Something I noticed looking at both issues of Blast is the amount of empty space left in both issues. When compared to something like The Crisis, which packs every inch of their pages with text or pictures or advertisements, Blast looks sparse, even in the second volume, which, as Kelsey points out, has a more traditional journal layout.

But I think part of why Blast's second issue falls flat for me circles around to a comment my father always made about my jokes; if they are funny, they are only funny the first time. I think the same reasoning applies here, but I am not saying Blast is a joke of a publication. Once something has been shocking or affective, it proceeds to be less so the second time around, and even less so the third time, and so on and so on. The first issue of Blast was, according to Morrison, a manifesto and call to arms for the latent avant-garde movement in London at the time. Blast's first volume is a mess of capitalization, bolded words, and lists, all scattered across the page with what seems to be carelessness. If this was going to be effective, it was only going to be effective once. Blast's second issue, to me, feels like an aesthetic and stylistic defeat, as it falls back towards standard journal format, regardless of what the content inside may be. For what it's worth, I think Blast Vol. 2 has some fascinating thoughts on the war and warfare in general, positing that humanity may very well end up in a state of perpetual warfare (13), which has actually kind of happened. However, I had to try harder to zero in on these insights, because I found the second issue of Blast to be a bit of a chore to read.