Arcade.

I've been threatening to write this post for awhile now, so I guess now is as good of a time as any to talk about the crapfactory that is Arcade. My personal first-hand introduction to the character occurred in approximately 1988, when I finally tracked down a backissue of X-Men #204, which had been a giant hole in my X-Men collection for a long time. When I finally bought a copy, I was severely disappointed. Months later, Arcade was featured in a couple of the early issues of Excalibur and that pretty much sealed the deal for me. God, I hate Arcade. He serves no purpose, other than to fill a back up story, which is used when they change creative teams or if they're behind on the production schedule and need a filler issue. Every time I would crack open an issue and see his stupid face and his stupid red hair, I would become immediately depressed that I just blew a $1 to $1.50 on a crappy comic. What a waste of newsprint.

Anyways, so a little backstory, and I had to do some research on Arcade because I had zero inclination to do so before this, but I was not surprised to find out that he was a spoiled rich kid. I was very annoyed to find that several different references referred to him as a "supervillian" and an "evil genius" (the next paragraph will go a little more into detail as why he's neither of those two things). Much of his history is clouded, but at one point Arcade did divulge some information. At one point his father cut off his allowance and he killed him. He then became a hitman, even thought he really didn't need the money. Then he developed "Murderworld". Kind of a boring backstory if you ask me.

The thing that really annoys me about him is that every time he's in a book, the plot always follows the exact same formula. He kidnaps someone, they have to survive his "Murderworld" park, which includes lifelike robots that look like various superheroes. So, chaos ensues, the kidnapped character has to "kill" someone they know (only to find out that it was a robot) so then they get mad and fight their way through to the control room and end up "killing" Arcade. Which would be awesome, BUT, every time he gets killed, we find out that it was an Arcade robot and that he somehow escaped. This is totally frustrating because he never, ever dies. AND he never actually kills anyone, which is his whole stated purpose. So, when you think about, no one ever gets killed or murdered, which, in my opinion, kind of defeats the whole purpose of calling your joint "Murderworld". Thinking about this annoys me to no end.

The only thing that is remotely redeeming about an Arcade story is that you're pretty much guaranteed an appearance by Miss Locke. Wow, she was smokin' hot. I had a huge crush on her and would flip through pages of annoying dialogue just to get to a panel that featured her. A very underrated and underused character, in my opinion.

Apparently, it is not known if he is alive or not (I vote for not), as in his last known appearance, he was transported to the Savage Land. Hopefully, he made a nice meal for a Tyrannosaurus Rex there. A guy can dream, can't he?