Spider-Man 2: Great Power/Superpoder (Scholastic)

Background

Scholastic is a big name in kids books. I didn't see any books from them for the 2002 Spider-Man movie, but this time they're determined not to be left out of things. They've cooked up a series of eight coloring/activity books, each with a different gimmick. Four of them feature goodies stuck to the front of the book, and one of them is bilingual Spanish/English. Looks promising. Let's open the covers!

Story Details

I don't speak Spanish, but I'm not sure that Superpoder is a direct translation of "Great Power", which has very specific connotations in Spider-Man's world. Well, I guess that's not the point anyhow. What about the book?

This is the odd-man-out of the Scholastic "Spider-Man 2" series. For starters, it's cheaper than the rest at US $3. Also, it's only available in certain markets - predominantly south-west U.S. I saw all the other books in the UK and in NZ, but not this one. Also, it's square bound, where all the others were simple crease-bindings. That's because this is by far the largest book at a whopping 80 pages.

Sure, it's newsprint instead of clean white paper, and there's no gimmicks - but at that price and size, are you surprised? The pages are a combination of pages from all the other books, with the instructions and footnotes given in both Spanish and English. Back cover is six Spidey shapes to cut out, and glue together to make three double-sided shapes to hang on a mobile. Hanger, string, glue and scissors not included.

You get the picture, this is the cheap-ass, no-frills version to mop up any market segment they might have missed with the other seven books. Actually, it works pretty well.

Overall Rating

The extra bulk certainly compensates for the lower-grade paper and lack of extras. This book is good value. Three and a half webs.