation and format. I feel Marvel shorted fans with the physical arrangement of the newspaper strips.

The material runs parallel to the spine - so the book must be held like a girlie mag centerfold, making it very uncomfortable to read. Additionally, the gutters near the spine are not sufficient, causing parts of some strips to "roll" into the middle.

I guess an argument can be made not to color the Sunday strips for story continuity (the dailies' plots were continued in the Sundays), but who are we kidding? Marvel went cheap. It's too bad.

The content was a great highlight of Silver/Bronze Age Spider-Man characterizations and situations. Stan Lee's cornball alliterations and snappy barbs were perfect for newspaper strips. John Romita's art served the stories well and were great examples of design, composition, and facial expressions to budding comic book artists. My only complaint on the art was the constant changing of inkers/letterers. To be fair, who knew the work was to be compiled 30 years later and invite comparison of successive strips?

I just wish Marvel would look at the great job Fantagraphics and other companies have done with comic strip reproductions. This should have been an easy production job.

Received this book today and I'm not a happy camper. As a previous reviewer mentioned, the book is printed sideways, three strips to a page with a large wasted border at top and bottom, pretty much the only colour I saw in the book. You have to hold the book sideways like a Playboy centerfold to read and the strips are about the same size as they were in the original newspaper printings. If Marvel had printed them in larger format, two strips to a page like they did the last few pages, I could live with the sideways printing but not at three to a page. At least in the DC reprints of the Superman and Batman newspaper strips the publisher had the common sense to bind the books on the short side.

In fact, now that I think of it, almost all of the strip reprints I've bought (Denis Kitchen's Little Abner, Terry & the Pirates, Gasoline Alley, Buck Rogers, the recent Hagar the Horrible, even the old Flying Buttress Captain Easy books) were bound on the short side and printed large enough to study and enjoy the artwork. I realize newspaper strips are the Incredible Shrinking Medium but...

Sorry, folks. I won't be buying any more in this series and I'm seriously considering returning it.

The quality of the Spider-Man comics fell sharply right around the time the 15 cent issues became large 25 centers and then immediately resumed being normal sized 20 centers in the early 1970s. When this strip started in 1977 it was a return to the incredible art and story that Lee and Romita were famous for but had been lost for years. Unfortunately, as others have stated the way this book was printed strongly diminishes the appeal of the collection.

There is no introduction as in many of the Masterworks issues, but there is yet another meaningless interview of Stan Lee balanced by a sharp and insightful interview of John Romita. One of the issues Romita talks about was that his (beautiful) artwork was being reduced in size so much in printed newspapers that it could not be properly viewed. And given that this was an important thing to Romita, why in the world did they print this book in landscape format at newspaper strip size? At least it could have been printed at a size that filled the page -- but no -- the strips are about 2/3 of a page wide. No color for the Sunday strips either. It's just sad that this material was given short shrift.

The last of the best Spider-Man material looks pretty bad. Several reprinted strips look like faint poor quality photocopies and I think there are some strips out of proper order too -- just sloppy composition all around. Romita is surely PO'd about this and with good reason.

I'm hoping a second printing or a new edition is made. There are many good examples of how this could have been done right. Kitchen Sink did a great job with the Batman and Superman daily newspaper strips and Sunday sections. Formatting Spider-Man like those would have been just fine. I think the best format for a book like this was a coffee table book of the Flash Gordon strips that was printed probably before there was a Spider-Man. I'm sure Silver-Age comics fans will remember the Flash Gordon newspaper strip collection. It was one of those expensive books behind the desk at the library they would not let you check out. How many lunch hours at school did I spend reading that one?

With the Spider-Man strips, Marvel could have completely re-created the specialness and desirability of that old Flash Gordon collection. I only wish I'd have read the previous Amazon reviews sooner because I already have all these strips from previous paperbacks that were put out some time ago. The two paperback book volumes and the "Best of Spider-Man" oversize paperback book collect the same material and then some and those books were printed in an easily readable format. I would have skipped this. It is not the proper "Masterworks" treatment.

The modern comics industry sucks. If this is how they treat some of the highest quality work that Lee and Romita ever produced I just have to shake my head in despair. How could they not get this important stuff printed in a proper format?

Living in the golden age of reprints as we are today, I can think of no valid excuse on Marvel's part to have released this book as is. Strip size is fine, but forcing the reader to rotate the book in order read the strips is nothing short of ridiculous. And while I have no problem with b&w Sunday pages, at this price point there's absolutely no reason they couldn't have reprinted them in full color. There are many other strip reprint projects doing it right; this is a prime example of how to do it wrong.

I purchased this volume without pausing to read the reviews first. I dimly remembered the originlal comic strips from my earliest days of newspaper reading (at the age of six). Complemented with reruns of the '60s Spider-Man cartoon, these strips helped turn Spidey into my favorite superhero, a position he's held with little interruption for the past 30 years. So why wouldn't I have bought these?

These strips remain sparkling well over 30 years after their original newspaper run. The first week's worth of strips, for example, show Spider-Man slinging into action when J. Jonah Jameson helps Doctor Doom secure an invite to lecture the United Nations. Of all things, Doom has been honored for successfully defending his Eastern European nation against the Communists. "That terrorist!", Spider-Man thinks. It's hard to go wrong with material like this. Jazzy Johnny Romita's art remains richly detailed with excellent consistency from day to day (check out the edition of the Daily Bugle trumpeting Doom's invite to New York in the first week of the collection).

Offset against the excellent material is the lackadaisical effort involved in assembly. The biggest problem is the arrangement of the strips. The volume is basically a standard-sized hardcover, 7 1/2 inches wide, which means the strips have to run parallel to the spine rather than left to right across the page. Considering how many other newspaper reprint collections get it right, it's an odd editorial choice for Marvel to go this way. The Sunday strips aren't in color, either.

Looking at the supplemental material to this book, it's easy to piece together what went wrong. There is no preface or introduction, which is unusual -- doesn't Stan Lee get to write essays for everything these days? Adding a further clue is the Lee interview offered at the back of the volume. The interviewer informs Lee that his newspaper strips are going to be reprinted "in 2007" and that he should prepare to be asked to write the intro. It would appear this project got shelved, and then after years of neglect got rushed out into the holiday market without any additional preparation. Or something like that.

Anyway, the material printed in the volume is a must-own. The shame is that it could have been so much better.

I read all the reviews about this book presenting the strips so you have to hold the book sideways. It really was not that bad. Yes, I do think they could have formatted it in a more reader freindly fashion and I really wish they had included the color for the Sunday strips. It really would have made this book great. The strips themselves are fantastic though. It really took me back to my teenage days of looking forward to reading the comic page of the newspaper every day. This was Stan Lee and John Romita at their finest. It must have been no easy task to write a story using just 3 panels a day. This would be a 5 star book if they had done the formatting better. Regardless of how they do it, I will buy volume 2 of this set if they ever come out with it.