Avengers Coloring Books

I was in the Dollar Tree today and I found a series of Marvel Comics coloring books. They had several Spider-Man and a few Captain America coloring and activity books, but what was really cool was a line of The Avengers coloring books. The coloring books are copyrighted 2002 with illustrations by Ronald & Donald Williams. The actual coloring pages feature lots of different Marvel characters such as Attuma, Kingpin, Super Skrull, Nomad, Beta Ray Bill, Dr. Doom, Daredevil, Grim Reaper, Thanos, The Owl, Thor, D-Man, Crossbones, Spider-Girl, Hercules, The Watcher, Supreme Intelligence, Quicksilver, Deathlok, Diamondback, Loki, The Wrecker & The Wrecking Crew, Black Widow, The Wizard, Iron Man, Scarlet Witch, The Serpent Society, The Red Skull, Captain America, Batroc, Medussa, The Inhumans, The Fantastic Four, Sersi, Elektra, Bullseye, Kang, Quasar, Mole Man, Vision, The Wasp, The Black Knight, Galactus, Black Panther, Ant Man, Falcon, Crystal, Giant Man, Jarvis, etc. The books reflect Marvel's history by having pictures of the different armor's Iron Man has had through the years and also multiple costumes for Henry Pym and Quasar.

I flipped through one and the artworks are very amateurish. It almost appeared that they were drawn by a ten-year-old. I don't see why they couldn't use the actual artwork from the comic books.

It looks like the artists were influenced by Eric Larson. I'm sure the pictures would probably look much better once they were colored (using crayons, colored pencils, markers, paint, etc.).

I was just impressed by the number of obscure Marvel characters in the books. The bad thing is that the pages don't indicate who's who. When I was young coloring books always had text at the bottom of each page either indicating who was in the picture or often included a sentence since the entire coloring book told a story.

I imagine that most kids won't how to properly color obscure characters such as Deathlok and Nomad sine they aren't pictured on the cover, but it doesn't matter really as long as they have fun coloring it.

Hello, !

Since coloring books are usualy aimed at young children who often have trouble keeping inside the lines etc. I doubt that actual comic art would be at all suitable. Usually its better to have simplistic art with thick lines.

Artistic merit isn't really the point of the exercise.

Well they wouldn't really know even if they were named so its not a big deal. As you say getting it 'right' isn't really that important. Besides even if they did know the 'right' colors, they'd probably just choose their own. Thats kids for you

Eoghann Irving

One of the coloring books uses Bruce Timm's Avengers #1/2 art on the cover, the other uses a George Perez piece. Weird...