Leviathan Dawn #1 Review

The C-Team

Written By: Brian Michael Bendis

Art By: Alex Maleev, Joshua Reed

Cover Price: $4.99

Release Date: February 26, 2020

The mystery/thriller continues here and if you didn't get enough answers out of the main event before...... Well, don't expect much more here.  Yeah, that's pretty cynical right off the bat, but if you've walked down one Brian Michael Bendis story, you've pretty much walked down them all.... especially at DC Comics because nothing ever truly ends and nothing is ever truly answered.  It just keeps going until you've forgotten what was going on in the first place, but hopefully, this one-shot that leads to Leviathan Checkmate at least will remind everyone what went down in Event Leviathan and who the players involved are.  Let's jump into this issue and see if Leviathan will start getting straight forward with us. 

Yeah, if you read Event Leviathan you know exactly what you're going to get out of this over-sized one-shot because like that event you get a bunch of characters walking and talking, but no one really ever has anything to say and right when you think they're going to reveal something in their nonsense, sing-song dialog, they pull back and leave wondering what exactly is going on, but you don't have time to deal with that because before you know it you're moving on to a new character to deal with even if they really don't bring anything to the story overall.

Essentially though, this issue is about forming a team to strike back at Leviathan for what he did during his event and what he creates going forward from here, but the problem with that is it feels like Brian Michael Bendis decided that even though Checkmate was an organization from before, he plays it like it's something that he's creating here and all we get from that is the name and the characters that are going to be involved with his new Checkmate.  To get that though you just have to go through a bunch of vignettes about the characters that don't seem to add up to where they need to be by the end or even why they've been chosen to become a part of this group.

Check out our video review of Leviathan Dawn #1

All in all, this one-shot feels as boring as the previous Event Leviathan and does little to gain excitement for the Leviathan Checkmate coming down the line.  Like the Detective Squads that we got in that previous event, characters are just brought together for no real purpose and most don't have a lot to do in this issue.  The art by Alex Maleev maybe some people's jams, but it's not a style I'm really fond of and certain times when it seems that they want to show you who's involved with Leviathan I was left scratching my head at who they were by the way they were depicted here.  Not that the art is the only culprit of this because essentially, everyone feels like they have the same snarky voice and they all just love to hear themselves talk.  

Bits and Pieces:

After how lackluster the conclusion to Event Leviathan felt I was hoping that this one-shot would at least get me excited for what's to come in Leviathan Checkmate, but it felt exactly like it did before and left me bored throughout, to the point where I was simply page counting to know when it was going to be over because besides for putting a team together that felt out of nowhere, we're only given one big move by Leviathan here and like the reveal of who Leviathan was at the end of the previous event, this did nothing to "wow" me.

4/10