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.

Aerial Battle Fun – LEGO Star Wars Magazine, July 2021

The summer heat has waned off a bit this week and things have become a bit more enjoyable, despite me still feeling like a lazy slob a lot of the time. At least the various LEGO magazines arrive on schedule, so let’s see what the latest edition of the Star Wars version has in store.

Jumping right in with the comics, we get a quite epic aerial battle between some TIE Fighters and X-Wings in the main one and the Millenium Falcon is involved, too. It’s still a bit weird and not adhering to the main canon very well, but still way better than those weird Vader stories. It’s also visually very pleasing with lots of nice blue sky shades, but at the same time the panels not looking empty as I criticized for one of the Jurassic World magazines not so long ago.

The second comic takes a play at the training scenes with Rey and BB-8 at the beginning of The Rise of Skywalker and is equally acceptable, not just because it serves as the tie-in for the extra, which of course are our two protagonists in minifigure format.

I’m just gonna say it: The posters are both terrible. It’s what I call uninspired hack jobs. One is cobbled together from existing stock photos. Nothing wrong with that and people do it all the time, but you can literally see that exactly zero effort went into it. Even I could probably bash this together in five minutes. They could at least have properly layered and color corrected the “ghost” overlay instead of just reducing opacity. The backside poster doesn’t fare much better. Though graphical in nature and playing with the idea of a brick mosaic, it just doesn’t look good.

That being the case, I wish they had used the wimmelpicture instead and ideally as an XXL print at that. The shameless promotion for the Mos Eisley Cantina (75290) and a few other sets aside, it has some interesting and funny details and would look gorgeous as a decently oversize poster. There’s always the chance they may do so in the future, of course, so not all hope is in vain.

The minifigures of Rey and BB-8 at this point feel like clearing leftovers from their stockpile. The funny thing is that  the movie may be only one and a half year in the past, but it already feels like an eternity, yet at the same time it’s to early to celebrate any anniversary and anyone who bought several of the sets is probably sitting on piles of Reys. Surprisingly the BB-8 has a decent value, though, as this new version with the larger eye has not been in that many sets. At the same time, my old version with the smaller eye which I got kind of accidentally with this set seems to be equally coveted. At least it’s rather pricey on Bricklink. Go, figure!

All things considered this is an okay issue, but it doesn’t make the globe spin faster. I’m particularly miffed that some good ideas were not used and for the extra they could at least have thrown in one of them palm leaves and a Dark Tan plate or something to create a little patch of the training jungle and make it more enticing. With that in mind, a lot of people are already much more excited about the next issue, which will include a Sith Trooper and as usual some people have already vowed to buy it in bulk… We’ll see how that works out!