40 Years Of The Amazing Spider-Man

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Summary: Excellant Amazing Spider-man collection on CD-Rom.
Review: -I've been collecting the Amazing Spider-Man comics for awhile, and this collection on CD-Rom is great!! It's authentic scans of real issues. Unlike the reprinted and released hard backs. With this CD-Rom collection you get to view first printings of the issues ( I can almost smell the pages)!!! You can seriously enlarge the scans, and no matter how large you go the images stay crisp and clear! It appears not a page of any issue is missing. All adds, covers, and story pages are there. It's a Marvel released collection, not some boot-leg or pirated item. This CD-Rom collection will bring my little spidey fan son and I, years and years of enjoyment.

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Summary: A Valuable History of Comic Book Lore!
Review: 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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Summary: Just what I was looking for...but for US customers only!
Review: Looks like an amazing set, even though I have 90% of the issues included I'd love to own this. However, as an Australian I am ineligible to buy this. All overseas customers should be aware that this is classed as "software" and non-US citizens cannot purchase it. Very disappointing.
Apparently them dern fer-ners can't be trusted not to re-sell these CD-ROMs to terrorists.

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Summary: Next best thing to the originals
Review: Some buddies and I went in on this set recently, and after some review of the enclosed materials I think that these scanned books are the next best thing to owning a full run of the originals (and at about a ten-thousandth of the price!)

I've purchased or read many of these books in the Masterworks editions, Essentials editions, even other CD-ROMS, and I think this set tops them all. Here's how it stacks up:

The Masterworks, though beautifully recolored, are quite pricey; for the same price of one Masterworks volume containing about 10 issues, here you get 501, all easily stored on 11 discs. There's just no beating that value.

The Essentials are a better value than the Masterworks, but you could probably still only get the first 60-70 issues for the same price as this set. Also, the Essentials are reprinted in black and white on very cheap newsprint... and if you don't think those four colors make a very big difference in the reading experience, I'd challenge you to read one of the issues from this set and one from an Essentials volume and see which experience you enjoy more.

The Marvel Comics CD-ROM for Spider-man is only about five bucks and uses the Masterworks quality reprints, but, again, you only get the first 10 issues there. If Marvel continued to release those discs until they got to 500 issues at the same price, you'd be spending 50 times more than what you will with this set. Plus, there's only one of these CD-ROMs so far, and no guarantee than others will ever be made.

In addition, a lot of the charm of this set is that it is scanned from original copies, ads, letter pages, and all, which give the reader much more insight into The Amazing Spider-man as a piece of cultural history. You'll witness ads advertising some odd new comic called "The X-men"; learn fun facts like why the "Amazing" prefix is used (it was carried over from "Amazing Fantasy", where Spider-man debuted); and get to see every whacky missive in the letters column, including early debates about the direction Spider-man should take (should he have a side-kick? should he be accepted by the law? should he have a spider-jet? there's even a debate about whether or not to keep the "Amazing" prefix!) Another welcome surprise is that Spider-man's first appearance, Amazing Fantasy 15, includes the FULL issue -- three unrelated back-up stories that have rarely (if ever) seen the light of day since their original printing. Also, though these are culled from an individual collector's personal set, all of these books are in very nice condition... no missing cover halves/logos, no missing pages, nothing send-ins cut out of the back cover. In fact, probably the worst quality book on here would be classified by a retailer as a VG- (Very Good Minus).

These issues can be read using simple Acrobat Reader, which is free from the Adobe website and also included on the set. Using Acrobat, you have any number of options for reading these books, and the size/quality of the image is really mostly up to the quality of your computer monitor. In full screen, these issues look mighty fine on my 17" LCD. Also, these issues were scanned in at a VERY high resolution... I've zoomed in to 5 times the size of the original image, and it never loses clarity or becomes pixelated. Finally, these issues are scanned in two-page spreads, which is especially important for later issues (the Marvel CD-ROMs split double page spreads in half, which isn't that big a deal for the early issues, but would have looked pretty ridiculous for later issues which often utilize these double page spreads for one image).

Cons: As mentioned by others, there are no annuals here, which means you'll be missing some pretty major events in the life of Spider-man (not the least of which is his wedding). Also previously mentioned, there will be a few incomplete stories in the later issues, when there were 3 or 4 Spider-man comics coming out every month that crossed over regularly with Amazing (though you might be surprised how little this matters when it comes to understanding those stories). Super-completists might be miffed at some missing alternate covers and fold-outs. But, as every other reviewer has agreed, these few short-comings are more than made up for by the high image quality, ease of use, and unbeatable price.

VERY highly recommended for children and fans of Spider-man in general.

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Summary: Annuals Not Included
Review: This is an awesome collection and certainly the worth the money. My only gripe is that the Amazing Spider-Man Annuals were not included in the set. I guess they are technically a different title, but they were included in the Essentials series so I was sort of expecting them here. Still, it's hard to complain about getting the first 500 issues in one collection.

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Summary: A must have for all Spidey fans!
Review: This one has it all. The comics are reproduced in full without any touchups or computer coloring. It's just like reading them only you don't have to get another room to store 500 issues in!
I like that all the original ads and backup stories are all included. I hope there are more with the other characters like the Fantastic Four; which is coming out next year as a movie. All the Marvel characters deserve this format because it's like stepping into comics history and reliving all those old issues. I can no longer afford 50 dollars for each Marvel Masterworks volume being an adult with responsiblities and this is the best way to see them.