Amazing Spider-Man: Web-Tastic Activities (Parragon)
Background
Parragon (in the UK) and Scholastic (in Australia/NZ) have been producing Spider-Man and "Marvel Super Hero" activity books pretty regularly over the past few years. Their output falls into two clear categories:
- Cheaper black & white coloring/activity books with a great-deal of repetition and overlap.
- Higher priced full-color activity books with lower page counts, but often with 3D or similar bonus features.
Clearly this "Amazing Spider-Man: Web-Tastic Activities" falls into the latter category.
Story Details
Amazing Spider-Man: Web-Tastic Activities (Parragon)
| Publisher: | Parragon Book Service, Ltd. |
The book is 8.5" x 10.6" with a glossy square-bound cardboard cover. There are 48 pages inside with a mixture of full-color and black/white sections on most pages. On the front cover is glued a plastic insert with two "glow-in-the-dark" white plastic spiders, each about 2.5" in length.
The illustrations are based on the same material that appears in all of the Parragon/Scholastic Spider-Man activity books. This book features the "enhanced" version of the artwork, which means that all the pages at least have color borders. Several of the pages are fully-colored, but most are actually simple black and white line art in the body of the page.
General Comments
In terms of inner content, this is of course nearly identical to several other Parragon/Scholastic offerings, such as Amazing Spider-Man: Tattoo Book (Parragon/Scholastic). The only difference is the gimmick (the spiders), and the relatively generous 48 page count (some of the other books feature only 32 pages).
Overall Rating 
Personally, the Spiders don't impress me. Yes, Peter Parker is "Spider-Man". But that doesn't fill me with any instinctive affection for these life-like model arachnids. Furthermore, I'm well and truly fed-up with seeing these same illustrations re-packaged again and again.
On the other hand, the UK list price of £3.99 seems reasonable enough. Despite its repetitive nature and barely-relevant toys, I guess I can dig deep and offer an "acceptable" rating of three webs.