Marvel Super Heroes: Deluxe Colouring/Activity Book (Scholastic Australia)

Background

This 48-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 48-page Spider-Man "Deluxe" book in the series, being 7.9" x 10.8", square-bound with a glossy cardboard cover.

All of the colouring & activity 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 is a bumper collection of colouring and activity pages, all with black and white line art illustrations. 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: Deluxe Colouring/Activity 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 for the colouring pages.

The activity pages are equally as attractive, with puzzles, join-the-dots, odd-one-out, counting/finding pages, and more, all with clean, appealing illustrations.

Overall Rating

On the plus side: Great artwork, nice production values, and a $6 price tag which is pretty good four 48 pages in a high-quality product.

On the minus side: Material is re-cycled from other books. But if you don't already own those other books, then that's not much of a problem.

I'm not sure what "Deluxe" label means, except that the title on the front cover is in reflective silver print. But the 48-page count gives a nice hefty feel to the product, and it's hard to deny that this is a appealing book. I'm happy to give this a rating of 3.5 webs.