3 out of 5

Once upon a time, there was an indie writer named Greg Rucka.  He was green to the comic world, having crossed over from books, but he brought a clear vision, propensity for writing female characters, and appreciation for crime / noir (then under-represented in comics) that rightfully grabbed him reader attention and paved the way for… DC comics!  Greg became one of those special few who worked for the Big Two but maintained his credibility, turning in exciting and solid work that combined his interests with comic book wackiness.  And then… the era of never-ending crossovers and events began.  First it was Infinite Crisis, and then 52, and then a million other things (both DC and Marvel were guilty of this), and unless your name is Grant Morrison and you’re crafting the crossovers, no writer survives this kind of nonsense unscathed.  Greg was swept up in the tidal wave of contributors, and while it offered a lot of cool opportunities, his Big Two writing would ne’er be the same again.

Not that Checkmate didn’t offer a lot promise, being exactly the kind of espionage / superhero mash-up that Greg always toyed with in his non-reality based titles: Checkmate, initially a covert ops group, is re-christened as a U.N. tasked cluster of operatives.  The “rule of two” requires the two sides of Checkmate – white and black – to be split between operations and analytics, as well as every super-powered member being balanced out by a human.  And as we kick off in media res, mid op, Checkmate’s first issue is the Queen & Country meets Suicide Squad dream it, I’d say, intends to be, with lusciously moody art by Jesus Saiz and wonderfully mature dialogue and smart action from Greg, grounding these motivations in the weird politics of a world with Supermans and Wonder Womans.

But, hey, the good stuff can only last so long.

The first sign of panic comes when Cliff Richards does an acceptable Saiz impression in issue 3; acceptable, but not Saiz.  Jesus is back in part 4, but we’re put on guard: when new series start experiencing crew shakeups early on, there’re always questions of timeline issues, or whether or not whichever crew member is being pulled away on another project, which only threatens dividing their focus.  Second hiccup comes the very next issue, when Saiz stops inking his own work and relents the job to Fernando Blanco.  It proves to be a good pairing for the most part, but it still lacks the moodiness of 100% Jesus.  At this point, though, Greg is still writing a pretty crackling tale that does its best to skirt the silliness of a guy in a jacket that says “Fair Play” (Mr. Terrific) sitting at a table with Suits, paralleling a building problem of keeping things all covert-op-y while dealing with larger than life characters.  There’s a willing suspension of disbelief, in other words – beyond the norm – because Greg writes things straight while more and more metas get added to the mix.

And then it sorta goes to shit in the next storyline, which switches to the actual Suicide Squad, doing usual Maria Hill secret nonsense, and drawn rather clunkily by the returning Richards.  The script tanks into melodrama, perhaps due to the sudden assistance-presence of Nunzio DeFillippis and Christina Weir, but maybe just because this is that issue of playing in the DC waters boiling over: you gotta crossover!  You gotta link to other storylines!  After doing his best to keep things tightly knit in the lead-in issues, these last two issues explode onto a bigger scene of soap opera and Mirror Master antics and you have no doubts you’re reading a Big Two book.

The original version of the trade (they were re-released in different collections some years after this edition) includes the covers, but otherwise its strictly a book-by-book collection.