The campaign for CD-ROM comics (see here) continued again recently with the release of 44 Years of Fantastic Four, a single DVD-ROM containing over 550 issues of Fantastic Four. At $44.95 (get it? Get it? Huh?), it’s a bargain for that many comics, but the big question is whether or not these are actually readable digital comics. Thankfully, the answer is a resounding yes.
Read on for the full story.
The last notable attempt to do something like this was the unfortunately named Marvel Comics Library Volume 1. Unfortunately titled, because there never was a volume two, I’m afraid. I ended up getting that one at GameStop for like $1.95 recently, and while there are an awful lot of comics on that disc, they’re hampered down by a plugin that only works with Internet Explorer. On Mac OS X it worked, but it was very, very buggy. Thank the lord, this disc doesn’t suffer from the same problem at all, as seeing the light, this disc has all 550+ comics in good ol’ Adobe Acrobat format.
This has a lot of excellent side effects. For one thing, it means that this disc is 100% cross-platform compatible. It runs flawlessly on OS X and Windows, and I imagine it probably runs perfectly on Linux as well. But wait, it gets better — these are unencrypted PDFs, so you can do whatever you like with them, including using a non-Adobe PDF reader (like Preview on OS X). There is a catch — attempting to view them in anything but Acrobat 6 or later causes a “MARVEL” watermark over the image. This means you wouldn’t want to print them (although you could — the PDFs aren’t locked for printing), but who cares? The watermark is transparent, so it doesn’t get in the way of reading them.
So what did I do with this power? Why I put them on my PSP, of course. Yup, I’ve got a couple of years of classic Fantastic Four comics on my PSP’s memory stick all ready to go for my lengthy train ride later this week. And hey, they look very, very good on that screen, too! (I’ll provide instructions for doing it in a later blog update).
The one downside to this disc is that it’s pretty bare bones. There’s no search keywords, so you can’t find all the issues by Byrne or anything like that. But at least it’s easy enough to navigate by year (using the inter-PDF linking Adobe added in Acrobat 6), so you can just find them that way (tip: Byrne’s first issue as an artist was #209…check out this obsessive FF page for more specifics).
Also, these are pretty much straight scans of the actual issues. So there’s dirt and yellowing, and sometimes the pages aren’t perfectly straight (actually, most of the time they’re slightly off). On the plus side, the fact that they’re scans means you get every single ad and letters page in the entire run, and some of those are great. Actual (and probably fake) letter from issue #3: “Dear Editor, You’ve got a heckuva nerve making a doll like Susan Storm invisible!”
If you like classic Fantastic Four comics, and have a computer monitor with a decent screen resolution, you owe it to yourself to get this. If you’ve got a high-res PDA or PSP, or a laptop you travel with frequently, it gets even better. And as they dropped the legacy of CD-ROMs behind, these are all on one disc, and not 11 like the recent Spider-Man compilation release (which apparently is going to be re-released on DVD, making it a lot more attractive). This is the first comics on CD/DVD project I’ve ever seen that wasn’t bogged down by software glitches. It’s in an open format, the restrictions are minimal, and the price is reasonable. What’s not to love?