Amazing Spider-Man: Extra Fun Book to Color (Dalmatian Press)

Background

Dalmatian Press is an offshoot of Bendon Publishing.

The Bendon parent company has produced several Spider-Man coloring/activity books under their own name (see Spider-Man Color/Activity (Bendon)).

But this one from Dalmatian uses a completely different set of artwork. Specifically, it uses the great set of artwork which Scholastic Australia, Inc. used for their colouring/activity products between 2011 and 2015 (see Spider-Man Color/Activity (Scholastic Australia)) and for those UK/Australia/NZ products jointly released by Parragon/Scholastic in Spider-Man Color/Activity (Parragon/Scholastic).

Story Details

This is a big book, being 11" x 14", square-bound cardboard cover. It contains 96 pages of black and white art, plus one sticker sheet. The pages are perforated for easy tear-out, and are of good quality clean paper.

The front features gold-foil detailing which immediately makes the book stand out on the shelf, especially given the giant size.

Although these large-format books are visually stunning, it is unfortunate how easily they get corner-damage on the shelf, or in shipping and handling.

General Comments

The "Scholastic/Parragon 2011" art pool is superb in several ways.

• It's quite extensive and it's very high quality with consistent use of line-thickness and appearance.
• The images share a common-thread which allows for a sense of "story" and continuity (something which I enjoy in a colouring book).
• The art pool features a well-balanced range of classic Spider-Man characters – enough to provide variety, but without spreading itself too thinly.
• The art is ideal for colouring – not too detailed, but not too simple either. Suitable for pencil or crayon.

Now, this book doesn't strictly tell a completely linear story. But it neatly implies one with sensible captions, and by focusing first on Spider-Man/Electro, then turning to other classic villains, before finishing up with a series of Hydroman pages. In-between, there's plenty of appearances of Peter Parker, J. Jonah Jameson, and other supporting cast.

Looking at each page, the content consists of a few pure colouring sheets, but the bulk of the pages are nicely-balanced, dual-purpose puzzle/colouring content. As always with this "Scholastic" material, the variety of the puzzles is great. There are items to find, pictures to complete, find-the-differences, odd-one-out, trivia, word games oh... you name it, it's probably in here.

Overall Rating

This "Extra Fun Book to Color" combines the depth of the artwork from Scholastic/Parragon with the authentic feel, generous page count, quality design and top-notch production of a U.S. manufactured product.

This is a worthy book. Five webs.

Footnote

I can find no reference to the book's ISBN via the interwebs. But I assure this product does exist, and I own a slightly battered second-hand copy!