In 2005, Fantasy Flight’s new edition of Richard Launius’s rather dated 1987 board game brought the co-operative, Lovecraftian horror game up to date. It had lavish production values, including beautiful artwork throughout, and updated, modernised game mechanics. The second edition of Arkham Horror was a hugely successful and perennially popular game, but it had a few niggling issues (an unwieldily huge board was a problem for anyone with a normal sized table, for one thing), and it was replaced by a third edition in 2018. This edition streamlined and modernised the game once more, with a modular board and other improvements.

The Arkham Horror branding was used for other games, with the same characters, settings and monsters popping up in other titles, such as Arkham Horror: The Card Game and Elder Sign (a dice game based in the Arkham Horror universe).

Numerous novels have been released based on the characters and lore of the game, with the appetite for 1920s-set, Lovecraftian cosmic horror apparently being endless among fans.

And now we have the first comic based on Arkham Horror, with The Terror at the End of Time, written by Cullen Bunn; he’s no stranger to cosmic horror in a period setting, having penned the superb Weird West series, The Sixth Gun.

Socialite Jenny Barnes is searching for her sister, who’s been abducted by sinister cultists. The cultists summoned some very nasty creatures from beyond the Earthly realm, and Jenny was able to thwart their plans, but her sister remains missing. Enlisting cynical private eye Joe Diamond to help her, the pair must work together to find Jenny’s sister, but there’s something incredibly sinister going on, and it’s more than just nasty, tentacled things from beyond.

This is a great start; Bunn writes in a fairly minimalist manner, with less tell and more show, the characters revealing themselves in little snippets of dialogue and their actions. Andrea Mutti’s art gives the comic an appropriately period feel, with some noir-esque touches and excellent rendering of the supernatural elements in the story. Vallerio Alloro’s muted palette of colours also reinforces the period and noir feel of the story.

The story itself moves at a good pace too, with a surprising third act and a great cliffhanger to nudge you in the direction of the second issue. Though familiarity with Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos might be a bonus, it’s definitely not necessary; nor is familiarity with the Arkham Horror games, even though several characters are drawn directly from it. I liked the fact that, just like in the board game, Jenny Barnes is most definitely not a damsel in distress, and in fact refuses to be one. She duel wields pistols like a John Woo protagonist, and it’s great to see this taken directly from the game.

Fun fact: Arkham Horror was the very first board game I ever reviewed for a now defunct website; being a fan of cosmic horror (and Lovecraft’s fiction, but, as the disclaimer always goes, not of the horrifically racist writer himself), it was always going to appeal to me, and I have a real soft spot for the updated edition.

Even though I was looking forward to this comic adaptation of the game, I was cautiously optimistic; I needn’t have worried, because with Bunn, Mutti and Alloro as the creative team, it’s in very capable hands.