Amazing Spider-Man: Webtastic Colouring (Parragon)

Background

The folks at Parragon (in the UK) and their buddies at Scholastic (in Australia/NZ) have been busy producing a range of high-quality Spidey and other Marvel coloring and activity books since 2011.

All the books are based on the same two pools of artwork. There's a pool of full-color artwork that originates in the Marvel: Origin Story Books series. Plus there's a pool of Black and White line art that has appeared in twenty or thirty different coloring books.

Story Details

The "Webtastic Colouring" book (note the UK spelling on "Colour") uses the second pool. This book is 64 pages, greyscale art on decent quality clean white paper. There's 64 pages and the book is 8.5" x 10.6" magazine size. A glossy square-bound cover completes the book.

Inside are a mix of mazes, connect-the-dots, coloring pages, puzzles and games. A pretty conventional mix of headline villains appears - Sandman, Electro, Doc Ock, Green Goblin, Scorpion, and more. Mary-Jane and Jonah Jameson make cameo appearances too.

General Comments

There's a number of ways a coloring book can go bad. Boring puzzles, bad art, low quality production, mis-used characters, recycled artwork, etc. But these Parragon/Scholastic books are pretty good at avoiding the pitfalls.

The content and production is visually pretty good this time around. There's no real depth in the characters - villains are bad, Spidey is good, no further questions asked.

The only real applicable objection is the recycled nature of the underlying artwork. Books like Amazing Spider-Man: Deluxe Colouring/Activity Book (Scholastic Australia), Amazing Spider-Man: Colouring & Activity Book (Scholastic Australia) and plenty of other titles from the series.

Overall Rating

Good value stuff. Recycled to heck, but otherwise perfectly sound and appealing.

Three webs.