Thoughts

The quality craziness of Arcade’s Murderworld concludes in this issue. Following a quickly told backstory for the spoiled assassin, we then get action that cuts between all the X-men as Arcade does – keeping an eye on how things are going with the heroes he’s been hired to kill.

Indeed, the rapid cutting between characters in this issue – rarely does each strand of the adventure get more than a page – makes me think that Arcade is a character that would work incredibly well in a movie.

You’d have to embrace the absurdity of it, present Murderworld in all its glorious size and insane scope. Moments of this would require bucketloads of CGI, but I also think there’d be room for some vast, entertaining sets.

Maybe not for the X-men though. They’ve yet to appear in the MCU and I imagine that when they do turn up, they’ll be in films emphasising the political and low-level outcast nature of the characters. Rather than something quite this insane.

Maybe it would work for Tom Holland’s Spider-man – the second film of his having a similar OTT crazy quality. Add an Ant-man and the Wasp. A She-Hulk and maybe even a Ms Marvel. And then maybe use it to introduce a couple of new heroes, caught up in the same giant hit. Maybe that’s how you can bring a Cyclops and Jean Grey into the MCU?

Fun Panel

The little panels outlining the origins of Arcade are just mini masterpieces of backstory.

None More Claremont

It becomes a bit of a repeated idea in Claremont’s work that fights between the good guys and the villains have their own code, a distinct honour system that means things don’t quite play out as you’d want it to. Wolverine is the worst for this, often espusing batsugar insane declarations of what is right when dealing with bad guys. The fact the X-men just accept that they can’t defeat Arcade and move on falls into that. Why? He’s an Assassin? What happens to all the folk he’ll kill before they bother to strike again?

Ok, so trying to find any element of realism in Arcade, a character that exists to be brilliantly absurd is being unfair. But the final walkaway of the X-men does disappoint.