Spider-Man Colouring & Activity Pad (Alligator)

Background

This is a Spider-Man Colouring & Activity Pad featuring "Over 60 pages of fun colouring and activities inside." In fact, there are 64 pages - but everybody knows that Marketing People have trouble with exact numbers.

Yet another in the series of Alligator UK-only colouring books. This is a 2005 book that was still floating around a few years later in UK remainder stores.

Story Details

This is the same art, activities and colouring that you'll find in all the other books in this series. It's mostly clip-art from Bagley issues of Ultimate Spider-Man, from which the black lines have been extracted by computer program while the color fill is faded to white. This leaves the outlines looking rather jaggy and uncertain, but I guess the UK under-tens market isn't that discerning.

Actually, they might be a little discerning after all, since like all the other books in this serious I found my copy in a discount remainder store for the meagre sum of GBP 1.99 reduced from GBP 2.99. For that you get 64 clean white pages of decent paper, a nice glossy cover, all in a top-bound pad format will pullout pages.

Still, crappy art is crappy art no matter how you package it.

General Comments

This is a perfect example of how to take great art (and Bagley's work in USM is very good indeed) and grind it down to a mediocre tie-in. I presume Alligator has paid their licensing fees - but I'm surprised that nobody in Marvel seems to care about the quality of the tie-in work. This stuff doesn't give Marvel a good name.

Overall Rating

Two sad little webs.