We recently recieved this great missive from Robert:
Hello folks,
as your page is truly dedicated to the one and only Spider-Man I want you to take a small look on a very challenging project Marvel Germany is currently working on.
Spider-Man Comics have been published in Germany since the 1970s. Nearly every SM-Comic was translated into German and Germany has seen four publishers. First publisher was Hit comics and they did publish Marvel comics in a very random way. Second publisher was Williams and they published from the start (Amazing Fantasy 15 being their #1, and ASM 1 being their #2 and so on.) Williams closed down when Amazing 137 was published. Soon afterwards Condor was the third publisher for German Spider-Man. Unfortunately they left a gap in the continuity because they started with ASM 150. They published Spider-Man comics in three forms: 1st as a magazine. In many cases these magazines featured one Spidey comic and one other comic of the marvel universe. Sometimes the stories were a little shortened (means one or more pages were missing).
2nd as Paperbacks. These were only half the size of a US-comic book and because of this pictures and text-bubbles were narrowed down. It was impossible top put all the original text into the smaller bubbles and so lots of text were lost for the German readers. Additionally sometimes pages were left out.
3rd as so called Album. These were a little larger than normal comic books (the size of a yellow press magazine) and hat two or three stories in them.
When Condor stopped publishing Spidey in the 90s it was Panini (Marvel Germany) to fill the gap. One of their great efforts to satisfy German spidey-fans was to publish the missing 13 issues of ASM.
In 1999 they started a new project called "Spider-Man komplett" (komplett = complete). They publish every few month a cartonage box which contains up to 18 comic books. I think the picture on this page gives you a small impression of what I'm talking about: http://www.uebercomics.de/marvel/spiderkomplet_intro.htm
All comics are fully colored, no sides missing. As some of the old films got lost, sometimes the coloring was really bad, but this got better with the last two boxes. This month box #13 was made available, containing the twelve books of ASM from 1975 and Giant Size SM 1-5 and Giant Size Super Heroes #1. The project will continue as long as there are enough people who buy the boxes.
As you can see from this the guys at Marvel Germany are very dedicated to Spidey. The boxes now span more issues than do the US-Essentials. And remember: those comics are all colored.
I have no connections to Marvel Germany, I thought only this might be interesting for you and of course: this is part of the Spider-Man history.
Best wishes,
Robert
Thanks for the info and the history lesson!