cool new book for learning characters

I cam across a cool new book for learning characters."Learning CHinese Characters"- Tuttle are the publishers.  It takes techniques used by memory-champions, you know the type that can memorise the order of cards in several packs and applies these techniques to increase the 'stickiness' of learning the characters.

The books starts off by introducing the building blocks, the components of characters that cannot be broken down further and build upon them to form more complex characters. By the time you are half way through the book you have the essential building blocks from which all the 800 (HSK Level A) characters are constructed.

But what makes this book unique, is its 'story' approach to taking the elements in a character and tying them together in an easier to remember story.  For example, the tone are represented by the following 1 a giant 2 a fairy 3 a teddy 4 a dwarf and the neutral tone by a robot. Take the word hao3 - the story goes something like this: Picture a man in a gallery staring at a picture of a woman and child and exclaiming "good". Meanwhile in the foreground a teddy is building a house of cards. The house hints at the pronounciation and the teddy indicates third tone.

You get the idea?  These are a good crutch so that you can get the character to stick in your brain at which point you won't need the story.

Has anyone come across anything like this before?