IDW has an awesome-looking new take on The Transformers, putting Optimus Prime and company at the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Hmmm…how about a 30 Days of Transformers crossover? I’d buy the action figures.
Just another nerd.
IDW has an awesome-looking new take on The Transformers, putting Optimus Prime and company at the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Hmmm…how about a 30 Days of Transformers crossover? I’d buy the action figures.
The other day I was wondering what Marvel would follow-up its 40 Years of the X-Men DVD-ROM with, and it turns out my speculation was right. The latest issue of Previews has a listing for a 40 Years of The Avengers DVD-ROM that will “collect over 535 complete Avengers comics spanning September 1963 through December 2005. Scheduled to ship in April 2006.” Suggested retail price is $49.95.
The other day I finally picked up the 40 Years of X-Men DVD-ROM at the local comic book store. That’s 480 issues of X-Men/Uncanny X-Men (the first series) from 1965 through 2005.
Like the previous offerings of Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four, all of the comics are scans of actual comics in PDF format. There is some lite-DRM in that you have to use Acrobat 6.0 or great to view these properly and when you print them, there is a watermark added to the printout. As with the Spider-Man and FF collections, however, it is easy enough to just use a screen capture utility to get high quality color print-outs without the watermark.
For $50, a package like this is just too good to pass up, though it is not quite as useful as the Spider-Man or Fantastic Four editions since the best years of the X-Men series often involved stories that spanned across multiple different X-Men related comic book titles.
No word yet that I’ve seen on if there’s going to be another in this series or, if so, what it might be. Avengers Assemble?
The US Post Office is going to have a series of stamps commemorating some DC Comics characters and specific comic books.
Notice anything missing? That’s right, where am Bizarro?
In March I posted my brief review of the 40th Anniversary Spider-Man CDRom Collection. That was a 9-CD set for about $40 that contained 501 issues of Spider-Man going back to Amazing Fantasy #15. Marvel followed that up with the 44 Years of Fantastic Four on DVD-ROM which collects 550 issues of the Fantastic Four title through 2004 (alas, no Ultimate FF).
I picked a copy up for $50 at the local comic book store (unlike the Spider-Man collection, I haven’t seen this for sale at computer superstores yet).
My first experience with the collection was not happy. I could not get my HP to recognize the DVD-ROM. I sent an e-mail to the tech support folks listed on the box, but did not receive a reply. Fortunately, a Dell machine I use did recognize the DVD. The DVD turns out to be double-layered and I imagine my DVD drive has some sort of incompatibility.
Anyway, although Marvel has gone to a different company to produce the Fantastic Four package, its basically the same. These are high resolution scans of comic books put into PDF files (one PDF file per issue). They include everything — covers, advertisements, letters columns, etc. If it was in the print version of the comic book, its here. The only drawback is that, as with the Spider-Man collection, some of the early issues are scanned from less than pristine comics and the printing method they used in the 1960s wasn’t the greatest to begin with.
On the upside, no copy protection as far as the files are concerned. I simply copied all 5+ gigs to my hard drive and store the disk. Where copy protection does come in is printing. Acrobat will insert a “Marvel” watermark overlay on top of the printed page which is quite ugly. There are, of course, plenty of ways around that, so it’s not much of an issue for me. A non-technical user who wants to do a lot of printing of these comics, however, is likely to be disappointed.
I have never been a big fan of the Fantastic Four, but I was very happy to have the entire run of the book for about $50 after taxes.
But the best news is yet to come. In October, Marvel and Graphic Imaging Technologies will be releasing probably the coolest such set to date — 40 Years of X-Men on DVD-ROM. All 480 issues in that title through 2004 (but again, probably no Ultimate X-Men).
The big question is when is DC going to get in on this? Where is the 65 Years of Batman on DVD-ROM set?
For Father’s Day, my wife hit the mother lode at a garage sale and got me a huge run of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and Angel comic books in mint condition. I’ve already got the comics in trade paperback format, so I figured I’d frame some of them and display them. A quick Internet search turned up a couple options to display comics in archive-safe enclosures.
Bags Unlimited sells a low-priced solution with its Archival Comic Frames Kits. A frame and matte to display a contemporary-sized comic book is $29. Unfortunately, there are almost no details as to what exactly qualifies this as an archival storage method.
ComicFrames.Com, in contrast, sells a comic book frame that is much more expensive — about $65 each. It comes with a mylar plastic sleeve sandwiched between acid proof matte material. In addition, the frame comes with framing grade acrylic designed to shield the comic from UV light, and ComicFrames.Com sells a number of alternatives to bump up the UV protection if necessary (such as in a brightly lit room).