Spectacular Spider-Man Animated Series Activity Book with Tattoos (Bendon)

Background

Bendon Publishing International, Inc. has given us a few new Spider-Man kids books (coloring, activity or otherwise generally interesting or educational) every year from 2006 to 2009 at least. In 2008, a couple of their offerings were linked to the short-lived but relatively popular "Spectacular Spider-Man Animated Series" cartoon, including this "coloring book with tattoos".

Story Details

This activity book is 8" x 10.5". Soft cover, stapled at the spine. It features 36 pages of black and white printing on clean white paper, plus a bonus insert which contains a single sheet of tattoos.

There are 30 tattoos featuring characters from the series (Spidey, Ock, Sandman, Rhino and the Green Goiblin). The art matches that of the show, including a rather portly Doctor Octopus.

The rest of the book consists of original coloring and activity pages, all drawn in the style of the art from the TV show. There is a good mix of traditional "coloring", along with "draw the other half", along with mazes, word grids, spot-the-odd-one-out, and such like.

The art is quite sparse, in that there are no background scenes - just the characters. But if you like the stylized art from the show, I guess you'll be happy enough with it. Certainly the lines are clean and the overall production quality is very high.

General Comments

The majority of the pages are identical to those from Spectacular Spider-Man Animated Series Activity Book with Stickers (Bendon), although this book contains 36 coloring/activity pages to the 24 in the "Stickers" book.

Overall Rating

I can't comment on the quality of the tattoos, as I was reluctant to remove any from the book in order to try them. But overall the production quality is very high, despite the cost-cutting move of sharing artwork between the two different books in this set.

I'm going to give it a slightly above-par three and a half webs.