Finished Mean Arena the second half definitely gets weirder, not sure that's really to it's benefit though. The introduction of more guns and odd scoring conditions just muddies the sport side of the strip. From the sudden wrap up I'm guessing editorial came to a similar conclusion.
Slaughterbowl is at least good OTT fun, it's basically Mario Kart meets Death Race 2000 with dinosaurs (what's not to like). The garish dayglo colour pallete perfectly suits it and it's short enough to not outstay it's welcome.
The In Detail section at the back then spends most of it's 8 pages talking about Harlem Heroes with just a couple of paragraphs at the end mentioning the strips we've just read. Can't help feeling we'd have been better served with 2 books of HH rather than Mean Arena. Looking at Barney the page counts are about the same (HH+Inferno is 295 to Mean's 288) so I'm not sure why they decided to go this way. This has been the weakest thrill of the whole UC imo and book 1 is probable the least likely vol of the UC to ever get a re-read (I might pick up 2 to read Slaughterbowl again someday).
