Amazing Spider-Man: Black Paper Colouring (Scholastic Australia)

Background

More colouring goodness from Scholastic Australia. This one is 8.5 x 10.5", 48 crisp, clean... BLACK pages!

Story Details

That's right. All the pages in this book are black, with WHITE line art! They're especially designed for you to color in with the eight bright crayons included in the plastic container attached to the front of the book.

The scenes feature Spider-Man, Mysterio, Electro, Vulture, Mary-Jane, Doc Ock, Sandman, Lizard, Green Goblin... not a bad turnout really!

I checked, and certainly some (but perhaps not all) of the artwork is recycled from some of the early coloring books in the Marvel Color/Activity (Scholastic Australia) series. But even when it is recycled, I'm pretty sure that they have been touched up and reworked to look sensible when inverted in color. You can't just swap black and white, I think they have thickened up some of the lines to make them stand out more clearly.

General Comments

Even though the artwork is somewhat recycled, this is still a brilliant new format for a book. I honestly cannot recall ever seeing a "black paper" Spider-Man coloring book in the fifty years of Spidey history. This really is something new.

Not only new, but very nice too. The paper is decent quality. I regret to say I'm not brave enough to test out the crayons and ruin my lovely near-mint condition copy, but they certainly look well-constructed and cleanly manufactured.

Overall Rating

Original stuff, and high quality too! Sure, the $10 price probably looks a bit expensive to the American eye, but you have to recognise that books and comics are all rather pricey down-under, and $10 isn't actually unreasonable for something of this standard.

All in all, I think this is a superb product, and I'm giving it a correspondingly superb rating of four-and-a-half webs.