Customer Reviews

40 Years Of The Amazing Spider-Man

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Just imagine what it would cost to have every issue of Spiderman in your collection? You would need to mortgage your home just to get you hands on Amazing Tales #15...Now, you have the ability to follow the development of Spiderman for the last 40 years and it will be a journey well worth taking....Unlike the Marvel Masterworks series, these are the complete comics which you read when you were a kid...I cringed when I saw a comic that I knew I had read, only to toss it out when I was through (nope, I'm not going to use the pat "My Mother threw them out!" excuse. I was the young dope that did the tossing!). What you will discover at your leisure is how the Spiderman character developed over the course of years, and it does not take long before the writing became darker and more current with the times....there is history to be had within these comics, as issues such as Vietnam, Race, and Parental Abuse, become touchstones in the stories...If you have collected the Spiderman Marvel Masterworks series, you might wonder if you should bother purchasing this set, and the rather obvious answer is yes, for a number of reasons. First, you get the complete comic which includes all of the advertisements. How many of you "baby boomers" out there purchased Sea Monkeys when you were a kid?. There is a wisp of nostalgia of a more simple time, when you read about all the cheap toys you drooled over when you were young. Those of you who are too young, will scratch your head at some of the stuff that was being sold to kids back then. Secondly, there is the letters page which can be as amusing as the comics to read. Give Stan Lee credit, for he was not shy about publishing negative letters as well as those which praised the mag. Third, as successful as the Marvel Masterworks have now become (thank goodness they started that series up agian!), I doubt they will reach publishing all 500 Spidey issues anytime in my lifetime, if at all. And finally, there was always Stan's Soapbox to read. He presented himself as a fatherly figure to many young kids and his advice was always insightful, whether he was cautioning about the harm of bigotry, or was rather self effacing commenting about his work, he always came across as genuine.

There are some minor issues concerning this CD Rom set however. The CD's are simply packaged loose in individual sleeves in the box. I would transfer them to a CD case when you get a chance. As mentioned, the Annuals are not included, and down the road, when the comic book business boomed in the late 80's, you will come across another obstacle. To milk the cash cow, many of the stories crossed over into a second Spiderman mag as well as other Superhero titles. Therefore, you will find some incomplete, and disjointed storylines during this period and no doubt, this will become frustrating at times. But this is a minor quibble and hopefully, if this set sells well, they will issue more of these CD ROM sets.....Highly Recommended!!!

One note. If you are anxious and pop the first CD into your drive, you might become annoyed at the MARVEL banner watermark that appears across the center panel on each page. This is only to appear if you print out the page, but on your monitor, it is not to be seen...If you see it, then that means that you do not have ADOBE 6.0 installed, and you are using an earlier version. ADOBE 6.0 can be installed from CD #1 in the Spiderman set, so once you upgrade, you will no longer see the watermark across the comic. Enjoy!

I almost gave this one 3 stars because it fell kinda short of my expectations. After I counted to 10 and took a deep breath I realized that this set contains exactly what the box claims it does...nothing more, nothing less.
What you get is "40 Years of The Amazing Spider Man". As others have pointed out, that encompasses only the "Amazing Spider-Man" title. Not "The Web of Spider-Man" or "Peter Parker the Spectacular Spider-Man" or other Spin-Off titles (some of which had storylines which were tied into ASM).
The really big let down for me was that I had gotten used to the Broderbund Series of magazine/ comic reproductions (National Geographic, MAD Magazine, et al), and Broderbund runs a software program which features such bonus as a search engine.

Had Broderbund done this title, a user would have been able to do a search such as 'all issues in which The Lizard appears' and the user would be provided that information whether or not those issues existed on the particular Disk the user was view at the time. But alas this title is in Adobe Acrobat so such is not the case.

Nevertheless it is a good collection and I don't regret the purchase at all. That the collection could have been packaged and presented better is besides the point because what the box says you get is, well- what you get

It should be very easy for you to decide if you are going to like "40 Years of the Amazing Spider-Man" because here are the two things that you might consider major shortcomings. First, what you are getting here are digital scans of each two-page spread from copies of the original comic books. So these are not the originals or whatever Marvel uses when they reproduce early Spider-Man comics for their Masterworks or Essential series of reprints. The copies are pretty good, even the really old ones, but they are not perfect and they are not always lined up straight. Basically, then, you are looking at photographs of somebody else's collection of "The Amazing Spider-Man" comic books.

Second, you have to view these comic books through the Adobe Reader, the 6.0 version of which you can install from the first disc (this is important because otherwise the "Marvel" that pops up as a sort of watermark when you try to print these pages pops up when you start reading each page. Unless you have a really big monitor (I thought I did before this) you have to choose between seeing the pages real size, where you cannot see an entire two-page spread at the same time, or you can reduce them in size to where you can see the entire two-page spread in which case the question is whether your eye sight is good enough to still read the print (I appear to be older than I thought). Beyond this it is a question of how powerful your computer is for being able to move from one spread to the next at a decent rate. Some people will find this maddening, and if that is the case you will not enjoy what this CD-Rom has to offer.

There are minor problems in that what you get is each CD-Rom in its own envelope, which means you can undoubtedly find some better way of keeping them around, and each disc only indicates what years are covered (e.g., 1962-1966), so you need to come up with your own way of remember what issues are on each disc (you can jot the numbers down on the envelope). The top choice on my list of Spider-Man comics I wanted to read again was #257, the one where Mary Jane finally told Peter Parker she knew he was Spider-Man. After I checked out the first disc I made a calculated guess as to which one it was on and I was right, but including the range of issues on each disc or at least on the box (to go along with the "mind-blowing 10 Milestones") should have been a no-brainer. Still, all of these "problems" are easily fixable. I am surprised that the annuals are not included, but expecting to have the crossovers (as some of the "Essentials" volumes do, e.g., "Tomb of Dracula) is rather unrealistic, so I would not count it as a major or minor problem.

Yes, it would be nice to sit in a chair that was not in front of a computer and read "The Amazing Spider-Man" from nicely bound books. But the "Marvel Masterworks" series is a rather expensive way of getting these comic books, the "Marvel Essentials" series is reprinted in black & white, and combined those two have not reprinted half of what is collected on these 11 CD-Roms. Even if you have the comic books, taking them out of their bags and backing boards seems like heresy, especially with the old ones. However, I do not have that problem because many years ago when my brother and I split up who was going to collect which Marvel comic books, he got the Spider-Man titles (we had from #28 on in the original comics, with everything prior to that being the original reprints in "Marvel Tales"). All I have are the six "Essential" collections and the four "Masterworks" trade paperbacks, which means I only have about a quarter of what is here in book form. When it comes to being economical, you are not going to be able to beat what this collection has to offer, and that is the key factor for putting its shortcomings in perspective.

"40 Years of The Amazing Spider-Man" begins with "Amazing Fantasy" #15 and ends with what became "The Amazing Spider-Man" #500 when "Volume 2" took advantage of the "Volume 1" numbering to mark a significant milestone in the history of the web-slinger. The touching coda in that last issue, drawn by John Romita, Sr. (who was Spider-Man's artist when I bought my first "Spider-Man" comic book, #62), makes for a fitting place to end this collection. I suppose a disc 12 could be out in 2007, but I do not have the same qualms about taking the latest issues out to read again that I do about the original Stan Lee and Steve Ditko issues. I am not overly excited about having the "complete" comic books, with all of those ads we remember from out childhood and the letters to the editor, but I do like seeing the covers of the other titles Marvel was putting out in the Sixties.

I gave up on Spider-Man when the whole clone thing was getting way out of hand. The alien costume bit was okay, but the clone bit was just too much for me. I started reading the comic books again (we live in the age of multiple titles for any successful comic book character) when I started teaching an Introduction to Popular Culture class in which I use "The Essential Spider-Man, Volume 1." The class also looks at a recent issue of one of the main Spider-Man titles, so I started reading "The Amazing Spider-Man" again with #482 (nee #42), almost a year after J. Michael Stracynski started scripting the book. I have gone back and gotten all of "Volume 2" of the book, and these CD-Roms allow me to fill in the gaps. It is just going to take a while to get through all of these and I feel like I should write some sort of academic treatise on it all.

40 Years of the Amazing Spider-Man CD-ROM
Company: TOPICS Entertainment
Price: $49.99
http://www.topics-ent.com/

As a comic book reader, I was very interested in this product when I first started seeing advertisements for it six months ago. As the title suggests, 40 Years of the Amazing Spider-Man CD-ROM is just that, all the issues of the Amazing Spider-Man comic on eleven CD-ROMs. Actually, the series also includes the original 1962 Amazing Fantasy #15, which is the first appearance of Spider-Man. From then on, however, it's all Amazing Spider-Man.

Each issue on the CD-ROM is an Adobe PDF file. You do need Adobe Acrobat 6.0 or later to view the files, which is included on the disc #1 in both Mac and Windows versions. If you try using another PDF viewing application, such as Apple's own Preview, you get to see the watermark Topics Entertainment placed on every page of every issue. I don't know why they bothered to put the watermark in the files, as that constitutes the level of anti-piracy they employ. Otherwise, these are simple PDF files.

The forty years include every issue from the above mention first appearance all the way up to issue #500 (December 2003). A curious omission, however, is the yearly annuals.

One of the problems, if you can call it that, is issues that crossover to other comics, be it another Marvel comic such as X-Men or Fantastic Four, or another Spider-Man title, such as Spectacular Spider-Man or Web of Spider-Man. This happened quite often in the late 1980's, and throughout all the 1990's. So sadly, while all the Amazing issues are present, not all the stories that go with those issues are.

Quality-wise, the stories are what they are. Some issues are fantastic, some not so much. I won't try and review every issue, that would be crazy. But there is a quality issue I'm a little disappointed with, and that is the picture quality of the PDF's themselves. But more on that in a moment.

I enjoy that each issue is complete from cover to cover, including the original ads on each page. Nothing like looking back at the older "Prizes for Cash" ads from the 1980's. I also like the fact that the covers are not only included, but the back cover as well. 99% of the time, the back cover is an advertisement, but occasionally, especially when you get into the special anniversary issues, a cover would be a wrap-around, so had they omitted the back cover, there was a chance that half the artwork would have been missing.

The problem is that while supplying these back issues of Amazing Spider-Man is a great concept, it's obvious that Topics Entertainment didn't work with Marvel Comics to acquire the best electronic format or physical copies of these issues. Rather, they simply used a flatbed scanner to scan each issue, page by page, to build the PDF files. They also did not use very high quality issues, as many of the copies are yellowed and flawed. More, there are some issues cocked at a slight angle, rather than laying them completely horizontal and true. This can be annoying to read. Even worse, there was not much care given to cleaning up the pages within Photoshop. I ran one page through Adobe Photoshop and applied the Auto-Color correction to the page and got fantastic results, at least three times better picture than the supplied PDF file.

Still, to have forty years of Amazing Spider-Man in electronic format on my computer (I copied all the CD-ROMs to an external FireWire Hard Drive for easier access) is a treat. As a long time comic book reader, it feels strange to read these comics on a computer screen. I have many of the physical issues myself, most of which are in better condition than the copies Topics Entertainment used when scanning. But to be able to quickly pull up an issue for reference is fun.

All in all, for $49.99 US (you can find it MUCH cheaper online, such as Amazon.com where the current price is $32.99) you can have a piece of comic book history that never goes out of style.

MyMac.com Rating: 3 out of 5. Good concept, nice format. I would prefer that more care be given to these comics, such as running batch color correction on each issue. I do like the index PDF for each year as well, but all it shows is a miniature version of the cover, not too handy.

I just got this last week and am even more pleased than I thought I would be. Despite the small flaws noted by others (primarily the omission of the annuals that are included in the FF collection) this is a terrific way to revist my youth. I started reading buying Spider-man somewhere between issues 10-20 (I was about 11) and have greatly enjoyed revisiting these stories.

Assuming that you have an interest in collecting/reading Spider-man, reaction to this product will largely depend on two questions: whether you are comfortable spening long stretches reading a computer screen (I am) and the size of the that screen. On my 19 inch LCD, choosing full screen presents a two page image almost exactly the size of the original comic books, and without the distracting interface, that is perfect to read. On a smaller screen, constant scrolling up/down and left/right might prove quite irritating.

Aside from the obvious cost effectiveness of this set, the experience (at least for me) is probably better than any of the hard copy reprints. The black and white reprints are just not acceptable to me. And while the Masterworks might present a somewhat higher quality image, the computer presentation--suprisingly--does a better job recreating the experience of reading the original book. The slightly yellowed appearance of the image, as well as the odd stain and tear, almost trick me into thinking I am rereading one of my old comics. And the inclusion of the contemporary ads and letter pages (complete with the trademark Marvel banter of the era) is just wonderful.

You'll note that this used to be available in CDs. Now the DVD version of Spider-man is available, but not at Amazon. You can get it cheaper at Tales of Wonder.

I have the CDs (maybe the DVDs will be different?). Unlike the FF set, they do not include annuals. The company has scanned in all the pages (including ads, Bullpen page, letter pages, and back cover) from actual issues. Often some of the pages are scanned in slightly crooked--what's the matter, don't you have time to line things up? (The FF version does a better job).

I thought it might be difficult reading the comics on a computer screen, but after a few pages I liked turning a page with the push of a button. If you have a bright monitor or laptop, the colors should look nice.

Make sure that you upgrade to Acrobat Reader 6 (included on the disk) so that the Marvel watermarks don't show on your screen. If you try to print a page the watermarks will (I believe) appear.

Overall, a wonderful addition for those who have the original issues but can't read them because of their value, for those who don't want to buy a bunch of the Masterworks titles, for those who want to see the comics with the original colors and printing quality, and for those who want to read all the issues in color. The cost of the total collection may seem high, but think about buying over 500 comics. That's less than a dime an issue--more than I paid years ago!

As Marvel does more of these (X-Men is out; an Avengers set is coming), they may "crash" the back issue market. People who have the comics may decide to buy these CDs and/or DVDs and sell their back issues.

Highly recommended.

As a long-time Spider-Man fan, I couldn't think of a better way to describe this collection than Mary Jane's immortal opening line.

Personally I think this is one of the best reprint ideas available. For hardcore or casual fans, you are not going to be able to beat this option. The issues, while not in perfect condition, are still clear enough to read and will provide - literally - days of entertainment. 501 issues take a while to read, people. For those that do not like sitting in front of a computer for extended periods of time to do your reading, you may not like this format.

The collection is stored in Adobe Acrobat format (PDF). The software is included if you don't have it. Each Acrobat "page" consists of 1 or 2 scanned comic pages. Some magnification may be necessary, depending on your monitor resolution.

The only minor complaint that I have is the "two page" approach. It can get a little irritating reading top to bottom and then scrolling up and to the right to see its neighboring page. My suggestion would have been to scan each page in individually and give a few more display options, but I digress. I am more than willing to ignore that minor inconvenience for the big picture: I have a full run on Amazing Spider-Man.

I think this a great idea and hope that Marvel will continue reprints in this format with other heroes. Now if DC could start up something similar with Batman, they'd have a monster hit on their hands as well.

This is a great product. Instead of having boxes and boxes of comic books, you get 40 years of Spider-Man on a few CD's. I had to get rid of my extensive comic book collection after I got married 20 years ago (the wife said they took up too much room), so I enjoyed reading these books again, especially all the issues I missed since I stopped collecting. The scans are well done (although some of the source books were not in pristine condition). This product is very cost-effective compared to the cost of buying 500 back issues. I am so pleased with this product that I plan to get the Fantastic Four DVD as well. I hope this trend catches on so we can get complete runs of other series in the CD/DVD format.

This set contains five hundred-plus Spider-Man comic books spread amongst ten CDs. Unfortunately, I haven't finished the first CD as I don't enjoy reading the PDF comics on my desktop computer as much as I had thought. Still, there's no other way I'd ever see most of these classic comics so I'd recommend this to all Spider-Man fans. I'd especially suggest this for comic book fans who own laptops as it seems ideal for a long train or plane ride.

This set contains five hundred-plus Spider-Man comic books spread amongst ten CDs. Unfortunately, I haven't finished the first CD as I don't enjoy reading the PDF comics on my desktop computer as much as I had thought. Still, there's no other way I'd ever see most of these classic comics so I'd recommend this to all Spider-Man fans. I'd especially suggest this for comic book fans who own laptops as it seems ideal for a long train or plane ride.