LEGO Super Hero Legends Magazine Issue 31: The One That Came With Two Foil Packs
Pull this one off the rack and the weight is the first thing you notice. Most issues in the run carry a single sealed pack taped to the front, a familiar flat rectangle you can feel through the polybag before you have even read the cover line. Issue 31 has two. Two packs, two figures, one magazine — and for a title that has spent most of its life doling out one exclusive at a time, that is not a small thing.
LEGO Super Hero Legends magazine issue 31 sits on the Avengers half of the alternating banner Immediate Media runs in the UK, the one that swaps back and forth with the Spider-Man numbering every other month. It reached British newsagents in autumn 2025, slotting in between the Green Goblin issue that went on sale at the end of August and the Captain America hero-tin edition that closed out January.
What You're Actually Flipping Through
The comic is the anchor. Issue 31 puts Black Widow front and centre in a chase story built around a rampaging Red Hulk — a decent bit of pacing for a title that often defaults to the full team punching a generic robot. Around it sits the usual furniture of the line: pull-out posters, a run of puzzles and code-breaker pages, character profiles, activity spreads pitched at younger readers, and the next-issue preview at the back that the collector community treats as an early-warning system for upcoming exclusives.
Worth saying plainly: the reading content is written for children, and the comic is short. If you are picking this up as an adult collector you are picking it up for what is sealed to the cover. That is the honest framing, and it is why the condition of the packs matters far more than the condition of the pages.
Black Widow and Thor, Sealed Separately
The two covermounts are the reason this issue is worth writing about at all. One pack holds a Black Widow minifigure, the other a Thor, both styled to the Infinity Saga look the line was leaning into through 2025. Getting two Avengers in a single UK exclusive is unusual enough that it changes the value calculation on the whole issue.
Black Widow in particular is a character who has done most of her LEGO circulating through this magazine-pack channel rather than through the standard retail range — European paper-pack releases like set 242505 put Natasha Romanoff into collections that never bought the sets she originally shipped in. Thor is a more common face, but the magazine-issue versions carry their own printing and accessory combinations, and they are not interchangeable with the retail figures collectors already own.
The Red Hulk Detail Nobody Clocked At the Time
Here is a small thing that reads differently in hindsight. Red Hulk is the antagonist of the issue 31 comic, and four issues later the line put Hulk and Red Hulk minifigures together in a collector's tin — one of the most chased editions the Avengers side has produced. Issue 31 was, in effect, the setup. Runs of magazine exclusives tend to telegraph themselves months ahead if you read the comics rather than just the covermounts, and this is a clean example.
Why This One Slipped Off the Shelf Quietly
UK newsstand print runs are finite and short. An issue occupies a rack for a few weeks, then rotates off and does not come back. There is no reprint, no restock, and no digital equivalent that includes the plastic. Issue 31 has already sold through at the specialist single-copy sellers who stocked it and no longer appears in their current Super Hero Legends listings at all.
That pattern is what turns an ordinary issue into a hard-to-source one. It is rarely the hyped editions that get genuinely scarce — those get squirrelled away sealed by the hundred. It is the mid-run issues that people bought, opened, and gave to a seven-year-old. A double-gift issue that went out without much fanfare is exactly the shape of thing that gets awkward to find complete two years later.
Buying a Double-Gift Back Issue Without Getting Burned
One practical rule if you go hunting: on a two-pack issue, insist on a photograph showing both packs still sealed and attached. Listings routinely photograph the cover only, and a copy missing one of the two packs is a materially different item from a complete one — but it will be described, and priced, as the same issue. Ask before you commit. If you are collecting the line properly, most long-term collectors land on the same approach: keep the packs sealed, and read a second copy if you want to read it.
Because everything under this banner is a UK retail exclusive, collectors outside Britain have two realistic routes in — an importer, or a subscription. Our Super Hero Legends magazine guide explains how the parallel Avengers and Spider-Man numbering actually works, which is the single thing that trips up new collectors of this title. Current and back issues live in the LEGO magazines collection, and if you are filling out the Marvel shelf more broadly, start with the wider LEGO Marvel range.
Worth a Second Look
Issue 31 never had a tin or a first-of-its-kind headline to carry it. What it had was two exclusive figures on one cover, a genuinely readable comic, and the bad luck of landing between two issues that got more attention. For anyone working backwards through the Avengers run, that combination usually makes for the better pickup.