ARCADE KINGS #1 - Review

 

The best part of growing up and going to middle school in Northern New Jersey was the pizza, the parks, the proximity to Manhattan and…the arcades. When you’re a teeny tweenie and you don’t have to worry about making it to Hebrew School right after school there was nothing better than rushing to the arcade with a pocket full of quarters or a five spot ready to be turned into a mound of quarters with plenty of time to kill. 

 

There were two arcades on South Orange Avenue right up the street from the middle school. One was in a bike shop called Motorsport where the cool older kids went who cared about yucky girls and lighting up blah blah blah. The one where all the dorks, nerds and weirdos went was called South Orange Amusements (dorkaroonski loserville right?). It was bigger, had better games and nobody cared who you were or what you looked like, as long as you had button mashing and joystick skills you belonged. You would head there with your friends and then split up to your preferred game once you entered its hallowed linoleum tiled palace. The only reason you would run into each other again is if you quickly crapped out of your quarters and then had to harangue your homie while they played their pixelated addiction of choice. 

 

This arcade had everything you could ask for: Pinball, old school, new school you name it. It even had Dragon’s Lair, the holiest of holy video games which looked unbelievably cool but cost double the price of a regular game and was insanely hard to boot. Have you ever played the original version of Dragon’s Lair? It’s bonkers and the only kids that were kicking ass at the game had Richie Rich stacks of quarters next to the machine since you died every 15 seconds. Of course watching the cool kid who would actually own and beat the game was a sight to behold. 

 

My video game of choice was Popeye. Yes Popeye! It was amazing! I think it spoke to the soon to be romantic at heart in my prebuscent peach fuzz mustachioed body. The game was a pretty basic platform game. You had to catch hearts that Olive Oyl was tossing down to you from the top of the screen while Bluto chased after you. If things got close or screwy you could eat a can of spinach and get the strength to wallop Bluto which would send him careening across the screen while you snatched up hearts galore.

 

One of the great crowning achievements of my youth is not me reading from the dusty Torah scroll with no English to help me during my Bar Mitzvah, not walloping a homer in kickball after being picked last for the umpteenth time, not winning my class Spelling Bee BUT beating the high score in Popeye which garnered me a free South Orange Amusements T-Shirt. Boyeee! 

 

 

Anyway, all these memories came back to me when I saw the solicits for Arcade Kings come out. I legitimately became excited to read this book. I assumed it would bring back all the feels from the 80s arcades and take you right back to the time when life was simple when your jean pockets had three dollars worth of quarters; finally got around to reading it and boy was I wrong. I really have no idea what I just read. I can’t even categorize it. Maybe a mish mosh? An eye splattering colossal WTF? I mean, it felt like some cheesy 80s type cartoon. Actually it felt like a modern Cartoon Network show that was trying to vibe like an 80s cartoon. It was bright with bold colors and over the top emotional moments, but it did nothing for me; it felt a bit hollow as if Burnett was caught up more in the 'isn't this cool that we're doing this' rather than investing us in the world and its characters.

 

 

Make no mistake the art by Burnett was fantastic but it felt more like it should be hanging in an art gallery than it did sitting in my lap in a sequential art book that desperately needed a compelling story. From what I got, McMax, some legendary Fighter has a son named Joe who now roams around with a wonky Dragon Fruit Helmet on helping kids in arcades beat bullies who dare to challenge them. At some point some hyper toddler with a controller that controls an enormous robot challenges Joe to a Robot fight and mayhem ensues. We later find out that Joe has a brother and that his aging and now sickly Dad is actually McMax and he wants him home for what appears to be ill-intentioned reasons. 

 

Mnyeh. 

 

 

I guess I was expecting more arcade shenanigans and Karate Kid type drama rather than a family on the rocks with a now psycho dad drama. Hey, it's not awful by any means but for $8 you gotsta come wit da ruffneck bidness Burnett! The story flew bye with oversized panels and the glorified artistic style. Right now I'm looking at a book that has Joust/Dig Dug/Galaga potential. You're gonna need to ratchet this up to a Dragon's Lair/TMNT 4 Players-At-Once level or I'm dropping this faster than quarters from my Wrangler jeans went into Popeye at 3:22pm on a Tuesday.

Rating: 7.1

Verdict: A couple more quarters left before I'm out