Rucka offers Golden Age Green Lantern Alan Scott as the voice of moderation, working within Checkmate to minimize casulaties.

To be sure, no one who dies is ever completely innocent, but the amount of killing is shocking all the same. In addition, Checkmate's plodding deliberation helps to balance some of the death and destruction caused by the team elsewhere in A King's Game's pages.įrom the first pages of A King's Game, we see the team-including former Justice Leaguer Fire-kill their enemies. Unlike the White House action of Ex Machina, Checkmate takes place in the UN, and there's an almost alarming amount of discussion here of resolutions, vetos, and national policies.ĭC Comics, to be sure, takes a risk in that Checkmate's intellectualism will turn off the casual reader, but presented here in trade form, I was pleased to find a comic that expects as much as Checkmate does from its reader. While there's action here, certainly, there's perhaps even more politicing. In other stories, a new recruit vies to be the Black Queen's Knight, and Amanda Waller secretly backs a Suicide Squad operation.Īt seven issues already, Checkmate is an especially thick read, perhaps the most dialogue-heavy comic I've read in a while. White King Alan Scott makes a deal for Checkmate's charted to be ratified, but loses his own position. A Checkmate team infiltrates a metahuman-creation plant in China, hoping to blackmail the country they find instead that the plant has been overtaken by Kobra. The Checkmate charter is vetoed by the Chinese UN representative, giving the organization only days to operate. Additionally, in DC Comic's somewhat kinder, gentler 'New Earth,' Checkmate offers a fascinating dose of moral ambiguity. Letting alone that the series contains a number of characters that Rucka created elsewhere, including Sasha Bordeaux, Jessica Midnight, and Jonah McCarthy, the tone of politics and espionage in Checkmate: A King's Game more closely matched Rucka's Queen and Country than anything before. Checkmate feels like the series, more than Detective Comics, Wonder Woman, or even Gotham Central, that Greg Rucka came to DC Comics to write.

Checkmate Vol. 1 by Greg Rucka