Marvel Super Heroes: Six Book Pack (Parragon)

Background

Parragon Publishing have been super-active in recent years producing a wide range of innovative Spidey and Marvel activity books for the UK market. This is another example of their willingness to try new formats.

Story Details

This product is a great example of the willingness of the Parragon design team to try different concepts. The product ships on a sturdy magazine-sized 8.5" x 10.6" card backing board. On the board is a plastic blister pack with four coloured pencils (green, blue, purple and red).

Also are six small 3.2" x 3.2" colouring mini-book starring Spider-Man, Thor, Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America and Wolverine. No girls allowed in this club, sorry.

Each booklet is sixteen little pages of black and white line art, plus a single sheet of stickers.

General Comments

Nice format. Shame about the content.

The art has been cropped hard to fit the tiny format. Unfortunately, the intelligence level seems to have been cropped along with it. Spider-Man was "bitten by a special spider". Now he is a "webbed warrior", who is "sworn to protect New York from angry villains". This really is lowest-common-denominator stuff.

Also, where's my yellow pencil? How am I supposed to colour Iron Man or Wolverine without yellow?

Overall Rating

Nice try, but this one totally collapsed in the execution. The designers had good intentions, but the writing team screwed up their job. Meanwhile the finance guys put the final nail in the coffin by cutting the budget down to allow only four pencils.

Six books. Four pencils. One web.