Marvel Comic Book Library:
Collector's Edition, Vol. 1
Story:
Art:

Published by Topics Entertainment
Price: $29.95

Contents:

• Amazing Fantasy #15
  
• Amazing Spider-Man #1-9
  
• Avengers #1-10
  
• Daredevil #1-10
  
• Fantastic Four #1-10
  
• Incredible Hulk #1-6
  
• Tales of Suspense #39-48, 59-68
  
• Tales to Astonish #60-63, 70-79
  
• Silver Surfer #1-10
  
• X-Men Giant Size #1, 94-102
  
• Character bios
  

My Verdict: Own it for posterity's sake.

There's a problem with trying to play catchup on your favorite titles--namely, it can be expensive as hell. A single comic these days is three dollars, a trade paperback is around fifteen and if you really want to go in for those Marvel hardbacks, that's your left kidney right there. For those of us who actually have a budget for our comic addiction, Marvel and Topics Entertainment have an excellent solution. For the price of two trades, you get one hundred classic Marvel comics to peruse.

The early appearances of Spider-Man, the modern Captain America, Daredevil, Silver Surfer, the modern X-Men, the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, The Hulk and The Sub-Mariner are all here. These all focus on characters that have feature film adaptations coming out soon...coincidence? Eh, could be.

When you pop the CD in, the initial screen that comes up has representations of the ten characters (or groups of characters) that the CD focuses on. You click there, and you get thumbnails of the ten issues for that character(s). Click further, and you get the interior of the book, with the ability to switch the black and white. You can also print out the pages if you wish--I did a test print of the first twelve pages of Giant-Size X-Men #1 and it looked pretty damn good, even in black and white.

The content is not an issue. The issues all look great, the scans are flawless and it's excellent to be able to get in and close-up as much as you want. The reader for the comics feels a lot like Adobe Acrobat, so it's not like there's a huge learning curve to get started. I do question why only the New X-Men were included instead of the first ten issues of the actual comic introducing the team itself. Instead of the Kirby issues you get Giant Size #1 (incorrectly identified as just X-Men #1 on the packaging) and the next nine issues of the book. Sure, granted, Wolverine got introduced there--but if you're concerned with Logan just do his first ten appearances. Also, Fantastic Four #48, the first appearance of the Surfer, is not on the CD (anywhere I can find) despite being listed on the inside flap.

No, apart from those omissions there's only some nits here. How everything is setup--with HTML files off the CD--is pretty basic, but let's face it--we're not here for snazz. Also, if you pick any of the items on the sitebar under "Extras," no matter what you select it all takes you to an Extras screen where you have to pick again. It's kind of silly to have to click "Character Bios" twice just to get there.

As extras you get bios for all the characters, scanned in from some Marvel guide that I can't quite place. The information's all good and relatively complete, so no worries there. You can also go to the Marvel website and get three free issues of either Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate X-Men or Incredible Hulk--which is nice. Get yourself addicted and here's where you can get some more. I would have been a bit more impressed if they had included the "trailers" that they create for Marvel.com on here--you know, convince me to buy one of your books.

But regardless of all this, the price is really the selling point. You can't beat it with a big stick and it gets you access to a good slice of comic history on the relative cheap. Granted, I'd much rather see a DVD-ROM with six hundred issues on it than a CD-ROM with a hundred, but I'm willing to be patient. This is a step in the right direction.