LEGO Art

Jim Lee Batman Collection

Comic legend Jim Lee's Batman, Joker and Harley, built one tiny plate at a time.

3.9/5

Set 31205 · 2022

Pieces4,167

Minifigsn/a

Year2022

Set number31205

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The verdict

If you love DC comics and the idea of a proper piece of wall art that you made yourself, this one's a genuinely good pick.

It's three completely different portraits (Batman, the Joker, Harley Quinn) in one box, which is rare for the Art line since most sets just recolor the same face. The catch is it's a long, repetitive placing job and you can only display one at a time. Grab it if you want a display piece with real personality, skip it if you want a build with actual techniques.

Best for: DC comics fans who want a display-worthy piece of buildable wall art

The full review

What it is

Here's the pitch for this LEGO® set in one line: it's a piece of proper wall art, designed by DC comics royalty, that you get to build yourself. The Jim Lee Batman Collection lets you make one of three portraits from a single box, and that alone makes it stand out in the Art line. Most Art sets give you one subject and maybe a couple of alternate color versions of the same face. This one gives you Batman, the Joker, and Harley Quinn, and they're not just palette swaps. Each has its own composition, its own mood, and its own color scheme. Batman is all brooding blues and blacks, the Joker leans into that sickly green-and-purple menace, and Harley brings the red and playful chaos. They all look fantastic finished, and honestly the hardest part is deciding which one to leave on the wall.

The catch

Now the honest bit. This is a mosaic set, which means the build itself is a grind. You're placing 4,167 pieces, and the vast majority are 1x1 round plates that go down one at a time, row by row, following a chart. There's no clever engineering, no moving parts, no sections that surprise you. It's meditative if you're in the right mood and genuinely tedious if you're not, so put a good podcast on and settle in. The other real catch is that you can only build and display one portrait at a time. To have all three up at once you'd need to buy three copies, and if you want the two bonus combined artworks the instructions tease, that means multiples too. At its original price of around 120 dollars that's a big ask, and since it's now retired you'll be paying secondary-market prices well above that.

Who it's for

So who should grab this one? If you're a DC fan who wants a display piece with actual comic-book credibility, and you like the calm of a repetitive build, you'll be really happy with it. It hangs on a wall, it looks great from across a room, and the fact that Jim Lee himself drew the source art gives it a story worth telling guests. If you want a build packed with techniques and clever moments, this isn't it, and you'll be bored by plate number three hundred. It's also worth knowing it's retired now, so prices have climbed and it won't get cheaper. My take: it's one of the better Art sets going, mostly because the three portraits give it far more replay value than its siblings. Just go in knowing exactly what a mosaic build is before you commit.

The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

Building this is about as pure a mosaic experience as LEGO makes. The frame goes together first from a set of base plates and framing elements, then the real work begins: you follow a numbered guide and place 1x1 round plates into the grid one at a time, section by section, until the portrait emerges. There's a genuine payoff when you step back and the loose field of dots suddenly resolves into a face, but getting there takes hours of the same motion. It's calm, low-stakes, and easy to pause, which makes it a great TV or podcast build. What it is not is a technical challenge, so temper expectations if you're after fancy techniques.

The parts story is all about color. The set uses 1x1 round plates in a wild 16 different shades, and for 2022 two of them were brand new: light aqua and medium lavender, which is a nice bonus for parts collectors. The color counts are chunky too, think 566 black, 432 titanium metallic, 423 dark blue, 380 tan and hundreds more across the palette, so if you're a mosaic or MOC builder this is a serious stash of round plates in useful quantities. At 4,167 pieces for its original 120 dollar price that worked out to well under 3 cents a part, strong value on paper, though of course they're nearly all the same small element. You also get 9 canvas decor plates, 2 hanging elements, and a special signature tile to finish the piece.

Fun facts

01The portraits were designed by legendary DC artist Jim Lee alongside his longtime colorist Alex Sinclair, so the source art is the genuine article rather than a LEGO interpretation.
02The set comes with a soundtrack of nearly two hours, including a roughly 55 minute interview with Jim Lee, Alex Sinclair and LEGO designer Kitt Kossman that you can listen to while you build.
03Buy multiple copies and the instructions let you combine sets into one of two larger memorabilia artworks, so the box hints at builds bigger than any single portrait.
04Unlike most LEGO Art sets that just recolor one subject, this box holds three completely different characters (Batman, the Joker and Harley Quinn), which is why fans call it one of the better-value entries in the line.