It sure looks like Jaime is dead, but there's nothing in this issue to confirm it.

Oh, wait, the solicit for #21 explicitly says he's dead. Good job with that cliffhanger, DC!

So yeah. Since I look at solicits when they're released, I came into this issue pretty much knowing that Jaime was toast. And I'm pretty mad/upset that Jaime was killed for reasons that aren't clear yet (Max hasn't used whatever knowledge he gleaned from studying the scarab to do anything but fight Jaime so far), but I'm trying not to let that color my impression of the issue too much.

And to be fair, this is far and away the best use of Jaime in this series thus far (Paco and Brenda even had a cameo! Hells yes!), so if he had to die, it's nice that he got to spend his final issue being awesome. I don't think he was used particularly well in this book as a whole, but this issue salvaged some of that.

Also, holy moly, we finally found out a little bit of Max's plan! I wanted to cry from happiness when he said he was using the JLI to make Checkmate look stupid. Nineteen issues is probably way too long to go until finding out why a team was formed, but I was so happy to get something resembling a reveal that I didn't care.

Art-wise, this book is wonky. Ice's costume continues to get more revealing without her ever actually changing clothes, all the characters with human faces look like they were made out of modeling clay, and everyone is extremely muscular, even characters who shouldn't be. However, the cover is gorgeous, and the splash panel of Checkmate is awesome, which together bump the art up a point.