Most of us have felt allured by the fantasy of becoming a superhero or living in a comic book world where the rules of normal life are suspended. Comics are wonderfully varied across different genres, many of them filled with heroes and villains in epic, enduring battles between good and evil.
Vibrant and collectable, there is a rich world of comics that also tap into more adult themes, which can include storylines that incorporate high-risk situations in casinos. At online gambling sites such as those highly recommended by the casino experts at Legalbet.uk, some slot machines feature famous comic book characters
But how is gambling portrayed in the works of comic book fiction themselves? What is its significance in driving characters and storylines along?
Running the gambit
One of the most famous gambling comic book characters is Gambit from X-Men. Also known as Remy LeBeau, Gambit is a mysterious character with an air of cool sophistication. At times balancing the anti-hero role with dark complexity and a lack of trust in others, he also serves as an ally to the X-Men, albeit reluctantly at times.
A big part of Gambit’s character is his highly skilled gambling abilities, with Blackjack being his particular game of choice. That game has been used as a device several times in the X-Men comics to help drive a Gambit plot forward, such as the character needing money for one of his adventures, and also being willing to put everything on the line in deadly games with villains.
The Immortal Iron Fist is another to have used gambling to his benefit in a comic book plot so that he had enough funds to keep up with his superhero lifestyle. Gambling has been used plenty of times as a backstory for a character or even a vice.
But in that regard, gambling has not always been painted in the most positive light, and everyone back in the real world should certainly play far more responsibly than the popular comic book characters do.
Casinos in comics
The above is a good example of how gambling has found its way into comic books, but there have been other more direct ways, through settings. Macau, for example, one of the most popular real-world gambling locations has been featured in the Daredevil comics.
But what is interesting is that instead of a tourist-friendly destination, it was painted more as a New York-style cityscape, full of imposing skyscrapers and things were just a little seedy, with debauchery the baseline for what went on there.
Another example is the Batman comics, where corruption and crime are central themes to the world that The Penguin lives in. As the kingpin of the underworld in Gotham, The Penguin holds sway over the gambling world as part of his crime network, highlighted by the Iceberg Casino.
So elements like that have taken things away from the more realistic tourist traps that places like Las Vegas, Monaco and Macau are today.
Staying in the main central casino areas, people are safe and can enjoy fantastic hospitality. But that would be fairly boring in a story in a comic, so creative licensing allows a character to walk into a dangerous world of debauchery and danger as it packs a lot more punch.
High stakes
Nothing delivers drama like a high-risk showdown between heroes and villains, and arguably there is no place better suited to high-risk than a casino. Whether that’s for high-stakes money or even life-or-death situations, a fictional casino is the ideal setting for that. It’s where popular characters like Gambit and Harley Quinn have found themselves on plenty of occasions, mixing with extremely morally ambiguous people.
The art of gambling in comic books mostly leans towards villains and anti-heroes in stories, the latter treading the thin line between mortality and wrongdoing. Very often, any casino in comic books tends to have an air of excess, corruption and seedy villainy about them.
When gambling, players try to control chance, control luck, but somewhere just out of sight someone higher is pulling the strings, leading to great drama.
In conclusion
Gambling, whether it’s depicted through a casino setting or an actual game where tensions are high, is often a symbol of control and power in comic books. Wakanda in the Black Panther series, for example, has tightly government-controlled casinos, underlying that, while notorious crime lord Kingpin, runs an empire from his ring of casinos, doing everything from corruption to money laundering and extortion.
Gambling in the real world comes in many formats and online casinos provide players with a taste of a safe and licenced experience, far removed from the fictional world of comics and their colourful hoard of characters and dubious motives.
