Renegade Royale

11 hours ago 3

Doris Sutherland | February 10, 2026

“Oh my God, fuck off, you Anne Rice-LARPing douche nozzles!”

So says Sasha as her virtual reality avatar, a gun-toting bounty hunter, confronts a pair of vampire-themed foes in a forest. The casual swearing is typical of the dialogue in Renegade Royale, as the competitive VR players who comprise the cast rarely make it through a double-page spread without the word “fuck” escaping their lips. In most cases, the presence of salty language in a book aimed at adults would barely be worth mentioning; it stands out here for the simple reason that, in every other respect, Renegade Royale could have been marketed as an all-ages comic.

The story confines its violence to virtual reality – and even there, all injuries are bloodless, with slain characters dissolving into pixels before waking up safe and sound in the physical realm. While the relationships on show are sufficiently non-cishet to rile the Elon Musks of this world, they are also thoroughly clean and chaste. Beneath all this, on the most fundamental level of emotion, what Renegade Royale captures more than anything else is the joy of the playground: that magical place where the grown-up world slips away long enough to let imagination reign supreme.

Renegade Royale is the sequel to 2021’s Renegade Rule, by the same team of writers Ben Khan and Rachel Silverstein and artist Sam Beck. The first book introduced the four-woman protagonist team as they made their mark in a futuristic gaming championship. This follow-up opens with most of the team still riding high from their second-place success; but one of their number, Tonya, is plagued with self-doubt. She blames herself for the gang’s failure to take the gold the first time around – and now, with a bigger and badder tournament on the horizon, she owes it to her teammates to pull herself together.

The game depicted here is not quite the same as that shown in Renegade Rule. That book included multiple virtual reality settings; this one is confined to a single realm that is mostly sword-and-sorcery flavoured, albeit with a few sci-fi touches. Previously, the game was team-based; it has now become a battle royale, with every player fighting for themselves. The four protagonists have formed an unofficial team of Tonya (samurai), Amanda (paladin), Jessie (catgirl, possibly inspired by Catra from the She-Ra cartoons) and Sasha (gunslinger). No longer, though, are they pitted against rival quartets, as they were in Renegade Rule – where one of the opposing teams consisted of male counterparts to Tonya and company.

More significant than any changes to the game’s world are the distinct ways in which the two volumes portray reality. The first book included a plot thread about Amanda’s desperation to wins she can pay her mother’s medical bills with the prize money. The stakes are lower this time around, with “winner even gets their character added to the official game lore” being the most material benefit of victory. The comic depicts a future in which the only conflict is virtual reality conflict, the game seemingly serving to stave off the end-of-history boredom envisioned by Francis Fukuyama.

A utopian subtext runs through Renegade Royale. Not only do the characters belong to a flourishing subculture that exists purely to have fun, they are able to have fun in an entirely generous, fair-minded way, with none of the toxicity that blights real-world gaming spaces. The four leads are racially diverse and uniformly queer: the wedding scene at the comic’s start, despite pairing a man with a woman, kicks away cisheteronormativity by putting the man in a dress and the woman in a tux. Yet at no point do they face either racism or queerophobia; this game world, where even the announcer is a drag queen, is an accepting one.

The all-round niceness of Renegade Royale extends as far as the comic’s central antagonists, KJ and Leaf Chesterfield. These two are defined as villains merely because they roleplay as villains. Where the four protagonists talk like people playing a game (“Maybe that meteor has power-up energy like in the game lore”), the Chesterfields throw themselves into their vampiric personas, delivering all of their lines in-character – in wrestling terms, they follow kayfabe – and becoming the Anne Rice LARPing douche nozzles so despised by Sasha. Outside of the game, though, KJ, Leaf and Sasha are free to meet up for a friendly coffee-shop chat; Leaf proudly sports a non-binary pride badge, confirming that in real life, all are on the same team.

That said, the story does make some gentle gestures towards real-world issues when exploring its main source of drama: Tonya’s battle with her self-esteem issues. In one scene, Tonya is told by Sasha that she has spent too much time letting “assholes like your dad, and Marissa” shape her future. Marissa is Tonya’s business-minded girlfriend, who works for the company that runs the VR game; as it happens, Tonya does not fit Marissa’s idea of a corporate-friendly star talent. Tonya’s father, meanwhile, is seen in a flashback prologue where Tonya, as a pyjama-clad child, accidentally breaks a vase with a toy sword. “I’ve had enough of this pretend-warrior crap in the house!” yells her dad. “Now clean this up, turn off the damn TV, and go to your room!”

Neither of these elements, however, gets much in the way of development. The Tonya/Marissa subplot is a minor one that gets wrapped up in three pages, with corporate politics going unmentioned afterwards. And while the opening flashback suggests that Tonya’s father tried to force her into a stereotyped gender role (“Be a young lady and behave for once”), this is no more than a hint: the rest of the sequence depicts an unremarkable scene of a parent being angry at a child for breaking a vase when she should have been in bed. That the relationship between the two had harsher aspects is left for the reader to infer. The emphasis is ultimately upon the unerring support Tonya receives from her present circle, rather than whatever strife might have lain in her past.

Like its characters, Renegade Royale’s heart lies in the Neverland-like pleasures of the game-world, where everybody has a sassy quip at hand, death lasts only until the next tournament, and the star prize is a self-esteem boost and the confirmation of a queer relationship. That said, there is little concern here for the exact mechanics of gameplay; nobody will confuse Renegade Royale for DIE, whose fictional RPG was so thoroughly-developed that it was released as an actual game. Only one specific mechanism – the opportunity to activate a superpowered mode after scoring enough kills – plays any role in the plot. Beyond this, the VR realm is one in which Tonya and company can enter a fray with whatever swords, guns and magic shields the latest action scene demands.

In drawing the Renegade books, artist Sam Beck leans into a chunky, colourful, cel-like aesthetic quite different from the more delicate style seen in her solo projects like Verse and Winter Parting. The artwork successfully evokes the feel of TV cartoons, particularly those ostensibly made for the tween demographic yet also attracting older audiences – again, She-Ra springs to mind. The fight scenes flow well, even with the story calling for laser-flinging chaos at every angle, and the simple-but-expressive characters are charming.

A curious detail, though, is that aside from the presence of obviously fantastical props like laser guns and flying islands, the comic’s artwork makes no stylistic distinction between the real and virtual worlds. The scene where Jessie marries her husband is just as bright, just as sparkling, just as evocative of unwrapping a brand new plastic toy, as the scene where Amanda cheerily swings her glowing sword to slice her foes into cyan pixels.

This is an entirely appropriate creative choice for a comic that offers an escapist fantasy about escapist fantasy. Renegade Royale takes us to a future in which adult concerns have been eliminated, allowing the childhood dream of an infinite playground to reign supreme. There is much to enjoy here, although getting into the right spirit might require consuming a substantial dose of sherbet.

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