Spider-Man "Spider-Sense" Jumbo Coloring/Activity/Stickers (Bendon)

Background

This is the "Spider-Man (Spider-Sense) Jumbo Coloring/Activity Book (Includes Stickers)" from Bendon Publishing, dated 2010. You may very easily confuse it with the Spider-Man "Spider-Sense" Jumbo Coloring/Activity (Bendon) book from 2009. I almost did so when I saw it on eBay! But there are some subtle differences.

Story Details

Both the 2009 "Jumbo" and 2010 "Jumbo with Stickers" books have a great deal in common. In fact, they contain essentially the same content. At any given time, Bendon works with a single pool of "colouring and activity pages artwork" that they just recycle for all their books. In fact, if the book has lots of pages, you're likely to see the same page appear more than once in the same book. For example, the exact same "Black Cat Colouring" page appears three times in this book.

So, the only real differences between the earlier and later versions are:

1. The 2010 version includes 144 pages, up from 96 in 2009.
2. The 2010 version has added a sheet of stickers.
3. The 2010 version has a red spine, not a blue one.
4. The 2010 version appears to come in only one variant, while the 2009 had four different covers.

General Comments

Well, there you have it. Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V a bunch of the pages to increase the page count. Throw a sheet of "Spider-Man Logo" stickers at the front, and you have a whole new product to go to the market!

Clearly, the job of marketing Spider-Man colouring books is a long ways removed from brain surgery!

Overall Rating

Same old, same old.

All these books have the bland sameness of cheap Bologna sausage. They're the literary equivalent of yesterday's chewing gum. Sure, they do the job they're intended to do... keep kids quiet while simultaneously helping develop fine motor control. But that doesn't make them "good" in any interesting way.

Two webs.

Footnote

Note: Bendon's coloring books from 2009, 2010 and 2011 all shared the same art pool. They swapped to use the new "2012 Amazing Spider-Man Movie art-pool" in June 2012, along with an updated design for their covers.