Saturday, January 8, 2011

Who wants to be a bad-ass secrect agent for Checkmate?

I recently finished reading issue#2 of Checkmate Vol. II and again it just blew me away how art imitates life sometimes. For those of you who read this blog but don't really know anything about what Checkmate is it's time you did. Basically Checkmate is DC's version of S.H.I.E.L.D. in which the operation and command structure is based on the pieces of a chess board. There is a White King and White Queen (Amanda Waller) as well as a Black King and Black Queen. Each King and Queen has a Bishop and Knight. The Bishop acts as lieutenant/advisor to his or her King or Queen. The Knight acts more like a bodyguard and lead field operative on behalf of that King or Queen. Then you have the pawns, who are basically secret agents through out the world who do mostly recon., intel. gathering and sometimes sabotage or just blow shit up when needed like you see here.
The White royals deal mostly with internal Checkmate matters and Checkmate's place on the global political stage. The Black royals deal mostly with field operations. And oh boy we could sure use them to deal with iran's nuclear program about now like they dealt with this N.Korean missile base. Just as an interesting side note I'd like to mention that last month in S.F. there was a solidarity with N.Korea rally in which American "imperialism" and the "paranoid anti-communist" govt. of S.Korea where the real threats to stability of the Korean peninsula and most of Indo-China. Naturally the brutal dictatorship of Kim Jong Ill's regime with it's forced labor camps, starved population, 100% suppression of free speech/press was as usual conveniently over looked by this radical left fringe party. But that's just typical around where I live in which tyrants and terrorists are saints and saviors while everything that represents Western Civilization is inherently evil. But I digress, as the director of Task Force X and The White Queen, Amanda Waller is the lynch pin between Checkmate and The Suicide Squad. This resulted in a duality of roles for some personal such as Count Vertigo who is The White Queen's Knight and also is a regular on Squad missions. But in other cases such as with Fire, that duality didn't come so easily.
Although being the White Queen largely kept her out of the ops game officially she was still savvy enough politically to find round about ways to have Checkmate perform field operations beneficial to her agenda. And what she couldn't get Checkmate to do for her she usually had the The Suicide Squad to take care of covertly. Other times she went about getting things done is some rather unorthodox ways such as the method she utilized to getting Rick Flag out of jail in Asia. She "leaked" the intel. anonymously on his captivity under the radar to Bronze Tiger who she knew would take it upon himself to rescue Flag out of a sense of personal loyalty.

4 comments:

  1. Hmmm...would I like to fight the evils of the world without having to deal with the idiotic political dorks in the congress? Why yes, I believe I would! Field test me! Please! And do I get a gun?

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  2. Fire is a great part of Checkmate - I always like it when the ex-JLA roll their sleeves up. Or sets them on fire lol

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  3. I certainly like Checkmate much more than the JLA. Although Generation Lost is okay.
    The characters are better developed now, not just clowns. Always thought they had potencial, but were underdeveloped. Specialy Fire, Ice and Booster Gold.

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  4. well aside from her mention in this posting i've already had a posting about Fire. that is one multi faceted character that has certainly got my attention in the past couple of years.

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