Marvel Super Heroes: Hero Action Activities (Parragon)

Background

Parragon Publishing (in the UK) and Scholastic Australia (in Australia/NZ) have got a nice little joint franchise deal going on for Marvel and Spider-Man colouring/activity books.

Artistically and creatively speaking, the results are a bit mixed. On one hand, Scholastic in particular has been churning out an interminable series of nearly-identical black and white colouring books, recycling the same material over and over. And on the other, they're simultaneously co-producing these highly individual, lovingly-designed, full-colour activity books.

Story Details

This one is entitled "Marvel Super Heroes: Hero-Action Activities". It is 8.4" x 10.6" magazine sized. It is square-bound and features 48 full-colour pages (with the exception of a few black and white images for you to colour).

The content is based on their existing pool of material, but has been significantly extended to produce an excellent range of puzzles and activities. Spider-Man and his foes appear in many of the pages, along with the X-Men, and the Avengers.

General Comments

In these pages you will find puzzles to "find the items", "complete the series", "spot the difference", "unscramble the letters", "answer the quiz", "join the dots", "find the odd-one-out', and many more. The variety is great, as is the design and production quality.

The book pitches at a perfect level. It doesn't pretend to be a fact-file or reference book. It simply concentrates on using the well-known characters to create a series of attractive, entertaining and fun series of puzzles.

The puffy "glow-in-the-dark" stickers on the front cover are a bit of an irrelevancy. They don't connect to the contents of the book at all. Still, I suppose it's understandable that something like that be included. When a printed book is trying to compete with an X-Box, Tablet or other form of interactive electronic entertainment, a physical, tactile component is the most obvious way to differentiate yourself.

Overall Rating

Visually appealing. Well designed and manufactured. Highly entertaining. And at £3.99 asking price including glow-in-the-dark stickers, also very good value for money.

Four webs.