Marvel Heroes: Jumbo Coloring & Activity Book (Bendon)

Background

Bendon Publishing International, Inc. have produced quite a range of Spider-Man coloring books, most recently using the "Spider-Sense" logo which has also been picked up by a number of other publishers.

This one is standard 8" x 10.5" size, soft card cover, with 96 pages. Interior is newsprint, with black and white artwork. There is a "$1" yellow price box printed on the cover. This book costs a buck.

There's also an unpriced variant from the same year (also 96 pages), as well as a second unpriced 2009 version which is missing the last 16 pages. You can tell it apart from the longer versions because it has no title printed on the spine.

Story Details

The contents are a mix of coloring pages, along with puzzles and games. Mazes, word-find, letter-scramble, spot the odd-one out, find-the-pair, copy the image, etc. All the usual stuff you find in these kinds of books.

There's a wide range of Marvel Heroes appearing. Naturally there's Hulk, Cap, Iron Man, Thor, Fantastic Four and Spidey. But there's also Daredevil, Black Cat, Beast and Iron Fist to add a bit of variety.

Notably, the line art is very clean and modern. A major flaw of many modern comic books is their clumsy recycling of artworks scraped from comics. However, this book features purpose-drawn black and white line art with clear, crisp lines.

General Comments

Perhaps one minor complaints about the artwork. There isn't much variety in the poses.

There's no background art in any of the pages, always just the character. And always just one character. More to the point, nearly all of the coloring pages feature that single character drawn large, advancing towards the reader, with one fist reaching forward in strong perspective towards one of the upper corners of the page.

It might be the Mighty Marvel Method, but it is somewhat overdone by the end of the book.

Overall Rating

So, nice artwork and a good range of characters and puzzles. However, the range of poses and backgrounds is very limited and uninspired.

Still, with 96 pages for a dollar, that's helluva-good-value right there. I have to give it four webs on price per page alone.