Spider-Man Coloring & Sticker Book (China) JQ-813D

Background

Here's another wonderful Chinese colouring book that uses the exact same artwork as the Spider-Man Coloring Book (China) A-Series and Spider-Man Coloring Book (China) S-002 I found a few months ago.

Story Details

This one is 5.6" x 8.4". It features a glossy red cardboard cover, and in the grand Chinese tradition of "neither quality nor quantity" it contains only 16 pages for colouring. There is also a centre-fold sheet of stickers stapled in the middle.

The stickers and the artwork feature the characters which grace this and the other two books: Spider-Man, Peter Parker, Mary Jane, Doctor Octopus, The Lizard, Silver Sable — along with "Maximum Shock" and "Talon", a couple of bonus characters generously gifted to the Spider-Man cast by the good workers of China.

General Comments

Everything about this book exudes the awe-inspiring level of ignorance regarding Spider-Man continuity that pervades pretty much all of the unauthorized Spidey material. The selection of content could not even generously be called "eclectic". It is by any standard an ill-educated and confused mess.

For example, among the images on the Spider-Man stickers page you will find:

• Comic Book Spider-Man
• Movie Spider-Man
• TV Cartoon Spider-Man
• Indian Spider-Man
• Turkish Spider-Man

Yep,I kid ye not. Check out the image scans. There is the brutal, misogynistic "Turkish Spider-Man" from the unauthorized 1970's Turkish movie - complete with moustache!

Overall Rating

This is, sadly, yet another example of what happens when a company who knows nothing at all about Spider-Man (and next-to-nothing about western artistic sensibilities) attempts to produce a super-cheap, illegal product for the English-speaking market.

This is bad, bad, bad. But actually, it's not the worst I've seen. At least the artwork manages to roughly represent almost-normal human forms, unlike some of the earlier books out of China (e.g. Spider-Man Chinese Coloring Book (Large)).

I'm going to be generous, and give it one whole web.

Then I'm going to take it outside and burn it.