Star Wars: Jedi Master Magazine (magazine review).

I can’t deny that this is a pretty kick-ass looking painting of Yoda flying towards me on the cover of ‘Star Wars: Jedi Master’ magazine, a new monthly American publication from Titan Comics and Disney aimed at pre-teen kids. As a youngster, I would have been attracted to the cover alone. The on-going theme throughout the magazine is to have the reader accomplish tasks and learn facts so that they might become a ‘Jedi Master’.

Each issue seems to be focusing on a different chapter in the ‘Star Wars’ saga, starting naturally enough with ‘The Phantom Menace’. The issue diligently sets up the timeline, even explaining what ‘ABY’ means for example and then proceeds to relate the events of the first prequel by detailing characters, planets, spaceships and key moments.

The level of detail is quite high, worthy of any of the DK books that were brought out in the last ten years and, as it stands currently, still canon. For example, I was able to read through a list of members of the Jedi Council and I was able to discover facts that even I wasn’t familiar with.

Interspersed between the factual content are games, anagrams and quizzes, for example, that are testing enough to divert a young mind for a couple of hours and there are plenty of pictures from the movie to keep them engaged. It has 50 pages, full colour with a glossy cover. The copy I was sent was the US version and is only available there at the moment.

‘Star Wars: Jedi Master’ is a bright, colourful and entertaining read, that contains a surprisingly dense level of content around its subject matter. Tellingly though, compared to magazines and comics from the film’s release date, only one or two pages of this magazine are devoted to Jar Jar Binks. Lots of fun!

John Rivers

December 2015

(pub: Titan Comics. 50 page full colour magazine. Price: $ 4.99 (US) American only so far)

check out website: www.titan.com