Super Hero Squad: Catch That Crook!

Background

This is a "lift-the-flap" book. It is 8" x 8" hard cardboard cover and hard cardboard pages. The entire book is printed in full color.

Including the inside front and back cover, there are 14 pages, making seven double-page scenes. The first six scenes have a large 5" x 5" flap to lift up and show a modified version of the scene.

Story Details

Scene One: "The radar shows trouble all over Super Hero City! General Ross must send the Super Hero Squad into action. Ross asks the team leader, Iron Man, 'Who will go to help?'"

I'm not sure how a "radar" can spot "trouble" in a city. Airplanes yes. Trouble... not so much? Then again, science is dead in modern schools, so it's not such a big deal.

Scene Two: Spider-Man and Hawkeye go to the museum and catch Doctor Octopus grabbing a painting.

Scene Three: Mr. Fantastic and Captain America find Magneto using his magnetic powers to steal gold bars from a bank vault. This makes sense... apart from the fact that public banks don't tend to keep gold bars, and the other fact that Gold has almost zero response to magnetism. Oh yeah... science is dead, etc. I forgot. My bad.

Scene Four: Spider-Man and Hawkeye head to the zoo, where Mole Man is stealing a lion. No, seriously. Stealing. A. Lion. On a Leash. This is something that showed up on a radar, we are to believe.

Hawkeye's solution is to shoot a net over Mole Man and the lion. The lion that lives in a brutally cruel circular enclosure about twenty feet across. A brutally cruel and incredibly unsafe enclosure with only a three foot fence high between the lion and the zoo visitors.

Is now a good time to point out that Mole Man's only power is to dig through dirt. Hence covering him with a tent-shaped net over a dirt surface is probably the least effective way to capture him?

Scene Five: Captain America and Mr. Fantastic find the Abomination messing up the books at the local library. To be honest, I don't even know where to start with this. It's like showing me two gorillas in nun's clothing filling a bathtub with brightly-colored machine tools. It's... unapproachable.

Scene Six: Back to Spider-Man and Hawkeye. The god Loki is turning all the traffic lights red. Spider-Man uses webbing. On a god. A God. A Deity. Webbing. Not only that, according to the "lift a flap", Loki appears to have disguised himself as a U.S. Mailbox.

Scene Seven: The heroes have wrapped up all the villains in webbing and have handed them over to two policemen. The webbing is loose, and doesn't restrict the villains from using their arms.

In the scene, the heroes are just leaving. Two policemen are presumably now going to take the not-really-tied-up-very-well villains (Abomination, Magneto, Doc Ock, Mole Man and Loki) to prison.

It's not shown, but presumably the Super Heroes are now racing to the florist to buy flowers to send to the widows of the two policemen.

General Comments

This one has "crossed-the-line". It has jumped the shark and jumped back again. It has a season pass to the local aquarium with a VIP pass to the shark-jumping exhibit.

Overall Rating

There's no way that a story like this could accidentally be so bad. My guess would be two lines of China White, half a bottle of Absinthe, and a heart-felt and rather vindictive practical joke.

Have Five Webs, Mr. Strathearn... and pass the Absinthe.

Footnote

This story doesn't make any sense... so why should my rating?