I think I can order comic book TPBs and hardcovers from the library system, but I don’t know what to order. Is there a system for following, say, Spiderman through this method, even if it runs behind?
Marvel seems to use frames or something that hides the exact URL. For Spiderman, this is the closest I can come: http://marvel.com/catalog/
Is there a system to this that won’t make my brain hurt?
At my LCS last week there was a free pamphlet called, I think, Son of Marvel Collections that was a bibliography of sorts of Marvel trades in print, ordered chronologically by character. That’s got to be your best bet. I think this would be awfully hard to research online because there’s no commitment to completeness in the collections policy. So you have Essentials or Masterworks volumes through the '60’s or '70’s, then maybe the “Classic” color TPB’s for sections in the '80’s, followed by trades of most but not all of the output of the last several years, sometimes organized by character, sometimes by crossover, sometimes by series title, but only a handful or in-print stuff from the '90’s or early '00’s.
Oh, the Marvel Wiki on Wikia might have the information presented in a systemic way. I don’t know if that’s something they track or not.
–Cliffy
http://tplist.millarworld.net/
The site is dedicated to the listing of Trade Paperbacks. Very handy to determine reading order.
Good luck trying to follow collections. Even just following them as regular series has to be hard enough if you haven’t kept up all along, what with the reboots, the renumberings, the zero issue fad that was going on for a while (among other bizarre numberings for special issues, though DC was probably worse than Marvel, I mean #1million? wtf?) etc etc etc.