First Fight #2
Technical difficulties forced me to use images of this comic from a couple of different places online, so my apologies if the quality seems a little off. In this issue I get an answer to my question about why Bryan doesn’t just change the name for each issue (First Fight, Second Fight, etc.): because these comics aren’t about one fight each. In this issue Bryan has his first fight in a tournament and loses on points. That seemed impressive enough to me, because at least he managed to stay “alive” for the whole fight. He watched the rest of the tournament with the rest of the crowd, and grew increasingly thankful that he didn’t make it through to some of the beasts that made it to the end. From there he made his first comic, talked to some folks at a convention about it, then got his own table for a later convention. As most of the questions seemed to focus on when he’d participate in his next tournament, he eventually decided that he was going to go ahead and try it. With training, of course, which is what the rest of the issue shows. One trivial thing bugged me, though: why put in a very obviously fake name for Robert Kirkman (Bobert Birkman and his comic “The Walking Dread”)? He used real names for everybody else, and I think “Birkman” has better things to do than sue small press comics artists who use his name. Baffling, but little things like that stick out to me for whatever reason. Still, no sense getting bogged down by the small stuff, as the bulk of this comic was a lot of fun. If he keeps this up this could be one of those rare crossover hits, as I’m sure a good chunk of MMA fans wouldn’t mind reading comics about the sport. And if it gets too rough on Bryan to continue producing material for his comics (i.e. taking a beating), then he could always follow another MMA fighter and do a comic about him. Just trying to save the man a few brain cells… $6
