Marvel Super Heroes: 1000 Stickers (Parragon/Scholastic)

Background

This is yet another non-U.S. coloring/activity book which only appears to be available in the UK and Australia. It was published by Scholastic in Australia as ISBN 9781742834047, and by Parragon Book Service, Ltd in the U.K. as ISBN 144547784X.

The book is branded "Marvel Super Heroes", and Spider-Man guest stars on the cover and throughout the content.

Story Details

The book is 8.4" x 10.7", square bound with a glossy cardboard cover. The cover is also die-cut so that you can see through to the first sheet of stickers bound inside the book. Die-cut covers were a brief craze in the 90's, but haven't been seen for a while. So this one is a blast from the past!

Inside the front cover are the eight sheets of stickers bound into the book. The first four and a half sheets are comprised of lots and lots of tiny stickers - about half an inch square! That explains how the book manages to pack 1,000 stickers inside.

After the stickers are 96 pages of printed content on paper that's relatively light-weight by Scholastic standards. There's roughly 30 pages of coloring-in, followed by 60-odd pages of puzzles and games! A couple of pages right at the back give the answers to the preceding puzzles.

The coloring pages seem to be purpose-illustrated for this book. At least I don't recognise any of the artwork from any other source, and the illustrations are well-suited to coloring, being interesting without being overly complex.

The activities and puzzles are many and varied. Most of the larger stickers at the front of the book are intended to be used within the puzzles. E.g. you match the character descriptions to the classic Marvel Super heroes, then place the stickers on the page to show your choices. Or you play tic-tac-toe using stickers. The stickers aren't removable at all.

General Comments

The interior of this book is set apart from many other books by the generous use of gray-scale mixed with black and white line art. All of the pages are bordered in gray-scale decoration, and many of the activity pages feature large areas of high resolution gray-scale art. The final result is a very "finished" and quite a rich appearance which goes quite some way to compensating for the rather light-weight paper stock.

Overall Rating

The page count is high, which is good. However that means thin paper, and the line art from the other side of the page tends to peek through a little, which is not so good.

There are many, many stickers, which is good. But that means that many of the stickers are very small, which is not so good.

The cover is appealing. The content is friendly and inviting, and appears to be generally original material. That's all good.

The price in the UK is £4.99 or less in the UK which is good value. It's more like AU$10 in Australia which is a fair bit more expensive - still a "fair" price, but not really a bargain.

Overall, I think this is worthy of four webs.