​​There’s a long line of challengers to play Hurricane Punch. They’re all waiting for a chance to go up against Joe. (Joe’s the guy with the head that kind of looks like a tomato. He thinks it looks like a dragon fruit, but...it’s definitely a tomato.) Joe’s looking for someone. What he finds...is trouble in Arcade Kings #1. Writer/artist Dylan Burnett opens a whole new series with the aid of colorists Walter Baiamonte and Sara Antonellini. It’s a fun manga-inspired opening to an action-based series that leans heavily on traditional action-hero tropes. 

In addition to being a total master on Hurricane Punch, Joe’s helping out around the arcade. There are some real thugs hanging around the place that Joe is perfectly capable of dealing with. It’s a nice life for Joe until someone from his past comes looking for him...someone who is backed up by a rather menacing warrior robot that is operated by a remote control set-up that looks quite a bit like an arcade console. The robot is huge. If Joe’s going to handle the threat, he will need to get a little help from the friends that he’s made in and around the arcade.

Burnett’s story works with time-worn action cliches. Joe is a formidable loner who swings into a small community to help people with their problems. He does so, but finds that his dark past is catching up with him again, and he must continue his lonely journey in search of someone who is also tied to his past. It’s a cowboy story. Or a samurai story. Or...well...just about any flavor of action serial has its variation on the itinerant loner hero trope. Burnett takes the trope into a slightly novel sci-fi setting in a reasonably satisfying first issue.

Burnett’s art is simple, dramatic, and dynamic. The character design for Joe is similarly simple and iconic. He’s a charismatic-looking guy with the overall appearance of a manga hero. The face is just weird enough to be interesting and cool without being so abstract as to lack emotion. Action shoots across the page with an appealingly rubbery cartoonish-ness. Baiamonte and Antonellini do a good job of delivering mood and intensity to the page with bold colors and stylish shadows.

Burnett’s sci-fi mutation of the traditional late 1990s video arcade makes for a fun milieu for the nomadic hero trope. There may not be anything terribly original about the story, but Joe seems like kind of a cool guy, and Burnett’s art swiftly slides the story through page and panel in a way that allows for a very distinct narrative fingerprint. Burnett lowers a few different subplots into place in the first issue that could be interesting in subsequent chapters. It will remain to be seen if the nomadic hero trope will hold up over the course of the next few issues of the series. Burnett might have something special here.

Grade: B