Spectacular Spider-Man Animated Series Activity Book with Stickers (Bendon)

Background

Bendon Publishing International, Inc. has given us a few new Spider-Man kids books (coloring, activity or otherwise generally interesting or educational) every year from 2006 to 2009 at least. In 2008, a couple of their offerings were linked to the short-lived but relatively popular "Spectacular Spider-Man Animated Series" cartoon, including this "coloring book with stickers".

Story Details

This activity book is 8" x 10.5". Soft cover, stapled at the spine. It features 24 pages of black and white printing on clean white paper, plus three bonus inserts:

• 1 pull-out poster (13" x 20.5") featuring art from the TV show.
• 2 pages of color stickers - around 50 stickers featuring art from the show.
• 2 growth-chart to put on the wall (6" x 22.5", heights from 36" - 55").

The rest of the book consists of original coloring and activity pages, all drawn in the style of the art from the TV show. There is a good mix of traditional "coloring", along with "draw the other half", along with mazes, word grids, spot-the-odd-one-out, and such like.

The art is quite sparse, in that there are no background scenes - just the characters. But if you like the stylized art from the show, I guess you'll be happy enough with it. Certainly the lines are clean and the overall production quality is very high.

General Comments

My only major negative comment would be that nearly of the comment seems shared with the sister book Spectacular Spider-Man Animated Series Activity Book with Tattoos (Bendon). That's a good cost-saving measure, but if you buy both books then be prepared for a huge double-up on content.

Overall Rating

There's no recommended retail price on this book, so I can't really say if it was good value for money when it was produced. But it's a nice tie-in with the TV series, and the "extras" are impressive. The artwork is new for this series, and production quality is high.

Three and a half webs.

Footnote

Note that this is entirely the same format as the The Amazing Spider-Man Activity Book (Bendon) from two years earlier. It contains the same page count and the same extras. However, all of the artwork is entirely new for this version.