LEGO Art 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man review

31209 The Amazing Spider-Man reshapes and builds on every innovation in the LEGO Art theme so far – but with great power comes great responsibility…

Swinging on to shelves not long after 31206 The Rolling Stones and 31208 Hokusai – The Great Wave, 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man represents another evolution for a theme that still feels like it’s just beginning to find its feet – and unlock its true potential – three years on from its initial launch.

Amid a wider portfolio that refuses to stand still (with one or two exceptions), that’s really the least we’d expect from the LEGO Group in 2023. But for a company whose bold experiments haven’t always paid off in recent months and years, can 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man burst from its comic book frame and earn a place on your wall?

— LEGO Art 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man set details —

Theme: LEGO Art Set name: 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man Release date: August 1, 2023

Price: £169.99 / $199.99 / €199.99 Pieces: 2,099 Minifigures: 0

LEGO: Order now

— Where to buy LEGO Art 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man  —

LEGO Art 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man will be available to buy from LEGO.com and in LEGO Stores from August 1, 2023. There’s a good chance it will pop up through at least one third-party retailer, too.

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— LEGO Art 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man build —

Just when you think you’ve seen everything LEGO Art has to offer, along comes a spider to rewrite the rulebook. If 31206 The Rolling Stones shows what can be done beyond the confines of a frame, and 31208 Hokusai – The Great Wave inversely creates texture within those constraints, 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man is both a perfect blend of those two artistic approaches – and all its own beast, too.

The LEGO Group could easily have tackled Spidey as a tiled (or studded) 48×48 portrait in the same way as 31199 Marvel Studios Iron Man, 31205 Jim Lee Batman Collection and so on, and we’d probably have had few complaints (especially if the pieces allowed us to build, say, Peter Parker, Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy). But in an era when the company mostly refuses to rest on its laurels – for better and worse at times – and when plenty of tools are already available to help you build your own LEGO Spidey mosaic, this feels like completely the right direction in which to travel.

Seriously: how many people could have predicted the LEGO Art team would bring us a Spider-Man set that depicted the web-slinger bursting from the frame of a comic book panel? It’s inspired, innovative and inventive in all the right ways… as a concept. But like any LEGO Art set – or any LEGO set, truth told – it lives and dies on the execution of that concept.

In that regard, 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man is actually a tricky one to judge. But we’ll come to that in a moment. First, a quick word on how it comes together, because here it really is unique: gone are the grid pieces that snap together in traditional LEGO Art mosaics, and in their place are a small football pitch in green 16×16 plates. Stuck to these are the closest you’ll come to that familiar feeling of laying down round plates, as the set strives to replicate the iconic Ben Day-dot printing technique that served comic books so well in the 20th century.

Originally conceived by Benjamin Henry Day Jr., the process uses small coloured dots to simulate shading and create high-contrast backgrounds without breaking the bank. 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man employs both those tools while deploying nearly every shade of green in the book, a colour that contrasts well with Spidey’s iconic red and blue suit. But that’s just one piece of the puzzle, and arguably the least impressive trick up this set’s sleeve.

You’ll find more fun in first how the three-dimensional webbing strings together – wrapping actual string elements around flexible Technic axles can’t fail to put a smile on your face – and then in the genuinely insane amount of maths that has gone into creating the necessary depth for the wall-crawler himself. The Pythagorean theory that has wormed its way into 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man isn’t unique to this set, but this does do the best job of explaining it to the layman, courtesy of notes from a mysterious narrator littered throughout its instruction manual.

Those box-outs are both heavily on the nose for famous nerd Peter Parker, and a credible reminder that this particular design draws heavily from the comics for inspiration (above countless other potential Spidey sources). It’s with that in mind that you’ll step back once those last few spiders are placed (15 of them dotted across the frame, in reference to the web-slinger’s debut in Amazing Fantasy #15) and look upon your creation with, well, a confusing cocktail of emotions.

Does 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man succeed in its unenviable task of creating convincing and realistic depth for its star superhero? Does Peter Parker genuinely feel like he’s coming out of the frame here, and in a way that doesn’t make your brain question the perspective, proportions or angles? These are the questions that will run through your mind long after the build has finished. But they do mean you won’t be able to stop staring at it, wherever in your house you hang it up. (And it does deserve to be hung.)

Pop it in your hallway and catch yourself staring at it every time you walk past; place it somewhere less visited and you might just find yourself exploring that corner of your house a little more often, if only to try to determine once and for all whether the designers have cracked the comic book code.

Art is very much subjective, so it’s difficult for us to tell you what you think of it, but for our part: Spidey’s head protrudes just a little bit too far forward, which is only really a problem when it’s viewed from the side, and the size of the frame – or perhaps the size of the LEGO pieces used – means the definition of the character starts to suffer the further back you go. But the composition of the entire piece, right down to Spider-Man’s hands clutching the edges of the frame, just clicks, making those minor missteps easy to forgive.

Plus, the important bits are all right on the money: the shape of Spider-Man’s head and eyes, for example, which are crucial to conveying his character, are executed flawlessly with a combination of slopes, curved elements, wedge plates and brand new printed tiles. It all adds up to a piece of brick-built art that you might just feel a little unsure about at first, but invites (if not demands) further reflection and appreciation. And isn’t that what good art is all about?

— LEGO Art 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man characters —

31209 The Amazing Spider-Man doesn’t include any minifigures – as is the way for all LEGO Art sets – but those 15 spiders are characters of sorts. Maybe?

— LEGO Art 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man price —

At first glance, 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man seems pretty expensive for what it is. But once you’ve opened the box and put the thing together, things start to click: there’s a lot of plastic here (with plenty of chunky elements involved), and the final build is a beefy addition to any wall. It asks more of you than LEGO Art’s many mosaics, but gives you more in return, and ultimately feels better value than the likes of 31205 Jim Lee Batman Collection and so on.

This is still a LEGO Art set, though, so maybe loses points for only offering the one model in the box – but it’s such a specific design that alternate builds would have been tricky to grapple with. Until the Rebrickable community gets its hands on it, anyway.

— LEGO Art 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man pictures —

— LEGO Art 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man pros and cons —

31209 The Amazing Spider-Man feels like the next logical step in the LEGO Art theme, and the culmination of exactly where the line has been heading these past few years. But it was never a given that it would succeed, and indeed you may find you need to convince yourself that it all hangs together long after you’ve finished the build. Maybe you won’t even manage to. And that’s fine! Not all art is for everyone.

But at the same time, it’s hard not to appreciate the bold ambition of a set like this when another 3-in-1 mosaic would probably have also been just fine. It’s a fitting tribute to the web-slinger – Spider-Man has never been a character content to phone it in – and feels well aware of that delicate balance between power and responsibility.

In a phrase: this isn’t just your friendly neighbourhood LEGO Art set. It’s something much more.

31209 The Amazing Spider-Man pros	31209 The Amazing Spider-Man cons
Ambitious LEGO Art set with a unique build experience	Spidey’s head projects just a little too far forward
Substantial finished product for the price	Forced perspective results in detail and definition fading a little too quickly
You won’t be able to stop staring at it

This set was provided for review by the LEGO Group.

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— Alternatives to LEGO Art 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man —

31209 The Amazing Spider-Man is such a unique set that you’re going to have to shift gears slightly for a satisfying alternative. In the direction of LEGO Art, there’s 31205 Jim Lee Batman Collection, which offers three very different portraits of DC characters within a single box – but that’s a route one take on the Art concept, comprised of 1×1 round plates.

If you’re coming to this for Spidey first and foremost, the web-slinger’s ultimate set is still 76178 Daily Bugle, which is also a work of art for entirely different reasons.

— LEGO Art 31209 The Amazing Spider-Man FAQs —