Event Leviathan #1 Review

A Better World

Written By: Brian Michael Bendis

Art By: Alex Maleev, Joshua Reed

Cover Price: $3.99

Release Date: June 12, 2019

The risings and the specials are behind us and now it's time to finally get the event we've been waiting for and with it...... some answers..... because damn, I feel like for all the issues we had leading up to this that I really don't know much.  It's time for Leviathan, the organization and the person referring to themselves as Leviathan to get their plan of changing the world started now that they've taken down all the big organizations within the DCU.  Let's jump into this issue and see if we learn what phase 2 is.  Let's check it out.

While I was seriously looking forward to getting to the meat of the story this issue, what we get instead is a lot of the same as we have Batman and Lois Lane come to the site of another destroyed building, this one belonging to ARGUS, where they come across Steve Trevor.  That's about it though and for the most part, since we're just hanging in one location that's not that interesting, this issue came off as a bit of a bore both visually and story wise.  

Really, at one point I thought things were going to start picking up in the issue when we had Green Arrow show up to this ARGUS site, which is being called Odyssey and it itself is kind of ridiculous in the size of the building alone, but because we keep almost getting that this building is something more than it appears, but that's constantly interrupted........ back to the Green Arrow though, we saw him in DC's Year of the Villain, teaming up with Batgirl to take down Merlyn before all three came face to face with Leviathan's blue energy emitting monster and from there we saw Batgirl taken away and given an offer to join Leviathan.  Since then, I've been wanting to see what the next step to that story was and once Green Arrow showed up here I figured that's what we'd be getting, but instead we get nothing because Green Arrow just shows up and keeps his mouth shut about all of that and besides for shooting a tazer arrow at one point in the book, he doesn't have much to do here.

All in all, this does little to further what we've already seen from Leviathan, except for the fact that someone is left behind after a detonation to a building so that they're looked at as a suspect, but really, it seems that it's just whoever is the big character of that organization is left behind, while we're still left in the dark about what's happened to the people caught in these blue energy fields.  The art is fine in this issue, but because we're just standing in the rubble of a building, the visuals are a bit on the boring side.  This doesn't do much for me for a first issue, especially because of all the months of buildup leading to it, but we do get little steps forward here and now that this issue is out of the way, I expect......... or maybe I just hope we'll be getting the story coming at us full stream from here on out.

Bits and Pieces:

The first issue to this event comes off as a bit of a bore in my mind because we really don't do much to further what we already know from all the prologues and specials proceeding this.  The art is fine, but because of the lack of any real backgrounds aside from rubble, it comes off a bit boring too.  This isn't the best of first issues to something, but I still look forward to this event wowing in the months ahead and hope that this was just a necessary issue to catch people up.

6/10