To be honest, I don't have much of an affinity for American football. It strikes me as tactically limited, and the professional game has been forced into painful stop-start monotony by the way it is presented on television. I'm told that college football is a vast improvement, but alas I've never had the pleasure. Someone at Games Workshop evidently felt quite differently, and so designed Blood Bowl, a board game transplanting the sport to a brutal swords & sorcery fantasy world. Ironically enough, Blood Bowl just happens to be one of my favorite games, so I was quite excited to hear of a comic version.

The issue kicks off* with a bit of signature Blood Bowl violence, and them settles into a solid balance between subplots and the main action, although I do wonder how this issue's approach of shoving the character bits into the half-time break will work in the long term; such a structure could soon become tedious, so I hope it's not followed too slavishly. The comic also benefits from a number of varied subplots; the player with links to organized crime is not much of a surprise given the setting, but the unexpected appearance of the father of one of the players brings some soap opera melodrama to proceedings and helps stave off the sense of macho bombast into which the title could easily fall.

Lads Helloven's art is big, loud and kinetic, effectively capturing the swiftness of the players and the crunch of the tackles, and there is a fun exaggeration in the character designs, which may be offputting for those looking for a more serious approach, but I'm not sure how serious a comic about orcs playing American football should, or could, really be. Besides, the idiosyncratic art style is rather reminiscent of the early days of Games Workshop when they didn't take themselves nearly as seriously as they seem to today. The same early, creative days that produced offbeat games like Blood Bowl, in fact.

All that said, I'm not sure about the way the creative team has approached the storytelling. Everything is portrayed at very close quarters, and while this allows for suitably gruesome imagery as the tackles slide in, it also tends to cut out the rest of the field, lessening the feel that we're watching a game in progress. Since sport comics are rather thin on the ground outside Japan, there's an opportunity here to deliver something unique, but what we've got instead is largely indistinguishable from your average US action comic. When I think of how we could have seen full page spreads showing the positioning of the players, and arrows and graphics showing movement and tactics, I can't help but feel a little disappointed. That's not to say that what Forbeck and Helloven have produced is sub-par, but rather that they haven't made full use of the potential inherent in the setting or the medium.

This issue doesn't do as much with the sports comic concept as I'd like, but it does boast interesting characters, compelling plots, and a unique setting; while it's not quite a touchdown** Blood Bowl: Killer Contract is an impressive first down***.

*Yes, I know.
** Sorry.
*** I'll get my coat.

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