Review: A Webwork Of Risky Life Choices Culminate In ‘Arcana Royale #1’

Welcome to the table,

I’m a fan of weird fiction. I like it even better when it’s laced with heaping helpings of occult weirdness and strange creatures. Arcane Royale delivers all of this… in spades.

Cullen Bunn is my best friend. The fact I would roll into hell beside the man does not color my view of his work. I tell you that because my editors like me to make it abundantly clear. I can appreciate them wanting me to do that, so there we go.

Arcana Royale follows Hudson Tremaine, a devil-may-care gambler who has made a name for herself in the various card table circles in Vegas. She has also made a fair amount of enemies in the high stakes underworld of card players.

Due to this webwork of risky life choices, she has found herself on the invite list to a secret card tournament known as the Arcanos Mysterinos.

Where this story goes from the very beginning is completely unhinged. That really sets it apart from typical “risky card game” stories.  The players at the table feel like they are drawn from the devil’s own toy-box. It’s not just a bunch of cigarette smoking occultists or high stakes cool people that you would see in your normal “occult adjacent story.”

There is a goat headed demon, a djinn-looking entity, some kind of princess, a sock monkey, a vampire looking thing, a mass of tentacles and mouths, a biker, and something that kind of looks like the troll that scared me as a child. It’s a long and strange list of creatures from across the paranormal landscape all sitting around card tables engaged in this high stakes card game.

Where Cullen spins a really compelling yarn, A.C. Zamudio‘s art and Bill Crabtree‘s colors really bring this whole weird horror card fantasy story to life. The art is really fun in a gritty way, capturing a tone that sells the story so well I don’t know if I could have figure out a better pairing if I was given a hundred portfolios and a year to think about it.

What’s also truly fun about Arcane Royale is that I have no idea where it is going. I know the plot, I understand what the stakes are, as far as they have been revealed to us. I am pretty sure I know nothing will work out in the end just based on my own pessimistic nature.

What the team on this book has managed to do in the first issue is create a compelling story with fantastic art, a well developed protagonist, and an overwhelming sense of “absolutely anything could, and probably will, happen on the next page.”

I’m really looking forward to the next issue to see how this whole strange ordeal unfolds.

Until next time, that sock monkey is evil as sin!