Tuesday, July 27, 2021

Checkmate #2 Review




Gotta Get That Snowman's Ticket..... Whatever That Is!


Written By: Brian Michael Bendis
Art By: Alex Maleev, Dave Stewart, Josh Reed
Cover Price: $3.99
Release Date: July 27, 2021


The pseudo Checkmate story continues where Lois Lane and a ragtag group that is somehow known as the best detectives in the DC Universe have come together to take down Leviathan for destroying all the spy agencies on Earth and even though they'll tell you within this story how things have drastically changed... if you're reading any other DC Comics right now you know that they haven't and this title continues to feel too little too late...... not to mention, not very well thought out. Let's jump into this issue to see who stands around and talks in circles as we continue to learn about Mark Shaw and Leviathan. Let's check it out.


One of the big deals that were going on during Event Leviathan was General Sam Lane dying and talking about something called "The Snowman's Ticket" and as we saw in the previous issue when an agent of Leviathan offered Lois Lane a place among them and Lois only asked "Are you the Snowman's Ticket" that it seems like that aspect is going to continue here....... which is good because I seriously thought that it would never come up again but now that it has been brought back up, it seems like this damn phrase has become the end all be all, but still no one, including Leviathan knows what it means but knows it's important and it's the reason that he brought down all the spy agencies...... This is a rough issue.




Beyond the Snowman's Ticket though, we have Lois taken, jumps that go back and forth throughout time that might matter somewhere, Green Arrow and Question feeling odd in their dialog, Merlyn being a part of Leviathan out of nowhere and Damian Wayne being teleported to a kid's basketball game because he knows he's supposed to be there. There's a lot of things in this issue that will tell you they're important or elude to it but ultimately with the state of DC Comics and everything that I've seen leading up to this story, I have yet to see the importance in anything we've gotten so far.




All in all, the story is still very rough and meanders about while you constantly ask yourself what is the point to this but I'm not even sure that the creators know what the point to this is or if Bendis even knows the characters he's using/destroying to tell this Snowman's ticket spy story. Characters are used in weird ways, saying weird things and it even appears that a big character (to some) is killed off in this issue which should be huge, but I doubt anyone will be talking about and I doubt that this will remain canon for how out of continuity it feels already. As for the art, I'm not really a fan but as I've said before, for this "detective" story, it works fine for what it's doing for the most part, but there's strange choices in panels with what Alex Maleev wants to show and a lot of times these decisions lead to me wondering what the hell I'm looking at. 


Bits and Pieces:


Checkmate continues to disappoint as I wonder what the point is overall in not only the story but in the characters we love acting and sounding so strangely through Bendis' mind. Some things in this issue feel like they'd be big anywhere else but because they're done here in a story that has gone on too long without anyone really knowing what it's about, I can't bring myself to think that anything big that happens here matters anywhere else.


4/10

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