Murderworld: Game Over #1 - Marvel Comics

MURDERWORLD: GAME OVER No. 1, May 2023

Most certainly bringing “Arcade’s darkest game” to a close with a bit of a bang, authors Jim Zub and Ray Fawkes’ script for “Murderworld: Game Over” probably left many a reader with a rather sore head, thanks to their storyline containing a number of twists and turns which few will probably anticipate. Indeed, this periodical’s twenty-page plot is positively laced with so many surprising demises that by its end it is genuinely difficult to determine just who is going to survive the grand finale and grab the deadly tournament’s “big prize!”

Sadly however, for those bibliophiles able to step away from the insane murders, red herrings, and Life Model Decoy (LMD) units for a moment, the actual logic to some of this book’s happenings doesn’t arguably make much sense from the perspective of its ever-dwindling cast of characters. For example, having saved the last two competitors from the fatal clutches of a robot Moon Knight, it’s soon revealed that the survivors’ saviour Black Widow, is actually just another of the super-villain’s mechanical killers. This revelation would surely only astonish those long-term bibliophiles who have followed the multi-title yarn and knew that Natasha Romanoff was trying to discover the location of the illegal broadcast. Not the badly battered Alex Benavides or Marina Komarova.

From the participants’ perspective, all that has happened is that Arcade has senselessly dispatched another android to stop his previous LMD from ending their lives, so the new one can do it instead..? This situation debatably makes no sense whatsoever, yet somehow still tricks the eventual victor into feeling they need to check the fallen Avenger’s corpse for signs of life just in case his Hydra-sponsored comrade-in-arms has mistakenly brought an end to the super-heroine’s existence; “I let people die here in Murderworld. I killed so many by not helping. But they would’ve done the same to me. Am I wrong..?”

So bizarre a state of affairs also then leads into perhaps one of the publication’s biggest (and potentially unconvincing) shocks when the gambler-turned-adulterer bests an expert in martial arts and close combat in a straightforward fist-fight. True, the Russian agent had just been wounded in an explosion. But so too had Alex, and yet artist Lorenzo Tammetta still pencils the man with no known hand-to-hand fighting skills whatsoever still somehow strangling the supposedly highly-tutored Marina to an implausible death.

Writers: Jim Zub & Ray Fawkes, Layouts: Netho Diaz, and Pencils/Inks: Lorenzo Tammetta