Ultimate Spider-Man: Deluxe Colouring/Activity Book (Scholastic Australia)

Background

The guys from Scholastic Australia are back... and at last they've got their hands on some new illustrations!

Story Details

Scholastic regularly pump out coloring books like these for the NZ/Australia market. This is one of their standard formats – the "Deluxe". With a foil-enhanced cover, the 48 square-bound black and white pages will cost ya around NZ$8 – which is close on $6 in U.S.A. money.

Once upon a time, illustrators used to create new artwork for every coloring book that was produced. Those days are long gone, and these days a common pool of artwork will be created, and licensed out to create multiple coloring books under multiple brands, across multiple markets.

The Scholastic Australia folks have obviously just gotten a permit to use the "Ultimate Spider-Man TV Series" art pool, and they've just dumped a handful of different colouring/activity products on the market.

General Comments

The art features Nova, Iron Fist, Rhino, White Tiger, and all the other characters from the latest TV series. It's used in a pretty typical mix of puzzles, mazes, word games, and straight-up coloring pages.

Overall Rating

There's nothing particularly original here. It's borrowed artwork formulated into a very standard set of content.

But the price is good, the quality is nice, and it's a nice change from the old Spidey/Electro/Hydro-Man content we've seen repeated for most of the preceding five years.

I'm going to err on the generous side here and give this Deluxe book a four-web rating. That generosity won't last long, once Scholastic design team get warmed up and we start to see the hundredth minor variation of this product. But for now, let's be kind.