How Did I Miss This?

Apparently there was a Lego Space comicbook back in 1986. The title looks pretty English-y (“Jim Spaceborn”), but the comic itself looks to be Danish. I wonder if this was published in the US? I’m guessing ‘no’, because I have trouble believing I could’ve missed anything Lego at that age—though, pre-internet, I’m sure I missed a lot of a lot of things. Anyway, the reason I’m bothering to write about it, however, has to do with the content. Specifically, I love the way that the ships and characters and so on in it are reasonably-accurate brick-built objects, using pieces that existed in the day. Even more amazingly, the folks at The Lego Group apparently actually built the large spaceship, because there’s a photo of it on the first page of the comic. And somebody else has just built a copy. It’s a fairly impressive ship, over a meter long, and uses building techniques that you didn’t really see back in ’86—at least not from TLG. Check out a sample of the comic, as well as the modern copy of the ship.

Pentaton!

This isn’t exactly news, but I didn’t have a blog when it was news. So, here I go:

The last time I sat down to build Mechaton mechs, I decided that I needed some sort of challenge—something to fire up my creative juices. For reasons that I have since forgotten, I decided to figure out how many different ways I could make pentagonally-symmetrical mechs. Pentagonal- or five-fold symmetry (they’re two different things in my mind, at least) are hard to do with Legos. Legos really like their rectilinear structure.

I’m dizzy

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Originally uploaded by holgermatthes

I haven’t been this disoriented in a long time. I routinely see amazing Lego construction techniques that I hadn’t thought of, or that illustrate equivalencies I never would’ve thought to even try, or that utilize pieces I don’t have, or that violate my sense of appropriate uses of pieces (i.e., putting them under “too much” stress). In short, amazing stuff done with Lego. But it’s really rare, after more than 3 decades with Legos, that I just plain can’t figure out how someone did something, once I see it.