Spider-Man 2: Stencil Book (Funtastic)

Background

Funtastic brought out a swag of coloring and activity books back in 2002 for the first movie - the usual mix of jumbo coloring pads, sticker books and such like, but also including a tattoo book and a paint-with-water book. Sadly, the rather disappointing art they decided to use last time really overshadowed any high points that the format may have provided.

For "Spider-Man 2", Funtastic is back with new art and even more nifty formats. As your devoted reviewer, I headed down to my local Warehouse (the NZ equivalent of Wal-Mart) and picked up one of each of the different books I can find. And here they are. Note that Funtastic appears to be an Australian company. I'm not sure if these books will make it to the US If they don't, then please accept my condolences. If you get something else instead, please drop me a line and let me know...

Story Details

This is another slab of a book. It has 9 thick card pages, which are stencils. Throw a piece of blank paper behind with a solid backing card, and trace the outline of the nine different Spider-Man stencils! Yep, all Spider-Man, no Ock to be seen, sadly. Still, this book was released pre-movie, and maybe they had strict conditions. Strange though, the cheap B & W coloring books had Ock in them, so why not the up-market books? Very odd.

But on the plus side, there's a compartment inside the book with four colored pencils (black, green, red, blue - each 3" long). And a bonus! At the back of the book there's a sleeve holding around a dozen pages of stickers, made up of different Spider-Man body parts. It's like a morgue in there... there's bits to go on each picture, just to "finish it off" they reckon, although it would probably make the picture look rather disjointed! Still, plenty of stickers!

All of this is for NZ$14.99 (US$9), and it's not too unreasonable. Even if it's only Spidey, there are still a swag of different poses, and you can re-use 'em until you're fair sick of 'em.

Overall Rating

Let's call this one better than average and give it 3.5 webs.