Event Leviathan
…this is just two issues worth of story stretched into a six-issue miniseries.
Much of Bendis’ decompressed comics work over at Marvel didn’t bother me the way that it did other fans. Giving his characters’ dialogue time to breathe made things feel more natural and helped draw me in to their stories that much better. That being said, there still needs to be a good story backing things up and the matter of “Who is Leviathan?” isn’t it.
Well, it might’ve been if it wasn’t catastrophically mishandled in two ways. The first involves the characters working the case. The story starts off with Batman and Lois Lane investigating the wreckage of the A.R.G.U.S. headquarters that Leviathan blew up and finding a very traumatized and shell-shocked Steve Trevor inside. From there, the core cast grows to include Green Arrow, The Question, Plastic Man, Damien “Robin” Wayne, and Kate “Manhunter” Spencer. It’s what you’d call a pretty solid assemblage of investigators — if you were trying to undersell it.
The problem here is that it takes these characters (and a second group that’s introduced later) around five-sixths of the way through this story to finally get a clue as to who Leviathan really is. Before that they’re chasing at shadows and red herrings — one of whom happens to wear a Red Hood — and talking ominously about what this means for the DCU. When I say that this miniseries is just two issues of story, I’m really saying that’s how long it should’ve taken these characters working together to find out who Leviathan really is.
In the meantime, Bendis and artist Alex Maleev try their very best to invest the mood and overall style of this story with enough drama to keep the reader invested in it. For a while, this works really well. Bendis and Maleev have worked before on projects both great (“Daredevil”) and, uh “flawed, but enjoyable,” (“Scarlet”) and they usually bring out the best in each other in whatever they work on. Maleev fares better here because he’s completely in his element when being asked to draw the seedy underbelly of the DCU. He keeps the action looking interesting long after you start to realize that Bendis is just working the slow burn in ways that probably amused him, but are less entertaining for us readers.
Which brings us to this volume’s second big problem: Leviathan’s identity. If Bendis had done it right, then the reveal of who the big bad really is would’ve made sense after we’d picked up on the clues he left about it along the way. That doesn’t happen here. Instead, we get the reveal of a character so obscure that the writer likely picked him for the role because of that. So the mystery’s big reveal fizzles when we find out that “Who is Leviathan?” didn’t really matter. I could’ve been anyone — and I really have to wonder if editorial had to talk Bendis out of using Ambush Bug in the role.
That the identity of Leviathan is so obscure didn’t have to be as big of a problem as it turned out to be. Going back to my “two issues” complaint, if Batman, Lois, and company had found out Leviathan’s identity at the end of the second issue then we could’ve spent some time building up this character and showing why he fit the role. Bendis could’ve addressed any continuity issues with the character’s new mindset by giving us the “Villain’s Journey” by showing us just how he got to this point in the context of the miniseries itself. He could’ve even had all these superhero investigators piece it together themselves, giving them something else to do besides stand around and talk tough.
Yet he didn’t and we’re ultimately left with an event that has fallen flat, which makes the use of “Event” in its name look all the more like hubris. I’m not saying that there aren’t any entertaining parts here, Bendis is still too good a writer to not produce a few good scenes in this story, but I can’t say I’m interested in the future exploits of this new villain after seeing his unmasking here. I don’t think I’m alone here because a follow-up to this miniseries, “Event Leviathan: Checkmate” had its first three issues solicited before mysteriously disappearing from the shipping lists. No explanation was given, not even a “Because of the pandemic.” If it does resurface in the future, I can only hope that mood and style have been exchanged for density and smarts in the final product.
Oh, and one last thing: This volume also includes the “Superman: Leviathan Rising” one-shot which served to hype up this event. In addition to the Bendis/Paquette “Superman” story, we have Greg Rucka and Mike Perkins showing us what Lois Lane was up to when she found out her husband was missing, Marc Andreyko and Eduardo Pansica showing us the private lives of a couple of D.E.O. agents, and the aftermath of Jimmy Olsen’s Gorilla City press junket for his new book courtesy of Matt Fraction and Steve Lieber. Out of all these stories, Fraction and Lieber’s is far and away the best as it’s a funny and sublimely ridiculous romp that dives into headfirst into the craziness of the DCU. Said craziness involves a cat barfing blood over the Honeymoon Suite. So if “Event Leviathan” didn’t excite me for the further adventures of the title character, it did the exact opposite for the further adventures of Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen!