As an old-school collector of many things, I have long found the notion of ownership in the digital age a source of contemplation. I regularly purchase books from Kobo and for my Kindle, and if I find a good sale on iTunes, I’ll also make a buy pretty quickly (this week, Once Upon A Time…in Hollywood for $4.99 was an easy click). But then we get into the whole world of licensing vs ownership, complexities that I don’t totally understand but which I’m aware of. I’ve yet to see any content disappear from any of my collections, though, so I tend not worry so much.
However, I do prefer to own what I buy outright. I often purchase comic bundles from Humble Bundle, knowing that PDFs and CBZs are in my library and that I can download them to my hard drive whenever I want. My complete Hellboy or Incal collections aren’t going anywhere, and I have that relief. The ability to download a PDF when you purchase a given title is also part of the appeal of Neon Ichiban, the new digital comics storefront spearheaded by David Steinberg and Chip Mosher, the geniuses behind the original Comixology platform, which was eventually bought by Amazon and devoured by the Kindle ecosphere. I’m a fan of what Neon Ichiban is doing and have a decent assortment of titles in my account there, some of which have that download capability (the books in my collection from DC and Dark Horse currently don’t). Their web reader is intuitive and user-friendly their weekly sales are an easy way for newcomers to start building a collection.
This all brings me to the return of GIT Collections. Throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, GIT released multiple DVD-ROM collections of Marvel titles ranging from the Avengers and The Amazing Spider-Man to Fantastic Four and Captain America. These sets were scanned from the original comics and included ads, letters pages, and anything else that was part of those original books. It was a great way to get complete runs (up to a given year of the set’s production) and read on your desktop (tablet reading was a little more cumbersome, and I’ve yet to find a good reading app on my iPad when I go back to a fiven PDF so I can read a page at a time – hit me up here if you know of one).
GIT Collections is back with what I feel is a new and improved system, bringing complete sets up to 2024 for The Amazing Spider-Man, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, and Captain America. I received a review USB for Amazing Spider-Man to see how GIT has advanced from its original concept, and I can tell you that the evolution is fantastic. The comics contained have been cleaned up, and the concept is different, in that you’re not reading PDFs of old school comics; instead, you’ve got digital copies you might find when you read a given issue on your Kindle or the Marvel Unlimited app. That means no ads, but it also means the comics absolutely shine when you’re reading them. The USB comes with some hoops to go through to ensure you can’t go pirating your books, which I think is completely reasonable. You get three licences, though, so you can read on multiple devices.
If there’s a downside to this method of reading, and there is in my book, it’s that, much like those original DVD-ROMs, while you’re getting complete runs of a series, when a storyline veers off into other books, as is often the case, you miss out on those particular issues. For instance, I tried to read the complete “Kraven’s Last Hunt” story, but because it also appeared in Web of Spider-Man and Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man, I was out of luck. That is something worth keeping in mind if you decide you want to go this route as a reader.
UPDATE: I just heard from GIT Collections that they will produce complete collections of both Web of Spider-Man and Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man in 2026 or early 2027!
I’ve been reading The Amazing Spider-Man on my iPad Pro, starting with the Nick Spencer run from 2018 that I never got through. Again, the books look great. And they’re mine. No chance of disappearing at all. The collector in me loves the idea, and I’ve already preordered the Fantastic Four and X-Men sets from GIT Collections, which are due to ship at the end of January. I can’t wait to dive into those, and I’m eager to see what other Marvel series will get the GIT Collections treatment.
