Posted By Dan Greenfield on Oct 16, 2025 | 6 comments

The celebrated Mr. K celebrates Checkmate’s arrival in screendom’s DCU…

By PAUL KUPPERBERG

Almost exactly four years to the day before the reveal on the Season 2 finale of Peacemaker, I responded to a text asking what announcement we would make if we could about any DC character, movie, TV show, or comic book at DC Fandome, “A Checkmate series from James Gunn!”

To which James Gunn replied, “Now there’s a thought.”

I already knew he was aware of Checkmate. A few months earlier, the writer/director had Tweeted, “The Doom Patrol Vs. Suicide Squad was definitely influential, as was Checkmate (a delightful series), as was Paul’s Peacemaker. This is all stuff I read or reread while writing the (The Suicide Squad) screenplay.”

But when it finally happened, I was apparently among the last to see it coming. The truth is, I wasn’t really all that conversant with what happened to Checkmate, the organization, after Checkmate, the comic book was cancelled in 1991. I scanned the early issues of, but didn’t really read, Greg Rucka’s 2006 reboot, or Brian Michael Bendis’ 2021 miniseries. I’m sure both were fine and dandy, but I didn’t have the heart to see what these two strangers had done to my baby, so I wasn’t aware of who Sasha Bordeaux was or her ties to Checkmate.

So, despite the fact that I created the organization in the eponymous 1988 comic book series Checkmate! (with artist Steve Erwin), when the camera panned up from Christopher Smith and the line of heroes to the building façade to reveal the Checkmate logo over the slogan “Making the World Better,” I had been expecting instead to see the name “Pax Institute,” the organization I’d concocted for Peacemaker in the 1988 miniseries (which was at least an improvement over Smith’s Charlton Comics HQ, then known as the “Peace Palace”).

Checkmate! was an outgrowth of my earlier work on Vigilante, the series into which I had brought Peacemaker (#36, December 1986) after his earlier brief appearance in Crisis on Infinite Earths #6 (September 1985). When that ended, I spun some of Vig’s supporting cast off into the new series, about a DCU super-secret spy organization that based its hierarchy on the game of chess, and Peacemaker came along for several memorable appearances, most notably during the 1989 Checkmate!/Suicide Squad “Janus Directive” crossover… which, as you’ll recall from the earlier quoted Tweet from James Gunn, “was definitely influential” in writing the screenplay for The Suicide Squad.

I’ve never made a secret of my love for DC Comics… not the physical company, per se, but the universe of characters and ideas it’s spawned over the past 90 years. Comics were the life rafts that kept me afloat as an unhappy child, the hobby that formed the center of my social life as an adolescent, and the creative outlet that supported me and my family for 50 years.

So whatever Gunn’s plans are for Checkmate on the big screen or small, whether it will be its own show or play a role in another franchise, and even though it’s obviously going to be based on Rucka’s revamp concept rather than my original version, I’m thrilled that my creations and ideas have not only survived the test of time, but are serving as springboards for the next generation of heroic storytelling.

Peace out!

—

MORE

— PAUL KUPPERBERG: My 13 Favorite PEACEMAKER COMIC BOOK Moments. Click here.

— 13 CHECKMATE COVERS Just Because It Was a Cool Series. Click here.

—

PAUL KUPPERBERG was a Silver Age fan who grew up to become a Bronze Age comic book creator, writer of Superman, the Doom Patrol, and Green Lantern, creator of Arion Lord of Atlantis, Checkmate, and Takion, and slayer of Aquababy, Archie, and Vigilante. He is the Harvey and Eisner Award nominated writer of Archie Comics’ Life with Archie, and his YA novel Kevin was nominated for a GLAAD media award and won a Scribe Award from the IAMTW. Check out his new memoir, Panel by Panel: My Comic Book Life. 

Website: https://www.paulkupperberg.net/

Shop: https://www.paulkupperberg.net/shop-1