Monday, February 15, 2010

Big Books

I own two Marvel Omnibuses: The Uncanny X-Men Omnibus (collects Uncanny X-Men #94-131, Annual #3, Giant-Size X-Men #1) and The X-Men Omnibus (collects X-Men # 1-31). Prior to buying them I thought they were a great idea. I was fixated on three advantages that I perceived when comparing Omnibuses to Marvel Masterworks:
  1. The cost per page, each Omnibus contains the equivalent of 3 or 4 Marvel Masterworks, for the cost of 2 or less.
  2. The page size is a little bigger so the images are a little bigger than they are in a Masterworks.
  3. The Omnibuses include the letters pages and other other bonus materials that the Masterworks do not.
I love the content (both regular and bonus: I never realized there were so many female X-Men fans back in the day) but I have a little trouble with the size. They aren't as portable as I would like them to be. They are too bulky and too heavy for me to read while I'm standing up on the Metro. In order to read them I need to be sitting with the book on a flat surface or my lap. Of course this didn't really sink in until after I bought a couple of them.

There are a couple other classic Marvel series that I want to read that have been released as part of the Masterworks series: Amazing Spider-Man and Thor. There is a Spider-Man Omnibus (possibly two) and I've been toying with the idea of getting it but now I'm leaning much more heavily (no pun intended) toward buying the Masterworks instead, one volume at a time. There is no Thor Omnibus, as of yet, and I was holding out for one but now I don't think that I will bother; I'll get the Masterworks instead.

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