BLAST has always fascinated me, but I've never taken time to consider the two issues side-by-side until now. As is true with many feature films in the present era, the sequal wasn't as inspiring as the original in terms of design. I was suprised by how traditional the wartime number looked compared to the orginal publication. In the first edition that was published in 1914, the aesthetic was more experimental in every way. The minimalistic pink cover of the first edition is more striking than the artistic yet nuetrally-colored cover of the second edition. Despite the avant garde nature of Wyndham Lewis's work on the 1915 cover, the art itself is still familiar to a reader that picked up BLAST 1 (I found the cover art to be very similar to Lewis's Slow Attack [image vi. in the first edition], though perhaps that's my undiscenring eye.) One obvious difference between these two images is the prescense of human figures, and this feature of human abstractions appears in many pieces throughout the second edition. 

Another obvious difference between these two publications is the way in which the text is formatted. In the 1914 edition, BLAST uses a variety of fonts and text sizes on the same page; blocks of words, phrases, and paragraphs are pieced together like a puzzle. This practice is evidenced throughout the Manifesto, more specifically. However, in the second editon, most of the text is organized in sensicle columns, more akin a newspaper. This certainly dulled my experience as a reader of the text.

I would be really curious to see any work that had gone into a third edition of BLAST to see if it followed the vorticism exhibited in the first edition or if it continues to return to more tradtional styles.