Where did you go to school? How is it that you’re able to envision things in such a manner that they fold out into such a grandiose, artistic fashion? If I were able to chat with Matthew Reinhart those are only a couple of the questions that I’d ask him. Reinhart’s pop-up books defy logic. It’s obvious that they pop-up, and one might expect a book along those lines to come off of the page. What Reinhart creates is mind-blowing art that comes off of the pages 12’ high and has multiple elements. Marvel Super Heroes The Ultimate Pop-Up Book takes on the MCU and entertains, as well as educates in ways that’ll make this a coffee table book for the pop culture savvy.
All of this is relative. Assuming that one is relaxed and in the mood for a book that is as immersive and detailed as you have the time for; you’ll love it. I mention that because I showed Marvel Super Heroes The Ultimate Pop-Up Book to some eighth graders who said that they enjoyed superhero movies. They gave the book a cursory look and then semi-politely gave it back to me. I showed the book to my wife who was even less appreciative and said that it was probably a “guy thing”.
I wouldn’t say that it’s a “guy thing”, but it could be a “geek thing” on a couple of levels. The intricateness of Marvel Super Heroes The Ultimate Pop-Up Book is stunning. Like Reinhart’s other pop-up books they invite the curious into the pages that have even the vaguest interest in the content. I just showed the book to another group of eighth graders who were more in the latter category and they enjoyed it. They said that they’d seen pop-up books, but hadn’t seen anything like this before.
The pop-ups have foldouts. The book demands your attention. When you open the page that presents The Avengers you’ll see a scientific lab that comes out of the page. Tony Stark is dressed in a business suit, but pull the red tab at his feet and the Iron Man suit pops up in front of him. The red tab beside Doctor Strange makes his cape open and his hands do their magic thing. Bruce Banner disappears so that his alter-ego can bust out the containment chamber that the red tab releases.
The text is fun and provides a great introduction or overview of the characters that inhabit the MCU. An example of that is the students that I just showed the book to in eighth grade. They briefly read the text about Galactus and marveled at the biggest pop-up in the book as the consumer of worlds towered over heroes in space. Then those same students started reading each blurb about the heroes fighting him and had a chat about which ones they liked the most.
For people like that, or just for the curious that want to see the unexpected, this book is for them. While, Marvel Super Heroes The Ultimate Pop-Up book is a medium that’s often associated with kiddie books, this level of pop-up is for ages five and up. Personally, I think that age is a bit too young, but I’m the kind of book geek who bags and boards all my comic books and protects the spine of books like it’s my own. Having said that, if a six-year-old is going to open this and be enthralled with the engineering of the book (they will), and then start reading the text then a bent character here or there is a small price to pay.
Marvel Super Heroes The Ultimate Pop-Up Book is engineered by Matthew Reinhart with pencils and inks by Aaron Lopresti, Paul Pelletier, Stacey Lee Phillips, and colors by Rachelle Rosenberg and available on Abrams Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Abrams Books.
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