Amazing Spider-Man Jumbo Coloring & Activity Book (Bendon)

Background

Bendon Publishing has been pretty active recently, with two four-book sets of hard cardboard page kids story books. They've also produced a mixed back of other coloring and activity books.

These are a set of four "Jumbo" books. I'm not sure why the are called Jumbo. Their size is perfectly average (8" x 10.5"), and their page count of 96 regular black and white newsprint pages is respectable, but hardly super-sized in any real sense.

In fact, Bendon has also produced a 288 page version, leaving this "Jumbo" series looking rather skimpy if you're just evaluating by magnitude alone.

Story Details

I have a couple of shelves full of Spider-Man coloring books, running the gamut from delectable custom-drawn pencil-work (e.g. older British coloring books like Spider-Man Color/Activity (Whitman)) to complete rubbish like Spider-Man Color/Activity (China) or even the hugely popular but damnably badly drawn Spider-Man Color/Activity Books (Paradise).

These four Bendon books hover somewhere in the upper half of the spectrum. While most of the art is reconstituted from issues of Ultimate Spider-Man and other sources, it has been post-processed in a generally competent fashion. What's more, there's a good mix of puzzles, word-games, spot-the-odd-one-out pages and suchlike.

Even better, the four different cover versions of this coloring book each contain a good slice of distinct material. Flicking through two or three of the books I did notice some pages which appeared in more than one variant. Also, the same characters tend to appear frequently - Black Cat is a hot favorite. But generally speaking, the interiors appear sufficiently non-overlapping to be essentially unique.

General Comments

Coloring books tend to come and go pretty quickly. They get one print run, flood the stores, and then they're gone. Kind of like comics I guess. When you go into a store deciding you want a "Spider-Man coloring book" for a plane journey or wet afternoon at home, then you get what you get.

If these books just happened to be what you got, then you're probably going to be satisfied that you got just what you paid for. Spider-Man, friends and villains. Pictures. Some puzzles. What more do you want?

Overall Rating

Competent and capable. Three and a half webs. Per variant.