Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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62 of 64 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Valuable History of Comic Book Lore!, December 22, 2004
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!
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Performs exactly as described..., February 20, 2005
Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars
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
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
501 issues of Spider-Man on CD-Rom is an Amazing deal, February 18, 2005
Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars
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.
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