I made a purchase the other day that I still can’t believe. I bought every issue of the comic book The Amazing Spider-Man for about 50 bucks. Sure these comics are on 11 cd’s in the pdf format. But 500 comics for 50 bucks? Tell where else you can buy 500 comics for 50 bucks? The product is called 40 Years of the Amazing Spider-Man and it is a must have for anyone that likes Spider-Man. These are not reproductions. These are the actual comic books scanned. You get the art, the, adds, the covers, and the letter pages. I can’t stress enough just how geeked out I am about this.

It’s so bad I haven’t had the time to log in to World of Warcraft the last few days. WoW can wait. I have 500 fucking issues of Spider-Man to read. And this is the good stuff people. The movies got their inspiration from the stories in these 500 issues.

I’m also pretty damn impressed by the current run on the comic. I’ve never read them till now and always thought the new stuff was inferior. Boy was I wrong. The current writer (J. Michael Straczynski) may be known to some of you in the sci-fi world as the creator of Babylon 5. It’s a Peter Parker that I hadn’t seen in a while. Straczynski has made me forget all about the retarded clone saga. I’m going to add the comic to my subscriptions at the local comic book store.

I picked up the comics that the Hellboy movie was based on. I’m happy to report the comic books are good stuff. Mignola’s work on Hellboy has the same spirit that Jack Kirby maintained in the bulk of his work. If you don’t know who Kirby is, you will just have to trust me.

Thankfully the movie does uphold the vision of the comic book. While it is not a direct translation (and that would be hard), it is very faithful to the important plot points of the comic. Dark Horse Comics has five books collecting the comic Hellboy. I’ve only read the first two volumes are were the movie gets most of it’s inspiration. Seed of Destruction and Wake the Devil which are available to buy at your local comic book store. I would highly recommend anyone who liked the movie and hasn’t read the original comics to pick these up.

Since the X2 movie just came out and I mentioned the original comic it was based on a few posts ago. So if you dig the X-Men movies and want to read the source material I have a few picks for you.

Four books (shown below) called Essential X-Men Volumes 1-4. These hefty books collect issues 94-179 of the original X-Men comics. These comics are the good stuff. And they are more or less the inspiration for these X-Men movies.

You can nab these suckers at you local comic shop or if you have to you can get them at Amazon.com. Essential X-Men Volume 1, Essential X-Men Volume 2, Essential X-Men Volume 3, and Essential X-Men Volume 4.