This heist could have been an email.

Greg Rucka and Nicola Scott’s Justice League: Cheetah & Cheshire Rob the Watchtower is awesome, what feels like the kind of world-building — or at least, world-using — that the DC Universe could benefit from. Familiar locales, familiar characters, some new characters with familiar ties — that much reminds of Rucka’s excellent Checkmate, and Scott’s presence evokes Gail Simone’s Secret Six, and that’s about the best pedigree you could ask for in a comic.

Much like Ram V’s The New Gods that I just finished, if Rucka and Scott follow this up soon with Cheshire & Cheetah Rob the Fortress of Solitude,¹ any mild discontent I have at the end here will be forgiven. And it’s not as though comics don’t leave things hanging as a general rule; maybe it’s that, with each of those books, the ends were so swift that it felt more unfinished than a cliffhanger (it’s not me, it’s them), or maybe it’s that, as opposed to Nicole Maines' Secret Six, I don’t see related projects from Rucka or Ram V already solicited, so that makes me worry a wrap-up sequel may never come (it’s not them, it’s me).

But better that Rucka should leave me wanting more than wanting less. Heist stories are hard, and 99% of the way, Rucka succeeds. If Cheetah & Cheshire stumbles slightly in the final analysis, I’ve definitely seen less ambitious books fare less well.

[Review contains spoilers]

There’s a lot in Cheetah that’s not accidental — Klarion the Witch Boy² selling out his crew to Black Adam isn’t accidental, Lian Harper seemingly having to take Cheetah’s place on the crew isn’t accidental. And so I wonder about a couple of moments in this book — when Cheshire and Cheetah talk about how Cheetah just helped Wonder Woman defeat the Sovereign, when Cheshire says that Cheetah and Wonder Woman are “like a Teen Titans slumber party! Loud and emotional and it always ends with somebody sobbing!”

That is, the book makes a specific point to underscore that Wonder Woman and Cheetah are frenemies, even if we didn’t already know that from Tom King’s Wonder Woman Vol. 2: Sacrifice or Rucka’s own Wonder Woman: Year One. So when it comes out in the end that Cheetah and Cheshire weren’t stealing the Power Bank, font of all the League’s powers, but actually a small idol that could be used to free Cheetah from the dark god Urzkartaga who abuses her, one has to wonder, couldn’t Cheetah have just presented this good idea to Wonder Woman? Wouldn’t Diana have gone along with it? Why was this whole thing even necessary?

It’s a final-pages hiccup that unfortunately mars everything that came before (such is the danger of a Rube Goldberg-type heist story). There’d be no problem if the Power Bank were the feint and the villains were after something else that equally needed to be stolen — that’s almost a given in this genre; it’s that in the end it’s questionable whether the idol needed to be stolen at all.

Further, I’m not sure Rucka plays fair with Cheetah and Cheshire’s initial discussion of stealing the Power Bank and the fact that they’re not actually stealing the Power Bank. “Fair” would be something the reader reads one way initially but then can read another way later with more knowledge; if Rucka left himself that out, I don’t see it. Worst is the possibility that what the creative team planned in the first issue somehow changed by the end such that the disparate parts of this miniseries can’t actually be reconciled.

Ultimately Cheetah dispatches Urzkartaga in about a page; that’s not really the thrust of the story, but it’s a swift end to the all-powerful being who looms over this story, and then a swift end to the story in general. We really don’t know Cheetah’s status now; other members of the crew get loot from the Watchtower, but I’m not sure why “this” is what Cheetah promised Klarion and why it matters to him; and we never find out why Cheetah calls Lian “Slick.”

That latter piece is significant, surely, because Cheshire asks Cheetah about it and Cheetah never gets a chance to answer — but it never comes back, the kind of thing maybe you don’t want to save for a sequel in case a sequel never comes. All of that, again, leads to the end of the story feeling hurried and unfinished, as if it needed a few more pages to complete.

But not any of that takes away from the fun. The recently resurrected Lian Harper is a favorite, and insofar as Cheetah and Cheshire have their names on the masthead, really this is Lian’s leading-character debut. Featherweight and Hazard are both great new/newly reintroduced characters with legacy ties, and among all of these there’s an appealing lack of capes and cowls. That’s in excellent contrast to Rucka and Scott’s fine use of the new Justice League Unlimited landscape — clock cameos as far reaching as the Big Three to Sideways, Misfit, Bunker, Spirit World’s Xanthe Zhou, and Flex Mentallo(!).

Hopefully other writers will pick up on this friendship between Cheshire and Cheetah. Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy are together, Joker bugs Luthor in Mark Waid’s World’s Finest, but we don’t as often (or recently as often) see these kinds of cross-series friendships of the kind when Kyle Rayner was keeping company with Donna Troy, for instance (or Kyle and Wally’s friendship, etc.).

Rucka doesn’t quite sell it — we’re meant to take for granted Cheetah and Cheshire know one another, that all the villains do, without getting any real sense of their prior interactions (and Cheshire, who once blew up a whole country, is markedly mild here) — but neither is their friendship that hard to believe.

Maybe Justice League: Cheetah & Cheshire Rob the Watchtower needed an ounce of Darkseid in it, some tie to the larger DC All In storyline like we’ve seen in about every other series and miniseries DC has published around this time. But this is enjoyable all told, rather what we want Greg Rucka’s return to the DC Universe to look like, and here’s hoping that portends more beyond just the new Batwoman series (though that’s welcome, too!).

[Includes original and variant covers]