Spider-Man ABC Sticker Activity Book (China)

Background

This Chinese-origin Write and Colouring Activity Book is 10.1" x 7.4". It features 16 pages of line art which encourages children to write the letters of the alphabet. It also contains a centrefold with two pages worth of stickers featuring Spider-Man and letters. The cover is enhanced with a holographic-effect sparkle. The code on the back is AOO-903ABC.

This is a companion book to the Spider-Man 123 Sticker Activity Book (China).

Story Details

Like its companion, this book features sandard white paper, with each page printed in monochrome blue or pink. This "ABC" book is slightly thinner, with only 16 pages compared to the 20 in the "123" version.

The artwork features the exact same images that are present in the "123" book — a mix of disconcertingly mis-proportioned Chinese-illustrated stock art featuring Spider-Man in a series of awkward and strangely uninteresting poses. Again, the two Chinese-origin villains "Maximum Shock" and "Lizard" make one appearance each. Doc Ock also appears once, in a piece of art which appears to be borrowed from Ultimate Spider-Man.

As you can see from the scan, the cover features the Spider-Man 3 movie poster image. The back cover also features a stock image from the Spider-Man 3 promotional collection.

The content consists of sections for each letter of the alphabet with spaces for the young reader to trace the letter, and to place stickers. Each letter is illustrated with a clip-art image which is entirely unrelated to Spider-Man. In fact, some of them are unrelated to the English language as we know it. "A" is for "Apple". "J" is for "Juice Perch". "Q" is for "Quacker". "U" is for "Uang". "X" is for "Xume".

Apparantly "Xume" is a word for "Seagull". "Quacker" is Chinglish for "Duckling". Yeah, it's brilliant stuff!

There are also three pages featuring "join-the-dots" puzzles where the dots are indicated by letters of the alphabet rather than numbers. Again, the images in those puzzles have nothing to do with Spider-Man, but are just generic clip-art... a Castle, a Butterfly, and a Fish.

General Comments

What I find so staggering here is the utter lack of respect shown by the "creators" of this book; Lack of respect for Spider-Man and for Intellectual Property Laws, disdain for their English-speaking customers, and total contempt for the fundamental principle of "quality".

The creators of this book clearly had access to modern printing and manufacturing equipment, so they are obviously not amateurs. What is it in their mental construction which leads them to demonstrate so little regard for their target audience?

And what about their customers? Who on earth is buying all this shit? Who in their right mind would... umm... OK. Well, yes it's true that I bought a copy. But that was purely for research purposes only!

Overall Rating

"X" is for "Xume", "Q" is for "Quacker".

Half-a-web is for rating books like these.