‘Murderworld’ showcases both artists and Arcade

Given how pitch-perfect this book is, we can only hope it is only a prologue.

June 14, 2023

Few supervillains are so pleasingly strange or as uniquely poised to be the mastermind of their own story as Arcade. He’s a baddie who provides his own dynamic setting, and his own rules of engagement; in his first appearance, he put Spider-Man and Captain Britain into a giant pinball machine of his own making.

If that doesn’t scream potential, I don’t know what does.

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That was the ’70s, however, when the more cartoonish and absurd ideas could fly by their own merits; a villain could be amusements-themed without anyone being concerned with grounding them in any sort of gruesome reality. By the ’80s, such an oddity could only muster a fill-in diversion for a group of heroes. Arcade spent a lot of time as a single-issue X-Men concern between major villains like Apocalypse and Sinister. He was occasionally paired with TV-themed Mojo on the thinnest of grounds.

Murderworld, by Jim Zub, Ray Fawkes, and a bevy of artists, is not Arcade’s first shot at the big time; there was 2012’s rather shocking Avengers Arena, wherein our boy-in-white settled a bunch of teen heroes onto an island, Battle Royale-style (the book’s title logo goes so far as to ape the design of the film). The trouble there was that Arcade himself was relegated to the background while the teen heroes stole the spotlight.

Murderworld finds a clever – and gruesome – solution to this problem: each of its five issues presents a new, unfamous narrator fighting for their life in a new, live-streaming version of Arcade’s battle royale, all of whom seem slated for a horrible demise by the issue’s conclusion. Arcade himself is still relegated to a control room, but his lunacy is never forced to take a back seat to any victim’s necessary character development.

However suited to the role, Arcade will never have the star power to sell his own book, so the series finds a clever way to include major heroes. Now as ratings-obsessed as his erstwhile pal Mojo, Arcade (and Marvel Comics) presents phony Avengers, Spider-People, and Wolverines to draw eyeballs. Murderous Life Model Decoys present both the selling point and the major obstacles of each issue.

If this all sounds gimmicky, that’s because it is – delightfully so. Arcade is a character enriched by the tacky and artificial; the series benefits from bait-and-switch tactics. You aren’t getting a Spider-Gwen cameo – you’re getting something a lot cheaper than that, as Arcade intends.

The series might just as well serve as a spotlight on our five art teams, all of whom beautifully render their small slice of Marvel iconography; Jethro Morales’ classic Avengers carry a sinister hokiness to match his gawky Arcade; Farid Karami drops a show-stopping spread of Spideys. Each team seems perfectly suited to their exact issues’ LMDs, making the reader yearn for a Moon Knight by Luca Pizzari or a fight-heavy book by Lorenzo Tammeta.

With the thinnest larger universe throughline (Black Widow, holding a grudge from her run-in with Arcade in her recent series, hot on his trail) suggesting further fun, Murderworld has the potential to return, highlighting both creators and our boy himself. Given how pitch-perfect this book is – there is rarely a dull or dropped moment – we can only hope it is only a prologue.