Marvel Super Heroes: Colouring Book (Scholastic Australia)

Background

This 24-page colouring book is part of a collection of Marvel Color/Activity (Scholastic Australia) published in 2011/2012 by Scholastic Australia. The format is identical to the 24-page Spider-Man books in the series, being 8.25" x 10.8", staple-bound with a glossy cardboard cover.

All of the colouring books by Scholastic Australia seem to share their material shamelessly from their private pool of content pages that are mixed-and-matched to form a bunch of similar-looking activity books in various shapes and sizes.

Story Details

Inside are 23 black and white line art pages for colouring. Some of the pages feature Spider-Man, some Wolverine/X-Men, and some feature Thor.

Looking through the Spider-Man content, ALL of it is identical to content that you can find also in the Spider-Man colouring book published around the same time, i.e. Amazing Spider-Man: Colouring Book (Scholastic Australia).

I'm not sure if the X-Men/Thor material is unique to this book, but given that there was a Thor movie around that time, it's very easy to imagine that the Thor pages are all borrowed from a Thor colouring book too.

General Comments

Despite the heavy re-use of content, the actual material that is present in these Scholastic Australia is always top notch, with clean line art, attention to backgrounds, and good framing of the primary character on the page.

Each colouring page does have a caption which probably formed a continuous story-line in its original context. But in this pick-and-chose scrambled compilation, the sense of any story is entirely lost. That's a shame, but it's not an absolute disaster.

Overall Rating

On the plus side: Great artwork, nice production values, and a staggeringly low $3 price tag.

On the minus side: Material is re-cycled from other books, and the captions that once formed a story have lost their context.

Despite its weaknesses, this book is a pretty good bargain, and is better than many such books we've seen in the past. I'm happy to give it a just-above-average rating of 3.5 webs.

Footnote

The 2013 reprint has the same ISBN. It is identical in terms of content, except that the captions have been removed from the images.