Marvel Super Heroes: Connect 'n' Color #86029 (Artistic Studios)

Background

Self-styled "Artistic Studios" picked up a Marvel franchise in 2013 and knocked out a small handful of coloring/activity products. This one calls itself "Connect-n-Color" and claims to contain "Hours of Coloring Fun".

Story Details

The book isn't large. Square-bound at the top, it is 6.3" x 8.3". It contains a mere 24 black and white activity pages. It does include a "Wacky Stack" Crayon in a resealable plastic insert on the cover. This consists of five stubby plastic-encased crayons. Each crayon is 1" long and fits inside the next. Colors are red, green, blue, yellow and purple.

Inside are activity pages. There's a high proportion of "join the dots to complete the picture", but there's also some regular coloring, mazes, tic-tac-toe, and a few pages that prompt you to write text to complete the story.

General Comments

The artwork is adequate. The two most notable problems are firstly the lack of page count. Twenty-four pages isn't particularly generous, and given the small dimensions of each page, this is definitely a light-weight candidate. "Hours of Coloring Fun"? I don't think so!

Secondly, the "Wacky Stack" crayons are ridiculously chunky! Combine blunt crayons with tiny pictures and you have the perfect recipe for frustration. Well-sharpened colored pencils would be a far more appropriate tool for coloring these pages. How on earth they imagined you would write words with these fat stubby crayons is utterly beyond me.

Overall Rating

This book is severely underweight, and the provided crayons are the wrong tool for the job. Whoever designed this product was asleep on the job.

As proof of my sad disappointment, I offer a mere one-and-a-half web rating.