Marvel Heroes: Ultimate Sticker Book (DK)

Background

This is one of several sticker books put out by DK books in the latter half of the 2000's. In its dimensions, this follows the format of Spider-Man: Ultimate Sticker Book (DK) (from the previous year), Spider-Man: Glow in the Dark Sticker Book (DK) (which was produced in the same month), and Marvel Heroes: Glow in the Dark Sticker Book (DK) (which came out a few months later).

Story Details

Specifically, all three are 8.5" x 11" soft card cover. There are 8 pages of art to place your stickers on, and 4 pages worth of stickers. The stickers are about 15 to a page, making 60-70 stickers in all. To give DK credit, the artwork, text and stickers are not overly recycled between the three books. They took the time to create separate design and content for each of the books. The villains and heroes differ between the various Marvel books, but cover most of the popular X-Men/Avengers/Spidey/Hulk range.

As with the others, the production quality is very high. There's a short paragraph of text for each character, which is generally inoffensive. Spider-Man's description is "Science student Peter Parker became Spider-Man when he was bitten by a radioactive spider. He uses his wall-crawling, web-slinging abilities to fight the hoodlums and Super Villains of New York." It kind of misses the whole "just a kid, guilt about Uncle Ben, power and responsibility" angle which is what makes Spidey unique... but I sympathize with the challenges of condensing 4000 comic-book appearances down into two sentences.

General Comments

At US$7 list price these books aren't a cheap option for 12 pages of content. Also, the "Glow in the Dark" books in the set are priced the same as this "non-Glowy" sibling, which kind of puts it to shame.

Overall Rating

I gave the glowing versions 4 webs. This one doesn't glow in the dark, but costs the same price. Let's trim it down to a three-and-a-half-web rating.