Another week, another Infinite Crisis spin-off.  This time it's Checkmate, who played a big role in OMAC Project and now get their own series.  As regular readers know, I ran to the hills after a couple of weeks of Infinite Crisis build-up and never went near any of the tie-in books, so I'm approaching this on the basis that it damn well ought to be accessible, because there's a big sign on the cover saying "#1."

Well, the results of that theory are a bit mixed.  The good news is that we get a nice clear explanation of what Checkmate do, right at the start.  They're a "United Nations chartered metahuman monitoring force."  Spies who watch superhuman stuff, in other words.  We also open with a nice silent action sequence of some Checkmate operatives breaking into a base, which raises hopes that writer Greg Rucka will be able to deliver something along the lines of Queen & Country meets SHIELD - not a bad idea, in theory.

We've also got a good strong opening arc, with Checkmate trying to get UN sanction to continue operating permanently, and running into an unexpected attempt to block them.  Fine as an opening story.

But where the book falls down is in establishing the characters.  Page 4 confronts us with a dizzying twelve team members to keep track of, most of whom thankfully play almost no part in this book.  One of them appears to be Mr Terrific, a character design so absurd that he crashes straight through my suspension of belief and plummets to the ground below, and another rejoices in the name of Werner Vertigo.  Neither of these guys seems entirely at ease with the tone of the book.

The main cast for this issue, though, are Sasha Bordeaux, Jonah McCarthy and Fire out of the JLA (confusingly identified as Beatriz Dacosta for most of the issue until they suddenly start calling her Fire halfway through).  I've vaguely heard of Sasha and recall Rucka using her with a similar total lack of explanation in the first issue of OMAC Project, which was as far as I got with it.  I've got absolutely no idea who Jonah McCarthy is supposed to be.  Our attention is drawn to the fact that Checkmate is equally composed of superhumans and normal people, but I genuinely couldn't tell you which category half of these guys fit into - a little worrying if it's meant to be a key premise of the book.  Does Mr Terrific have powers or not?  I have no idea.

Ultimately, and regrettably, it falls into the trap of so many alleged jump-on points these days.  It's perfectly accessible, in the sense that you can understand the story without knowing anything that came before.  But without prior knowledge of the characters, you're unlikely to care.  Those readers who are already familiar with these characters may well get a lot more out of this than I did, but it doesn't really work for me.

Rating: B-

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