For Blast, I believe one of the more significant parts of the magazine that can be studied involves number 6, the format. Examining the first issue closely, the size of Blast seems very large and thick compared to modern magazines but I believe that most magazines from the day were approximately the same size. The length of the edition is hard to judge because the actual journal says 160 but there are many blank pages at the beginning and end of it which may have been advertisements or just blanks pages. However, the size of the font changes drastically depending on which piece you look at. The font sometimes changes too; not in the middle of a story but when you compare the different ones to each other.
As far as visual art goes there are many drawings, especially abstract ones, within the first edition. There is only one photograph of an abstract sculpture on page xvii, titled Stags in the magazine but towards the end there are a few drawings that are not abstract but what look like water-color paintings of society.
There does not seem to be any sort of order in which the pictures are displayed and they appear many times in the middle of the different stories. For example, in the middle of The Saddest Story, there are several abstract drawings of head and other things which do not relate to the story at all. The images all seem to be independent of the various stories and without them the journal would not really be much better or worse in my opinion. The images are not in color but the cover of the actual magazine is bright pink with black writing.
Because of the length of time that Blast was being produced and the number of editions, there are not really any major changes that I can see other than the increase in what can only be described as war propaganda. There is much more in the second edition than the first as WWI becomes more and more inevitable.
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