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Story by Dwight Jon Zimmerman
Design by Paul Richer

This book was published by Marvel Books with a copyright of 1986. It does not seem to have an ISBN.

The scans!

View the scans as... a single web page, a CBZ archive, or a PDF.

These scans were contributed by an anonymous donor.

General observations:

This is about 50% longer than the "normal" coloring books, but was also printed at a smaller size. Most of the acitivities and puzzles in this book are new, but there are a bunch that were re-used from older coloring books. The art, on the other hand, is essentially all from other sources. Even pages with new activities use old art! Most of that art is copied from model sheets or other brand reference, like the picture of Cybertron on page 5. Curiously this includes things like rear views of some characters' vehicle modes.

Zimmerman gets credited with "story" even though this book is simply a hodge-podge of puzzles and word games. He did write many of the books that these activities are taken from, though, and quite possibly wrote the new activities and/or their flavor text. Since the art was done by a cadre of different Marvel Book artists, there is no art credit. Instead there is the vague "design" credit for Richer. Does this refer to page layouts? Art? Maybe even puzzle design? No way to know.

For the reused activities, the same title and words are here as in their original printings but the text has been typset differently. The typeface itelf is even different! I imagine that simply shrinking down the original pages could have run into two problems: the original text might have become too small, and also this book's pages are at a different aspect ratio than the originals, which could have led to wasted space. In addition to the new typesetting, all the answers have been moved to pages at the back of this book, even if the original activity had an answer written upside-down at the bottom of the page.

In the example of a re-used activity shown above, note that the order of the pictures on the right has been changed, even though all the same pieces of art are used. Likewise, the words used are exactly the same but they've all been newly typeset. For the purposes of the comparison, I scaled the images to have the same height but Super Activity Book pages are actually smaller. I also think its funny that they used a matching activity with Decepticon Patrol's uniquely differentiated head and jet designs for Starscream, Thundercracker, and Skywarp. In the original book, you could look back at story pages to figure out which one was which, but not this time!

The vast majority of activities in here are based on words and letters. There are also a few mazes, a few "spot the differences" or matching activities... but shockingly no connnect-the-dots, even though there are existing activities of that type in other books!

Character inclusion oddities:

Even though the book's copyright is 1986, it only contains characters from the first two seasons of the TV show, and has a heavy bias in favor of season one. There are no movie/S3 characters. I have no way of checking WHEN during 1986 this was published, but it may have been out before the movie's August release.

As a refresher: season one DOES include Shockwave, Jetfire, the Dinobots, the Constructicons, and the Insecticons... even though none of their toys were available until 1985. Fun fact: the 1984 coloring books, as a whole, include only characters whose toys were available in 1984: the first wave of figures from the toyline's launch. The 1985 coloring books add in the later Season 1 characters, whose toys came out in 1985. Season 2 characters don't appear in any coloring books, except incidentally in some 1986 books, without being featured in the spotlight. Season 2 characters ARE featured in some Marvel story books, but weirdly not coloring books.

ANYWAY. As a comilation of old and new activity pages without a story per se, this book does NOT follow those rules for the "normal" coloring books. The art in this book includes both Perceptor (p6 and p50) and Dirge (p15 and p58), and quite a few other Season 2 characters are referred to in text even though they don't appear. (The TF Wiki's page about this book has handy lists of both "featured" and namedropped characters.)

In addition, this book features an extremely rare appearance of airplane mode Jetfire-not-Skyfire, looking just like a Macross super valkyrie. A nice, large version shows up on p26, and a smaller version on p59. This looks like an exact copy of the animation model that appears in the cartoon's production "bible" and was also used in Jetfire's toy commercial. It's pretty unusual to see it in the wild instead of the redesigned "Skyfire" body, especially as late as 1986! You'd think everyone would be on board with the Skyfire model by then, especially since it had long been in use by the Marvel comics artists.

I will now admit: there is one reference, sort of, to a 1986/Season 3 concept and name... the destination in the maze on pages 20-21 is described (without any art) as "the Autobot City Metroplex". Make of that whatever you like!

Notes/observations on specific pages:

• p2: Very interesting art of Ratchet that I've been unable to find a match for anywhere. It's mostly toy-based, but with a humanoid head that's reminiscent of his Decepticon Patrol head, although not a great match. He appears in toy form in the first issue of the Marvel comic, but the S.A.B. picture has enough differences (like inclusion of the canon at the front of his MARB and the grooves runnong around his missile launcher) that I don't think the comic is the source. It's not an especially close match to his box art or instruction booklet photos, either. [See his original instructions/art on Unicron.com]





• p4: Mirage appears in his Decepticon Patrol body, but this particular drawing doesn't seem to be from that book. I think it's drawn from scratch using Patrol as reference.
• p28: I love this picture of Prowl (shown above) holding a giant bucket full of letters that's not even drawn using the same line weight as his stock pose. The page's title refers to it as a "basket" btw.





• p57: This matching page seems to be new. The headshots (seen above) are in a mixture of styles. Hound and Bumblebee are similar to some drawings in Search for Treasure Under the Sea, but they're not exact, and the rest of the drawings don't seem to be from that book. Gears and Windcharger don't appear at all in it! Also note that Windcharger's portrait is based on his character model while BB, Gears, and Hound are more in a box art vein, albeit with modifications. Prime looks similar to the art of him that appears repeatedly in this book (pp20, 27, 55) but here his windows are horizontal whereas in the other art they are slightly tilted...
• p60: This is Megatron's Decepticon Patrol design, right down to the 'con insignia on his hip, but this picture doesn't appear anywhere in that book. It may be newly-drawn like the Mirage from p4.

Additional re-uses I noticed (less interesting, just for completeness):

• The cover illustration is taken from the next-to-last page of Decepticon Patrol.



• p10: This is page 10 from Search for Treasure Under the Sea.
• p12: A weirdly-bendy car mode Bluestreak appears here. This feels familiar--like it's part of one of the many Autobots-drive-along-windy-road pictures--but I haven't located a source for it.
• p16: This is page 14 from The Deadly Fuel Shortage.
• p19: This is, obviously, Wheeljack's box art but it also looks just like his "I built a boat" page in Search for Treasure Under the Sea.
• p20 and p27 and p55: The Prime drawing on p20 matches the activity on page 27 of this book, and that activity is a smaller version of p22 from Super-Size Coloring Activity Book, which I do not yet have posted. The activity here in S.A.B. has only four Primes, but the S.S.C.A.B. version has five. The art is used AGAIN on page 55.
• p23: Art from p6 of Search for Treasure Under the Sea.
• p24: Maze taken from p36 of Decepticon Patrol.
• p25: Art from p12 of Search for Treasure Under the Sea.
• p52: Sunstreaker is drawn here in profile and taking a step. Some of the original character models did include a pose just like this, including Sunstreaker's. You can see an original scan of the model on TFRaw or a nicely-colored one made by fan D.M in a TFW2005 thread by chchchch that mirrors D.M's work in an easy-to-browse form.
• p56: A really nicely-drawn rendition of Prowl's toy in car mode. I'm guessing this was done from photo reference. It's not quite the same angle as the photo in his instruction booklet, though.