Revisiting Spider-Man

Marvel Comics' Spider-Man is hands down my favourite comic book character of all time. Although other characters pluck at my heartstrings, I have never read as many issues featuring a character as I have Spider-Man, nor have I bought as many toys, novelties, and other products as I do Spider-Man products. I fell in love with the cartoons that were on when I was a child, the movies they made when I was a teenager, and with the baby toys and clothes I can give to my newborn child now.

Eight or nine years ago my then-girlfriend, now my wife, bought me the complete Amazing Spider-Man CD-ROM collection. The first 500 issues of Spider-Man's flagship series, on only 10 CDs, readable on a computer with Adobe Acrobat Reader. Over several months I devoured them, but I would get disappointed as I tried to get through stories from the '80s and '90s. A lot of the stories from those decades are "crossovers," meaning that the story is made up of multiple parts, usually 3 to 6, and each part takes place within a different series. Since the CDs only contained the issues of "Amazing Spider-Man," I would only get parts 1 and 4, or 3 and 6, but never the whole story.

It was at this point, through Internet searches for more digital format comic books, a virtually non-existent entity at the time, that I discovered torrents of old comic books, scanned and uploaded for "preservation." (A term used because it makes the intent sound altruistic, as opposed to outright saying "scanned and uploaded so people can read copyrighted material without having to pay for it.") Using these torrents, I compiled as complete a digital collection of old Spider-Man comics as I could, while also building a large physical collection of single issues, variants, hardcovers, trades, toys, and more. Nowadays a lot of these comics are available digitally for a small fee via Marvel and Comixology, so it should be easier and less legally ambiguous for someone else to pursue this collection.

I have read and organized every one of those Spider-Man comics into, as near as I can tell, an ideal reading order based on the events and timeline of the issues, as opposed to based on publication date. And now, I plan to read them again.

Without further ado and incrimination, I now commit this blog to revisiting Spider-Man... from the beginning, may it never end.