Murderworld - Spider-Man #1
The man known as Arcade had been an assassin. Now he’s a...producer. (It’s a weird job market. Things change.) The contestants advance to the next stage in Murderworld: Spider-Man #1, written by Jim Zub and Ray Fawkes. The second part in a multi-#1 series started in mid-November with an issue featuring the Avengers. The second issue involves an ambush by robots from every end of the Spider-verse in an issue drawn by Farid Karami and colorist Chris Sotomayor. The second issue in the series might be fun, but the title match lacks inventiveness, and the overall rhythm of the series really has yet to take hold.
200 contestants entered Murderworld in the first issue of the series. As the second issue opens, the field of contestants is down to 110. That’s a hell of a lot of dead people in 20 pages. Eden Abraha had been an MMA fighter before she made it to the contest. There’s a good chance that she will make it. There’s also a fairly good chance that the contest might get shut down. Black Widow is looking to put an end to Arcade’s latest moneymaking venture. If she’s going to shut it down, she’s going to have to find it...
Zub and Fawkes have real potential in a series focusing on Arcade and Murderworld. For two chapters in a row now, they’ve failed to deliver on the potential of a series centering around Arcade. The survival reality show nature of the contest could be a lot of fun if it were to be framed in more of a cleanly delineated format, but Zub and Fawkes are all over the place with the narrative. The pacing is awful as well. The Spider-Man-Bot battle is over in about five pages, and none of the contestants get the kind of focus needed to let the reader really engage with them.
The script feels pretty choppy with a lot of story lurching around over the course of the issue, but Karami manages to keep everything impressively fluid for the bulk of the story. The dramatic sense of action would really have a chance to flow across the page if the script would allow for it, but since Zub and Fawkes are cramming things together at such odd angles, there’s never much of a chance for any of the action to find the right momentum. Sotomayor does some beautiful work delivering the atmosphere of Murderworld, which would be really nice if Zub and Fawkes would allow the world a bit more of a presence on the page.
Murderworld may have been a ripoff of Westworld when it was originally conceived, but there’s real potential in an ongoing series. The inexplicable longevity of a TV show like Survivor proves that the drama of such a contest in the Marvel Universe could really take off if it was tackled from the right angle. As it is, Zub and Fawkes simply haven’t found the right angle for a truly compelling story.