Creative Staff:
Story: Dennis Hopeless
Art: Kev Walker & Alessandro Vitti
What They Say:
Trapped on an isolated island, 16 superhuman teens (including cult favorites like members of the Runaways, the Avengers Academy and Darkhawk) are given a chilling ultimatum by their demented captor: Fight or die…only one will walk out alive! Thus begins a primal battle that will test the skills, stamina and morals of each combatant. Welcome to Murder World, where secrets are plenty, alliances are fleeting, and the key to victory might be rewriting the rules of the game. Who will survive? As Cammi and Hazmat battle the mysterious Deathlocket, X-23 and Juston Seyfert’s Sentinel join the fray…but who is the killer stalking the heroes in their sleep? Who are the students of the Braddock Aacdemy? And why does Darkhawk equal death?
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
While I’ve not read much in the way of Marvel Comics for nearly twenty years, it’s been easy to keep up on some of the ideas out there and a lot of the bigger things play a long enough game that even this far out I can still figure it all out easily enough. While friends have been recommending Avengers Arena to me, I’ll admit I kind of avoided it because of just how blatant it was in using the Battle Royale design to it. The concept certainly isn’t new and we’ve seen it reworked elsewhere and expanded upon, notably with The Hunger Games (which is parodied here lightly), something about the up front way it was doing it just kind of rubbed me wrong. But a little lack of willpower and another recommendation had me picking up the first volume to see what it’s all about, particularly since the series ran for eighteen issues, the first six of which are included here.
Working with a villain who has been around for an age and a day from the X-Men universe with Arcade, he’s the perfect foil for this plan as he essentially kidnaps a large group of young superheroes and places them… someplace. It’s not clear where he’s doing this or how, but with the abilities at hand he’s got full control over the kids that he’s brought in as they’re all safely contained and unable to hurt him. He actually makes the nice nod to past capers of his in that doing those kinds of elaborate traps just don’t work anymore. He’s essentially been aged out of existence in a way and has a hard time being relevant. So he’s decided to go big here by setting up a situation where this large group of kids, sixteen of them in fact, and created a situation where given enough time that they’ll start going at each other. The traps are laid, there are manipulations he can play and you can see the mixture of Battle Royale, The Hunger Games and Sword Art Online all coming into play here as he lets them loose.
That makes the premise pretty easy to work with, especially since Arcade largely bugs out for the bulk of this volume as for the first few days that are covered he doesn’t appear until towards the end where he decides that things have gotten a little dull. Like any property of this nature, the real fun is in watching how the players involved handle the situation and what kinds of choices they make. We get that experience very early on when we’re introduced to Hazmat and Mettle as Arcade makes it clear that the weak link has to be killed first and we see Mettle get taken down hard in front of her. This is traumatic enough in itself, but it’s worse for Hazmat since she and Mettle were in the early stages of a teenage romantic and sexual relationship. That certainly gives her incentive to live since he basically sacrificed himself for her, but you can imagine some significant emotional and psychological strain coming into play later on.
Once this setting of the foundation is done, the series works a pretty decent structure here for the remainder of what’s here. Each issue essentially focuses on a different character or group of characters and how they’re surviving over the course of the first week or so that this covers. We know that the story goes to at least a month by the opening chapter, but what we get here are those early choices as the groups figure out the best ways to survive. There are a few groups that shake out amid it because of their home turf pairings, such as those that came from the Avengers Academy or those that came from the Braddock school. I honestly knew barely any of these characters since they’re a younger and lesser known set, but there are some easy ones to pick out. X-23 of course gets some decent time scattered throughout due to being a cloned female version of Wolverine, but there’s also the fun of Deathlokette that’s brought into play as we get her origin story mixed in as well. The other that was easy to pick out was Kid Briton, an alternate timeline version of Captain Briton who has a personality issue tied to his powers that’s amusing.
With each chapter, we get a good mix of back story for those we’re dealing with and connections in the present as we see how they survive. It’s a predictable structure, but it actually manages to work quite well because even as these are characters that aren’t top tier by any stretch, we get to really know them a bit. Understanding Deathlokette’s back story helps to make her accessible as she struggles with who she is, but it also ties into a larger previous storyline I haven’t read since there’s obviously a lot of tension from everyone about what it is she is. Another that I really liked is the thirteen year old girl Cammi, someone who has a really curious story before she ended up here since she was off in space working with an unusual group before she got caught up with S.W.O.R.D. and sent back down to Earth – for protection – because quite a few intergalactic types are after her. That helps to reconnect the space side of the Marvel Universe for me, but Cammi is wholly engaging as we see how she survives on her own but still finds people to connect with herself in order to ensure that survival.
The only really known quantity that I had here was that of Darkhawk, a character that I enjoyed a fair bit with his original 90’s series. He has a minor role here but there’s some decent comedy over the fact that he is a bit older than everyone else but keeps being thought of as younger – or just not thought about at all. His presence in the Marvel Universe has been awkward over the years to be sure and that factors in well here. But what he does provide is a minor authority figure that some can acknowledge since they know he’s been around the block and isn’t just another hero in training with a cocky attitude. And though his role isn’t big here to start, he provides an interesting balance to what we get from everyone else, especially as the bodies start dropping along the way.
In Summary:
You can look at the cover of this volume easily and know exactly what it is. And it really is just that, with a dash of a few other properties that have been influenced by Battle Royale and things that influenced Battle Royale itself. That said, it is a pretty fun book that works a cast of characters that’s easier to work with because they’re not bound by decades of material, personalities issues and connections or other things. With the use of Arcade and this version of Murderworld, we get a pretty fun superhero form of Hunger Games but with a lot of interesting characters that you can become surprisingly invested in – and quickly. With a large cast it’s easy for people to get lost along the way, but with some solid writing and plotting from Dennis Hopeless and some smooth and detailed artwork by Kev Walker that runs the range of locales here, it’s a fun romp that has me looking forward to picking up more installments.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 13+
Released By: Marvel Comics
Release Date: May 21st, 2013
MSRP: $15.99
