Arcade Kings #3 // Review
Gentrification doesn’t generally come with thugs beating the hell out of people at the arcade on the other side of the street. Of course...gentrification doesn’t always come to a place like The Row. Nevertheless, a single arcade owner is going to have to deal with the threats that come with the changing times in Arcade Kings #3. Writer/artist Dylan Burnett expands his weirdly anachronistic world of video arcades, robots, gangs, and vendettas. The dark semi-future world comes to its third issue just a bit more defined with a bit more room for developing the identity of its main characters.
Ken stares down a powerfully-built man who is at least a foot taller than him and carrying a katana. He even had the presence of mind to threaten the guy...who promptly plodded off out of the panel and off the page. Ken’s a disheveled guy who can calmly take a powerful hit, but the hardest hits to take aren’t always physical, and there’s some question of exactly how he and his arcade are going to survive the impending financial crisis as big money moves into The Row and takes over completely. He can handle thugs himself. For everything else, he’s going to need a little help.
Burnett knows how to frame a heroic adventure. It might seem a little cliché, but the strength of Arcade Kings doesn't lie in its originality. It lies in the setting. Moving forward traditional concepts of heroism and vendettas and violence and honor and placing them in a world of arcades continues to be a great deal of fun. The characters that Burnett is bringing to the page are a lot of fun as well. Ken comes across as a powerfully heroic hero...simply because he doesn’t fight back in an aggressive physical way. It’s not often that pacifism is shown as strength in an action story of any kind.
Burnett’s kinetic sense of action continues to impress. The percussion of the action slams into the page with often overwhelming force, which is remarkable considering how little of the page it fills. Action shoots across very slim slices of page, allowing for plenty of room for action and stylish drama. Burnett is also incredibly good at establishing the overall look and feel of the city. Ken's little corner of the world is contrasted against the towering skyscrapers of the real power in the city. Burnett’s clever sense of composition is present in those establishing shots as well. Even the most breathtaking perspectives end up anchoring small corners of the page. It’s like a bento box narrative, and it’s beautiful.
Burnett is allowing the world to expand a little more as he introduces a new character on the other side of the narrative. As cool as the itinerant hero is in the first couple of issues, it's cooler to see a contrasting hero who is every bit as valorous while being much more firmly anchored in a single location.
