For the love of the game!
Creative Staff:
Story: Nick Kyme
Art: Jack Jadson, Nelson Pereira
Colors: Fabricio Guerra
Letterer: Simon Bowland
What They Say:
Crunching tackles, bloody violence, horrible deaths, and that’s just the referees! Bone-crunching sports action in the fantasy world of Warhammer! The most vicious and dangerous fantasy football tournament you will ever encounter! Dive into the action as a rag-tag team of humans, the Hochland Harbingers, attempt to claw their way to the top of the Blood Bowl League! Can Dreng Strumbold, a former star player who has crashed to rock bottom, help the Harbingers fend off the terrifying opposition?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Having grown up on role playing games of the pen and paper variety during the heyday of the 80’s, one of the things I fell in love with was the Warhammer/40K property that came into existence. That spawned all sorts of spinoffs along the way (oh how I miss the Titan games) but the one that made for a lot of fun with friends was Blood Bowl. Taking the familiar race types and putting it into a bloody and brutal football setting was just a whole lot of fun with the rules, the death, and the chaos that ensued from it. With Titan Comics having been mining the 40K series for a bit now they’ve got this new four-issue miniseries to see what can be done to draw in some Blood Bowl fans with Nick Kyme writing and artwork from Jack Jadson, someone who delivered great pages during some recent Vampirella work for me.
The book focuses on a former player named Dreng Strumbold that ended up falling off the pedestal and has suffered since as a penniless drunkard and beggar. His fate changes in a dark and stormy alley one night when a cloaked man offers him a chance to get back into the game he loves, which leads him to a little out of the way place in the countryside that reveals a lower tier Blood Bowl game. The game is fun and while he’s not at the top of his form we do see that he has some skills – including dwary carrying – that makes it clear he can go the distance. While the game itself is a mess in the end, some giant orcs essentially pulping the majority of his team, it turns out that this was basically a tryout for the cloaked man that reveals himself to be the Hogan, coach of the Hochland Harbingers.
Hogan sees something is still in Dreng and works to get him on the team and into proper matches to go up against some tough competition. About half the book focuses on this first big match after introducing the comical team made up of mostly humans and a giant orc as well, but it’s clear they’re not fully a team in some ways and that the coaching, which is good, is still somewhat limited. The match itself is fun as we see the team struggle for a lot of it before Dreng really finds himself in all of it, but it’s the wackiness that will draw people new to the property. The power of the orcs, the fact that the ball is alive, playing the angle of just beating up each other more than playing… it’s just silly but it works in its own way and a good part of that is just Dreng’s narration and enthusiasm as he goes to town at things. It’s got a good bit of energy about it and it manages to bring the matches to life pretty well, not something that’s always easy when it come to sports in comics.
In Summary:
I didn’t go into Blood Bowl expecting high end material in a sense but rather looking for a well put together book that was fun. Kyme gives us a character to rally around and can bring out the rest of the team as time goes on while taking time here to establish the basics and throw us into a few matches and what they’re like. It works well but is made more enjoyable thanks to some great artwork from Jack Jadson and the team. What they bring to the page here is bright and colorful without being cartoonish and it just has a sense of silliness and bloodiness that works very well together. It’s a fun book that hits the right notes and works better than it should in a lot of ways.
Grade: B
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Titan Comics
Release Date: May 31st, 2017
MSRP: $3.99
