Horned Killer – LEGO Star Wars Magazine, July 2022

Outside it’s hot like on Tatooine, so it is oddly fitting that this month’s issue of the LEGO Star Wars magazine also sort of touches upon this iconic location, if only tangentially in a very “think around five corners” sense. After all Darth Maul only was there rather briefly. 😉

The first comic once more brings up the question of whether Vader doesn’t have anything better to do all day than coming up with weird ideas and pestering his underlings. I mean, if I was the second most powerful person in The Empire I’d sure know a lot of better ways to spend my time than trying to build something as impossible as an AT-ST and TIE Fighter hybrid…

The second comic inevitable loops back to Darth Maul and his adventures ever since they brought him back for The Mandalorian to get entangled in some encounters with the eponymous guy and his brethren. That and of course his presence is teased left and right in other recent Star Wars series just as well, at least from what I can gather.

I haven’t spotted anything noteworthy in the activities section as the few puzzles and quizzes are just very ordinary standard fare. the posters are okay. I elected to show the back side for its graphical clarity and it actually looks quite good in reality, even though the colors are too bright and technically “wrong”. The front poster could be just as good, had they made an effort to clean it up and do a pit of overpainting on top of the “crusty paint” Photoshop filter cascade. Since they haven’t, it’s a bit of a missed opportunity.

The “that evil guy” minifigure seems to be exactly the same as in the Duel on Mandalore (75310) set, one of those with barely any substantive parts to speak of and clearly designed to mostly sell the Darth Maul and Ahsoka Tano minifigures to collectors. Therefore this is a good opportunity to just get the red devil if you don’t want to shell out the full money. By LEGO standards the print quality is actually quite good this time, as, despite slightly darkening on the black background, the Red is bright enough. That is something that cannot be taken for granted, unfortunately. So you’re getting some pretty decent value this time around.

Overall this is an okay issue, but if you have no interest in the minifigure it will be of limited value. The rest of the content isn’t worth much and regrettably doesn’t even make for a good distraction while sizzling in the sun…

Mandalorian Raider – LEGO Star Wars Magazine, September 2021

The weekend was quite uncomfortably cold for late August, so I was looking forward to the latest LEGO Star Wars magazine even more to take my mind off things, even more since I knew that it would contain a buildable model which I still favor over minifigures.

The first comic takes us back to Kashyyyk, home of the Wookies, and features an aerial chase with some large dragonfly creatures which of course in turn have inspired similar vehicles as can be seen in Revenge of the Sith.

The second comic as usual is meant to provide context for included extra and revolves around The Mandalorian. Since Disney are hanging on to their Disney+ exclusivity and still haven’t released at least the first season on alternate streaming services or Blu-Ray I still mostly don’t know much about the details apart from watching trailers, clips and summaries on the Internet, so I’m pretty clueless about the specifics.

Both comics are drawn reasonably dynamically and do their job, though unlike other times I haven’t detected a specific panel that got me excited to a point where I would want it as a poster. A similar lack of enthusiasm is creeping in with the puzzles and quizzes, which just don’t seem to evolve (not artistically nor in their contents) and are really getting long in the tooth. I’m pretty sure that if I had a halfway smart kid he or she would be bored to death by this point.

The posters are okay, though perhaps recycling an old poster from The Last Jedi and ineptly smooshing in the imperial flag is not a great effort. You know, the usual five-minute Photoshop hack job. They should at least have spent more time on mimicking the texture of the cloth waving in the wind. Of course I have been advocating bringing out the Mos Eisley wimmelpicture as a poster, but somehow it still feels terribly small. I guess it’s really a candidate for one of Blue Ocean‘s XXL editions where they bundle up regular LEGO polybags with a special mag and the poster is a huge eight-fold spread. The problem is, though, that currently there aren’t any new Star Wars polybags, so it may take a while before we get to see something like that.

The extra is the AT-ST raider from The Mandalorian with its colored legs and a few other brown replacement parts bashed together from scrap yard finds. You could of course build it in consistently grey colors from your own parts if you have all the pieces at hand. In fact it would have been a fun experiment if they had included all two versions here or sold the magazine in two variants, considering that the Kashyyyk comic also features an AT-ST in its default appearance. It would be totally worth it since the model is very well designed and just looks the part. Aside from a good helping of the ratcheted hinge plates no super rare or special pieces, though.

I quite like this issue. The model is nice and the comics and posters are likable. As so often a little more love and attention could have made it even better, but it’s more than acceptable.