Review: Checkmate trade paperback (DC Comics)

To be sure, Brian Michael Bendis' Checkmate is more of Event Leviathan. If pages upon pages of a motley collection of DC heroes standing around in darkened rooms talking in circles is your idea of fun (and indeed, that often is my idea of fun!), then Checkmate is a whole other helping of that. But this also means Checkmate is subject to the same criticisms as leveled against Event Leviathan — that it spends too long meandering, that it’s more concerned with only-occasionally witty banter than actual plot, that the story does not culminate so much as it just ends.

Added to that is that a giant chunk of one of Checkmate’s B-plots, which ends up factoring heavily in its conclusion, takes place not in the Checkmate collection at all, but in Bendis' Justice League Vol. 2: United Order. This is not a significant sin — most of the time I’d be all too pleased by these kinds of of-the-moment continuity ties, and I’m sure it all read great in monthly issues — but there’s no effort made within this collection specifically to direct the reader over there for more information.

Thus, reading Checkmate first and on its own, I felt as if pages were missing, or perhaps there was a plot that had to be truncated or was left vague for yet another sequel. That’s out of the Checkmate collection’s control, and yet it’s another hurdle for a book with already a lot stacked against it. I’d read more of Bendis' Checkmate — a spy story set against the backdrop of the DCU? Are you kidding? Of course! — but even for a fan, the particular patois wears thin in places here, and some of the stumbles in the characterization grate. More’s the pity for what was clearly supposed to be a big thing in the DCU, until it wasn’t any more.

[Review contains spoilers]

It probably doesn’t do the future of comics any good for a scene in a modern comic to have the most resonance only if you’ve been reading about the character on and off for the past 30-odd years. Then again, this is the book series that dropped Mark Shaw back on us apropos of nothing, so the long view is kind of the “Leviathan” books' bread and butter. As such, for me the most crackling scene in Checkmate is when Bendis brings in Allie, once famously living homeless in the Daily Planet building in 1990 (!), and reveals her as a Leviathan agent in confrontation with Lois Lane. Maybe that’s got the same effect even if you haven’t seen Allie in the background of Superman stories since 1987 (!!), but I doubt it.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

At a time when it’s common for charistmatic villains to be political metaphors, Bendis has been circumspect in that bent with Leviathan. But the leap is easy to make when it comes to Allie, a character whom we know has often been taken for granted by the Daily Planet elites, whom we know has struggled to make ends meet in the most prosperous city in the (fictional comics) world. Allie isn’t evil (or doesn’t see herself as such), I believe she genuinely feels bad about Lois Lane’s father’s death, but also she firmly believes a demagogue who tells her things haven’t gone her way because the world is broken and he’s the only one who can fix it (Shaw’s potential mind control substances aside).

Bendis could have used an extra from central casting, but his choice of Allie is very clever — someone who has legitimately been a friend to the Kents, someone entirely nonthreatening, and who might legitimately have a different worldview that also happens to be tied up in a world-conquering megalomaniac — and also a great reading of DCU history. This is a place where Checkmate is doing what we might hope it would, offering that kind of All the President’s Men abject paranoia in an office building kind of vibe, and with the weight of the history of the DCU behind it.

It’s this same kind of thing Bendis tries but doesn’t accomplish in the fourth issue, when Green Arrow and Manhunter Kate Spencer foil Leviathan’s Merlyn and Guardian on the Justice League satellite, but then recognize themselves as exposed to Leviathan’s weapons. What worked in Bendis' use of Allie does not work here; from the Justice League satellite of uncertain provenance to Bendis' unusually angry, violent Guardian, the same kind of attempts to use continuity as a touchstone fail when they don’t ring true. The villains are too ineffectual to be concerning, and when Bendis gets down to the suspense moment, when it seems Green Arrow and Manhunter might be most endangered, that danger has passed on the very next page.

This is how Checkmate mostly goes. In the climactic sequence, the main cast fights comics' umpteenth battle with Talia al Ghul while Leviathan Mark Shaw is dispensed with by a character we know nothing about (see the aforementioned Justice League: United Order). Ultimately Shaw is killed in part due to his perceived failure to lead Leviathan; the calmness of the sequence is fascinating, if not nearly comical, like the world’s worst 360-degree review. This is in line with how all along the Leviathan group has been part agreeable social movement, part diabolical villain organization, but equanimity is not perhaps what’s needed here when Checkmate is supposed to be coming to crescendo.

I’m not particularly sure if Bendis kills Shaw because Shaw’s story is over (rather quickly), or if Bendis perceives his own time to tell Shaw’s story is over (I see nothing new from Bendis in DC’s latest solicitations), or if the point of Event Leviathan storyline has always been the establishment of a new Checkmate, villains notwithstanding. Whichever, it mars Mark Shaw’s reputation as a villain in a way that I think is unfortunate; as grand as Leviathan Shaw was in Event Leviathan, he became less so amidst the goofy chaos of Action Comics Vol. 4: Metropolis Burning, and Checkmate completes his too-swift fall from grace.

2.25

Rating

Checkmate is everywhere now, or at least I’ve seen mention of it in Deathstroke Inc., Suicide Squad, and Wonder Woman, basically as a monolithic organization with infrastructure, as if someone did copy and paste on all mentions of the DEO and ARGUS. Checkmate, the book, doesn’t establish that, unless it’s in Justice League, but I’m guessing this is an example of the adage, “If you don’t nail down your comic book spy agency when you first introduce it, someone else is going to do it for you.” So it goes. I’ll be curious to see how Checkmate evolves in the DCU, and I would indeed read more from Brian Michael Bendis and artist Alex Maleev, but the chances seem small.

[Includes original and variant covers, character and logo designs]