SECOND CITY BLUES

[Devons Daddy]

ok its over. the dust has settled.
time to read it again and make our feelings known.

in the end. i liked it.slow bitty and to behonest i felt a little childish at first.sort of like a script written for a younger crowd up beefed up a bit to fit into 2000ad.
 it has perked up recently.i must admit and i will look forward to reading the next story arc if they bring it back.

it was no classic, but has enough to offer a decent stable background and foundation to biuld upon.

whats the hive minds thoughts.

[LARF]

Christopher Eccleston has quit!

Does not want to be typecast, so, who will be the next who?

Apparently odds on favourite is the guy who's now playing Cassanova over on BBC3.

Personally I'd like Eddie Izzard.

[Jared Katooie]

I thought it was very silly but I enjoyed reading it to some extent.

All the sport stuff in it was essentially pointless but apart from that there were no dissapointments.

Looks like I'm going have to write that future sports story myself though.

[Tordelbach]

Utterly daft, but very enjoyable.  Fresh, light and occasionally surprising.  If Kek-W has enough ideas to carry the "off-world" season in a similar vein, I'd love to see another run.  

[Dudley]

"What an utterly bizarre experience reading this strip has been. I'll be honest at the start and say that I've never read and enjoyed a sports strip, except Billy the Fish and the gentle parodies like DEATHSPERE produced for Solar Wind. Mean Arena, Roy of the Rovers: you can keep 'em. But Second City Blues isn't really a sports strip: nor is it a proper science fiction strip. It's been more like reading a magical realist novel crossed with a Brummie soap opera: so, you've got your hard life choices, your star crossed lovers, your gangster dad, your squid-headed alien and your spaceship full of beings out to destroy Love. (Ok, so technically it's "all emotion" they want to destroy, but we all know what that's a code for!)"

"Far, far too many elements to fit into a short tale, and it's to 2000AD editor Matt Smith's great credit that he took a chance and commissioned a 13-part series in a defunct genre, with a creative team barely tested within the pages of the comic."

"So has it worked? Well... kinda. I've become slowly addicted, entirely against my will, to a story that I know is full of clich? and unresolved plot threads. It's like Neighbours - there's no good reason to like it, but vast sections of the population do. And I have to admit that, despite my better judgement, I'd like to see it return for a second series."

Link: http://www.2000adreview.co.uk" target="_blank">For more insightful reviews...

[Oddboy]

(Using the power of hindsight, I've corrected the spelling mistake in my review...)

"This needs to be serialised as a Saturday morning cartoon immediately."

[Bico]

I got the impression it didn't belong in 2000ad.  I don't mean because it was rubbish (it was only average, at worst) - I mean it didn't feel like it should have been there.  I read it and kept getting the impression that if someone had produced a rival comic to 2000ad and was just finding their feet, this is the kind of thing they'd be printing - if that makes any sense.
It had a few rough edges and it didn't really go anywhere, but it was hardly 2000ad's worst hour.

[feridian]

I came to like it a lot. Unlike many stories it started slowly, but added layers of complexity as it went on (contrast TSDM, for instance, which had used up all its ideas by ep 2), and by the end offered much more than it seemed to be at the beginning. I agree that the sports angle wasn't really exploited, but then there's probably little mileage in an actual game. Lots of good ideas and a great Brummie background - I'd welcome it back.

[crill]

I hated it. Sorry. It's the first story I have _ever_ skipped in the prog. I even read Kola Kommandos. I had to force myself to go back and re-read it. This story belonged in the 80's and even then it would still be ridden with cliches. You just can't do anything original with future sports stories. It's all been done. And I thought the art was terrible, the colors washed out.

When anyone writes in to ask for some old character back, Tharg goes on about nostalgia and rose-tinted spectacles blah-blah, and leaving the old stuff where it should be, but it seems like he only uses the excuse when it suits him as this story did not belong in 2005.  And 13 episodes? Why not give Robohunter a 13 episode run to establish the character a bit more?

Again, personal opinion, obviously. I just really didn't think this story should have progressed past proposal stage.

crill

[The Monarch]

I liked it

[LARF]

Crill - totally agree with you there mate, utter drivell.

Dudley - 'Brummie Soap Opera." - remember Albion Market? That was shite as well.

Before anyone gets on the unconstructive bandwagon, my tuppence is pretty much the same as Crills - artwork wise the characters were undefined, limp, and badly drawn, the line work was very weak, the figure work miserable with no definition or form and the colouring was washed out and miserable. Story wise it was clich?d, tired and drab - and sports based, which has really never worked for me - I mean if they'd lost (god forbid! the holy bible of cliches) then it would at least given it a twist, but they always seemed to win by some kind of default, which as  sportsmen/women/horses they should have been pretty pissed about. Oh, and the Horse - I mean what are the chances of an Alien race looking like a Horse, nevermind coming from Centaury - if this was meant to be tongue in cheek they missed the cheek and hit a molar instead. I'm not against new stories, American Gothic has got off to a good start and I enjoyed TSDM, but SCB was, for me, an indigestion inducing filler which let down a bloody tasty sandwich of stories.

I'd be disappointed if this returned.

[Floyd-the-k]

calling scb 'magical realist' would be to wildly overrate it for mine. I agree it's to Matt Smith's great credit that he took a punt on it but I didn't like it.  There were some good ideas in it, well, cute ones anyway, but they were wedged within this starchy format.  I really wanted to like it but couldn't. It really lost me when we found out (oh what a relief) that the bloke with the shadows under his eyes was on medication not 'drugs'.

For me, the only good thing about it was that it showed that 2000 AD is still into taking risks.

[Dudley]

what are the chances of an Alien race looking like a Horse, nevermind coming from Centaury

Chances of an alien race looking like anything are pretty hard to determine, so can't answer the first part.  However, the odds that if mankind discovered a race of aliens that looked like horses they'd call them Centaurians seem pretty good to me.

I forgot to mention in my review that I really enjoyed the fact that the team won not a single match throughout, but somehow always made it on to the next round.  I'd hope they'd keep up that kind of record in the second series.

[Funt Solo]

The opening episode really put me off, due to what I considered at the time to be poor art.  Not only that, but I didn't like the guy with the horse head or the upper class gang or the clockwork orange gang or the fact that it was a future sport strip.

However, by the end of the run I'd been converted.  I'd got used to the art, and instead of finding it poor, I now just see it as a different style.

The story drew me in and by the end of it I was finding it really enjoyable:  so it totally upset my expectations.

It is more cartoony than some of the other strips:  but I don't see that as a bad thing.  At the end of the day it kept me entertained, much more so than, say, Faces, which I found particularly dull during the Autumn.

I don't think it's really fair to say that having people with horses heads being Centaurian is too much of a stretch of logic.  Well, yes, in a purely logical world, it is a stretch:  but no more so than Rogue, Helm, Bagman and Gunnar having names that fit their roles in the strip, or the majority of alien species in any sci-fi being bipedal carbon-based life forms.

As a sci-fi cartoon I think it worked really well:  and it didn't concentrate too heavily on the actual sport - and in the penultimate episode the match was pretty much abandoned in favour of an invasion of hula-hoop headed aliens.  Now come on:  that's not a cliche.

[LARF]

There is already a Centaurian star system, and if I'm right it's the nearest star system to Earth  that could host lifeforms. I'm presuming that the Centaurians are from this system, so therefore they look like horses after the system has been named not before. If you know what I mean.