Amazing Spider-Man: Giant Activity Carry Pad (Scholastic Australia)

Background

This Spidey carry pad is from Scholastic Australia. I haven't seen it offered for sale anywhere outside Oz. I managed to pick one up when I nipped across the ditch last month. It's quite impressive!

This pad is 14.6" x 11.8". It is bound like a pad, with a grey cardboard back and a glossy cardboard front. The pages are hinged at the top into a glued binding, and I'm pretty sure that you could easily tear out the pages individually if you wanted to. Me, I didn't want to. So I didn't.

To help you deal with the size, there's a handy carry handle die-cut out at the top.

Story Details

Inside there are the aforementioned 48 pages of puzzle pages. We'll get to those in the moment. But first there's a glossy sheet of stickers featuring art work taken from the recent picture story book The Amazing Spider-Man: An Origin Story. The reverse of the front cover is a big glossy action scene featuring a waterfront at night where you can place your stickers. The stickers may be re-usable, but I wasn't brave enough to try.

Then we're into the main event. There are 24 double-sided high-quality white-paper sheets of Spider-Man activities, intermixed with a few full-page colouring sheets. Nearly all of the material is simply recycled from the earlier Marvel Color/Activity (Scholastic Australia), such as Amazing Spider-Man: Deluxe Colouring/Activity Book (Scholastic Australia) and other such Scholastic Australia products of that era.

However, there has been at least one major change to each page... since this book is in "Landscape" layout, a lot of the art and puzzles have been cropped and/or rearranged in order to adapt the original "Portrait" layout content to fit sideways. There may be a few original puzzles in this lot as well. I couldn't be bothered going through them all and checking. Let's give Scholastic the benefit of the doubt and pretend that there was some brand new material in here as well.

General Comments

As mentioned, this Carry Pad uses much of the same material that has already been published in at least two other formats. The only difference is... this time it's bigger. In most cases that works out all right. The line art on the colouring pages is pretty good quality, and it scales up to the larger size just fine without getting too grainy.

Mind you, I'm not sure that "larger" is particularly "better" when it comes to word puzzles or "spot-the-difference" games. But I guess there are plenty of kids out there who would disagree with me when it comes to unwrapping presents at Christmas or on Birthdays.

Overall Rating

Altogether, this big feller will set you back AU$15, which is about the same as US$15. That's quite a bit of dough for a 45-page colouring book with no particular notable feature other than its size.

I'm also rather tired of seeing the same old content recycled again and again. But if you don't already own any of the other activity books from this series, and you're looking for something hefty to impress a young Australian Spidey-Fan, then this will probably do the trick.

Three webs.