Yellow Digger – LEGO Minecraft Magazine, March 2023

I may not be into Minecraft or for that matter the LEGO version of it, but the LEGO Minecraft magazine certainly keeps on giving and still holds my interest. That is of course a bit of an inevitable paradox, as no doubt I may marvel at things that are everyday breakfast for someone engrossed in that world. Anyway, for now I’m discovering enough new things that I like, so let’s have a look at the latest issue for March 2023.

One of the main issues with the series is of course the limited color palette because everything is based on blocks in a few standardized colors. This adds a level of complication for making the comics look interesting, but as far as that goes the one in this issue ain’t that bad. The illustrators seem to understand the process better now after two years doing this stuff and they also get a bit more daring with applying extra shading and light effects.

One thing that still annoys me is the scattershot nature of how the pages are laid out and every other page interrupts the comic with puzzles or some unrelated info. Are kids’ attention spans these days really so bad they can’t be asked to read the comic as an entire block? In any case, it makes the mag quite noisy and look cheap.

Last month’s poster was quite okay, but this month we’re back down in the dumps. Re-using the November cover image? Mirroring it? You must be kidding! Calling this bad Photoshop editing would be doing favors. It’s really a lot worse than that and downright awful. The backside doesn’t do much better with the umpteenth use of the same Creeper image…

The bright spot is once more the extra(s), which is quite plentiful. Not only do you get two minifigures, the yellow explorer and another Creeper, but also a sizable piece of landscape. Not by any means anything too special, but usable. The Trans Neon Green “slime blob” is particularly nice and I almost wish it didn’t even have the eyes printed on, so it could be used more universally (without resorting to trickery like turning the cube in order to hide the decorations).

All in all this is an okay issue when you figure in all the little pieces, but I’m somehow baffled by Blue Ocean making strides and improving in one area (the comic) and then being cheap and falling back on those terrible hacks (the posters). A more coherent and consistent approach really would improve matters quite a bit.

Chasing the White Rabbit – LEGO Friends Magazine, March 2023

The LEGO Friends magazine is not necessarily the most exciting magazine, but somehow through all those years has managed to be just good enough for me to never have ditched it. The topics are of course predictable and repetitive and so it’s not much of a surprise that the March 2023 issue is basically the “Easter Edition” with rabbits and all that since the April issue will only come out after the festive days. Let’s have a look at what’s inside.

Despite my “hangin’ in there” I’ll never get behind the comics. They’re just awful and adding new characters hasn’t done much to improve the situation. The style and panel layout are just boring and the stories laughable.

In keeping with the special subject we inevitably get some extra content by ways of an editorial/ info page on rabbits and there are other bits sprinkled across the pages such as a nice, but very small coloring image. They’re also still in the process of introducing the new characters, so there’s a bunch of activities related to that as well.

On that same note, the back side of the poster features several of these new Heartlake City inhabitants for you (or your kid) to better learn their names. the front side simply features a photo of a rabbit doing its thing in the grass.

The extra is one of them washing stations/ diagnostic table things we’ve seen a hundred times with minor variations in the color theme and build style. Really nothing to write home about, even more so since they didn’t include a new version of the rabbit, either.

All things considered, this is one of those issues that “just exist” and while it has a few good parts, the rest is as forgettable as it is most of the time. I would not urge anyone to buy it, but if you enjoy this type of stuff it’s definitely okay.

Orange Trooper – LEGO Star Wars Magazine, March 2023

February is of course a short month, so here we are already again with the latest LEGO Star Wars magazine for March 2023.

The first comic has The Mandalorian and Grogu in it, which is a bit unusual, given that last month we got a similar comic already, though it was the shorter one.

In the second comic we see General Grievous facing off against some Storm Troopers, which of course is a not so subtle hint at the included extra (no, it’s not Grievous)

For the poster I picked the back side featuring Yoda‘s unforgettable “Do it or don’t! There is no try!” quote. If the text was slightly smaller it would be even better. The front side has a standard Death Star trench chase scene. That’s okay, just nothing special.

The extra has some people’s underwear in a knot and to some degree makes them go bonkers. The facts are simple: The  212th Clone Trooper so far has only appeared in the AT-TE Walker (75337) and there are only three in this set. This apparently makes this coveted minifigure quite costly on Bricklink and other secondary markets. That seems to be reason enough for people to buy stacks and stacks of this magazine to deck out their battle dioramas. It’s basically still cheaper to pay 5 Euro for the mag instead of 7 Euro (in an optimistic case; most times it’s around 10 Euro), but it’s still a lot of money to throw around you could just as well on some real sets. It always amazes me how people fall into this “battle pack (substitute) craze”!

That said, the figure itself is just fine and has some detailed prints. With its Orange demarcations it will look distinct to the 501th Storm Troopers with their Blue insignia or the upcoming Dark Purple ones (forgot which unit they are) as well as the many standard white and grey ones. Personally I will be happy that the next issue comes with a buildable extra again, though. I get why people want minifigures, but at the end of the day you clearly cannot cover enough ground to make everybody happy, anyway, for a multitude of reasons. Having something brick-built will make a nice change after four minifigs in a row.

For me this is one of the more enjoyable issues because it doesn’t veer too much in the “silly nonsense” direction with the comics and there’s at least one serviceable poster. If you’re part of the Storm Trooper/ Clone Trooper crowd you cannot avoid buying this, anyway, multiple times if necessary.

Beaming Chamber – LEGO Jurassic World Magazine, February 2023

It’s a good thing that the LEGO Jurassic World magazine is now on one and a half month cycle, so there’s at least some stability there, given how much the publishing schedule of the other magazines has been thinned out or stretched to a point where every issue that still gets released feels like a surprise because you simply lose sight of the release dates in those long weeks.

The first thing of note in the February/ March 2023 issue is the new style of coloring. It’s not big news that each of the inking artists has their own style and that’s fair and square and logical with how the magazine is produced, but I feel this particular look is one step too far. It makes things look a bit too dark and the silky sheen with the inner glows/ inner drop shadows bleeding into certain areas feels weird. It’s plausible in that both comics play out at night and you’d have this odd “moonlight effect” to some degree, but if feels a bit too extreme here. It’s all too soft and there are e.g. barely any hard shadows in the panels. They need to take it back a notch next time.

The posters both aren’t very good, only recycling and repeating the ever same ideas and motives. It’s not even executed well from a technical standpoint with the orange wall looking murky and lacking any crunch. The bricks breaking out are a completely different color and don’t cast shadows, either. Some very unsophisticated Photoshop hack job!

Saving the day once again is the extra. It’s not very complex, but makes up for it with volume. It isn’t every day that you get two half-cylinders in a magazine “polybag” (they’re obviously paper now) and some 1 x 1 x 5 bricks. It’s supposed to be some sort of hatching/ growth chamber, but could just as well be a transporter from Star Trek or some sort of deep freeze hibernation thing. A slightly larger base plate and perhaps a few extra pieces could have elevated this to a level where it would almost compete with commercial sets.

On the whole this is a somewhat hum-ho issue and only the extra is adding some real value. Unfortunately we’re still in this slump with Jurassic World with no new sets on the horizon independent from the movies and so it’s all a bit too much rinse-repeat with the ever same content.

Anvil Knight – LEGO Minecraft Magazine, February 2023

The LEGO Minecraft magazine is certainly shaping up to become one of the more favorable magazines in my little universe despite me having zero interest in the actual game. That’s not least of all due to the extras being useful, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves and see what the February issue offers otherwise.

The comic is a bit of a mixed bag as usual. This time at least it offers some variety with regards to the coloring of the panels and there even are a few really good ones with the knight and lama, but of course the underlying problem remains that the underlying system of blocks is not necessarily very diverse and there’s only so many ways you can add interest to all those perpendicular angles and straight lines.

The comic is also spread thin with it being stretched across the entire magazine by inserting games, puzzles and quizzes and other activities on every other page. The two double spreads shown are literally the two only ones in the publication where the comic is covering two adjacent pages. This makes the alternate pages even more feel like stuffing.

The main poster is quite neat. As you know I like those clean, graphical designs and even though this is just a “comic” style filter thrown on top of a photo instead of everything being re-drawn in a graphics program, it looks the part. The alternative poster on the back features that scene with the underwater temple guardians again. This must now be the third time or so… Not that I don’t like puffer fish, but it’s getting a bit repetitive.

I’ve complained about the ever same Steves and Alexs enough and thankfully we’re really getting something different this time. It’s a knight in a shiny armor, and you can take that at its word since the pieces are in Flat Silver indeed. If nothing else this stuff is always useful for kit-bashing together your own minifigures from different individual parts. The ingot/ bar elements in Dark Pearl Grey should also be interesting. The anvil and treasure chest are just standard stuff you find in every set. Throwing in the new mold for the lid with the flattened top would have made this more interesting and if it was in a metal color as well that would have been killer. Can’t have everything, I guess! 😉

In summary this is an okay issue which in particular benefits from the extra being very acceptable and useful. The comic didn’t really do it for me and there’s a lot of filler, so it’s not going to keep you or your kids busy for a long time, though.

Bo-Bo-Bo Katan(a)? – LEGO Star Wars Magazine, February 2023

It seems like Christmas was only yesterday, yet here we are again already one month into the new year with the LEGO Star Wars magazine for February 2023 knocking on the door.

The main comic is yet again one of those stupid “Vader gets himself into trouble” things that I don’t look particularly favorably at. It just doesn’t do it for me, no matter how well the panels are composed and drawn.

The second one is more realistic and shows an encounter on one of the barren worlds as they are see in the The Mandalorian series. As you would expect, it also serves as the glue that brings the mag and extra together.

The posters are okay in that they’re not too ugly and not covered in pointless text and fake effects, but at the same time we definitely had better ones just as well.

The inevitable extra is Bo-Katan Kryze in minifigure format. Apparently she’s been in some animated Star Wars series as well and was introduced in season 2 of The Mandalorian. Since Disney+ subscriptions don’t fall out of the sky I still haven’t seen any of that beyond what the various trailers and snippets on YouTube reveal, but it’s notable insofar as the character is played by the great Katee Sackhoff who really made a splash in the early 2000s as the cocky Starbuck in the Battlestar Galactica series remake.

The figure is remarkable in that previously it was only available in the Mandalorian Starfighter (75316) set. The set itself clearly wasn’t a hit with audiences, but the figures are in high demand and thus relatively costly on the secondhand markets. The inclusion in the mag should mitigate the situation a bit. The other interesting observation here is that the package comes with the small foil bag for the helmet shields and visor “hammer”. Why am I telling you this? Obviously this little gimmick isn’t included in the latest Microfighter Boba Fett’s Starship (75344). Therefore buying this magazine would be a simple way to fix this omission and also give you two more spares to possibly repair other such appendages on other minifigures.

As so often the extra saves the day on an otherwise just average magazine and if minifigures are your thing, then next month will be another treat with a 212th Clone Trooper. I have a feeling this will be one of those issues that some people will buy in stacks to deck out their dioramas and displays with walkers…

Explorer-ing… Mighty Machines – LEGO Explorer Magazine, February 2023

While it seems that the apocalypse has been cancelled for the LEGO Explorer magazine in the sense that it hasn’t been send to the pasture for good, something is fishy in Denmark in the quite literal sense. Imagine that: The next issue is scheduled for end of March! They are seriously stretching the publication cycle as a cost saving measure. This means we’ll effectively only be getting six issues this year, if at all. It must really be selling poorly or paper has gotten super expensive… Anyway, let’s move on and see what we have here.

This issue is about “mighty machines”, which in the world of a child of course simply means they are big/ bigger than others. As it is, we therefore only get a rather generic and loose selection of a few specialized vehicles, ships, machines and so on. It’s way too broad to really dig into the specifics of one of them, which is always what massively diminishes the value of these editorial pages. I’m sure that even if you don’t nerd out completely, a detailed view at a tunnel drilling machine or one of those super size mining excavators would be more than enough to fill one magazine.

The comic takes a spin on the agricultural theme introduced in City last year and looks oddly familiar, especially after having built the Farmer’s Market Van (60345) with its strip of field.

The poster depicts a bunch of super cars/ hyper cars. It’s not necessarily my favorite subject, but at least it looks reasonably tasteful and fits the “mighty” topic on some level.

The extra is the small blue tractor seen in the comic. It’s more of a lawnmower tractor rather than a real one for real field work, but serviceable. I intentionally mounted the main wheels the other way around, as tractors usually have hollow wheel hubs with the nuts visible, not spoked ones. The designer of the model and/ or the comic artist got this wrong.

All things considered, this is a rather hum-ho edition and I’m afraid if things don’t improve, they will never get out of their slump and won’t convince more people to buy the mag. It’s okay for what it is, but they really need to improve. The only consolation this time was that the thing came with two polybags as apparently they have tons of those from unsold previous issues. I got another skull, but yours may contain a different model. It’s not completely “free”, though. They ramped up the price by an extra euro for that.

Another Blue Night – LEGO Jurassic World Magazine, January 2023

Look what I did there! Hot on the heels of my review of Vincent van Gogh – The Starry Night (21333) I recycled the title for this month’s LEGO Jurassic World magazine. Let’s see what the January 2023 issue has on offer.

The relationship between the articles and my cheap word play becomes immediately apparent once you turn your attention to the pages of the first comic. It indeed plays out at nighttime and has a lot of blue in it. It has it’s roots in movie production where using blue filters is actually a very typical technique to do day-for-night shoots. I once a long time ago got in hot water with a gentlemen who mistook what we call American Night here in Germany (for the aforementioned reason of it originating in Hollywood) to be an insult to US people. Go, figure! Anyway, I digress. The comic is about some Velociraptors making an escape with the accidental help of a Ceratosaurus.

There’s a second, short three-page comic showing a Dilophosaurus stampede. This is a bit like they are adapting the pattern from the Star Wars magazines, only without the second comic being required to advertise the extra, which is covered in the big one. We’ll have to see if this just a one-off or will become a permanent change.

For the poster I opted to show the back side, since it has a nice graphical design illustrating a few of the main types of LEGO dinosaurs. It’s far from complete and exhaustive, but looks nice enough. The front side is more standard fare with some dinosaurs and a water-based chase scene being depicted.

The extra is a little dino trap and as mentioned, it can also be seen in the main comic. I intentionally assembled it wrongly for the photo, as otherwise the dino and the chicken leg bait get too close and it doesn’t look nice. I also couldn’t get the mechanism to stay up. It would be one row of studs more in and then it would work by holding the dino down as opposed to strangulating the little guy from below as it looks like in my image.

Regrettably it always seems things never come together fully and while this issue has good comics and acceptable posters, the extra is a bit lackluster. Not bad, just not as exciting as the last few ones. 😉

Frosty Luke – LEGO Star Wars Magazine, January 2023

It’s been one of the warmest New Year’s Eves in history, so the title of this article is diametrical to the real conditions, but it is nonetheless appropriate. In the run-up to the end of year celebrations this was supposed to come out a bit earlier, but somehow it only appeared at my newsstand on Friday and I didn’t get around to finishing my review earlier. Now lets see what the LEGO Star Wars magazine has to offer on this exact first day of the new year.

The first comic takes a page from the original A New Hope movie in that it presents us with a Millenium Falcon chase through an asteroid field, however this time as part of a cosmic race, whose concept somehow immediately reminded me of Star Trek – Voyager‘s “Drive” episode in the seventh season. Someone certainly took some inspiration. It also makes the comic slightly more interesting since we at least get to see some varied spaceships and characters.

The second comic as usual serves as the means to introduce the extra and features some icy action on Hoth with some Wampas and a certain Luke Skywalker.

The posters are quite nice this time. One can never have enough Mustafar-themed ones as the fiery, volcanic glows just look mysterious and cool and Vader with his brooding presence adds to that. The composition feels a bit cheap and could have been done better, but it’s really okay. The back side might be even more interesting to some people. It has a close-up of Luke‘s minifigure head with the Red 5 helmet, which would make for an interesting presentation if you put it up next somewhere to the eponymous set of the helmet.

Since for all intents and purposes it’s extremely unlikely LEGO will revive the Wampa mold any time soon, you knew where this was going when I mentioned the second comic and yes, of course we’re getting the Luke minifigure instead. Regrettably, while it’s actually quite nice, it’s also nothing special. It has been available for a long time in a Microfighters set and just was part of the 2022 LEGO Star Wars Advent Calendar (75340). Chances that you already have it therefore are very high and the minifig as such will drop considerably in value. Therefore its real value is more in using it as a basis for a custom figure with a replaced head.

This edition of the mag on the whole is okay, but unless you really don’t have the minifigure and want it badly, there’s no need to rush to the newsstand. That might be a much more appropriate course of action next month, when we will get a much rarer Bo Katan fig.

Blue January – LEGO Minecraft Magazine, January 2023

Continuing this week’s little LEGO magazine sprint the next on the list is the one for Minecraft.

The first thing that jumps to your eye is, quite literally, that this issue is very blue. The cover alone is a nearly indiscernible mush of azure and a few other shades and this continues in the comic, because of course it is ice-themed and to boot the character they chose is Steve with his blue shirt. *yikes* At least the perspectives chosen for the panels are interesting, but the some more color here and there wouldn’t hurt.

For the poster I opted to show you the back side. As you know, I prefer clean graphic designs and this one hits the mark quite well with its heraldry-like approach. The one on the front has a swarm of flying phantoms/ bats in Dark Blue, which contributes further to this issue coming across as a bit too monochromatic.

The extra is interesting, in particular the spider. It is nearly identical to the one included in The Mushroom House (21179), give or take the bracket for fixating the minifig. Not much else to report otherwise.

This is an okay issue, but I’m beginning to feel that they’re kind of milking it. We never really get something fresh from the current line-up and the ever same Steve and Alex figures are really getting long in the tooth.