For what seems like a lifetime, Spider-Girl and the rest of her MC2 compatriots went without being collected into trade paperbacks or digests. With the exception of a few early issues collected in two trades, there was no easy to pick-up-and-read story collections: Spider-Girl: A Fresh Start which contains #1 and #2, features a neat new piece by Pat Olliffe for the cover that I'd love to own, the other trade simply called 'Spider-Girl' reprints #0-8.
It's wouldn't be until years later, when they began releasing Spider-Girl in manga-sized digest-format that a wider audience of children could find and, well, digest them....not literally, of course. The digests lasted through to Volume 12 (containing #67-72) as well as a single volume for each of the other MC2 titles at the time (A-Next, J2, Wild Thing, Fantastic Five and a 2-for-1 Darkdevil/Buzz digest) before behind the scenes goings-on ended the digest line abruptly. Luckily, Marvel's second show of faith in the MC2 line as a whole had yielded Last Hero Standing and the various mini's that followed. All of which saw trade paperback releases: Last Planet Standing, Avengers Next: Rebirth, Fantastic Five: The Final Doom and American Dream: Beyond Courage.
The relaunched Amazing Spider-Girl title received trade releases of it's entire run, encompassing five volumes. The various Spider-Girl tales (as well as the Mr and Mrs Spider-man stories) following Amazing's end are collected as Spectacular Spider-Girl: Who Killed Gwen Reilly and Spectacular Spider-Girl: The Last Stand.
If you're as obsessive as I clearly am (the doctors all say there's no hope) then you will want to grab the Captain America Corps trade as well, just because it features American Dream prominently and happens to be the only MC2 appearance in 2011. It's also written by the legendary Roger Stern, if you needed any other reason.
Getting back to the digests; I was very disappointed that they simply ceased production after volume #12, as up to that time they'd provided an inexpensive and easy to pick up method for casual readers to enjoy. Not to mention, the next volume would have covered the Black Costume Saga (erm...not to be confused with Peter Parker's Saga of the same name from the 80's) and the fallout from dealing with the Black Tarantula. *Sigh* Oh well. By my calculations, had the digests continued to Spider-Girl #100, it would run until volume 17, maybe an 18th volume if they integrated related material such as Amazing Spider-Man magazine (2007) and the Araña story from Spider-man Family? Now I'm just speculating and daydreaming.
While I like the digests, I'd still love to see a complete release of the Spider-Girl series from start to finish in trade format. Is that to much to ask? As a bonus, I recently came across this digest which collects the two stories I mentioned above.
Until nerdiness becomes inexpensive, I remain
frogoat
Part 1: Singles and Variants