Review: Blue and Gold

A comic book series teaming Booster Gold and Blue Beetle is something that I've heard fans asking for since about the time I started reading comics. For some reason, DC finally decided to pull the trigger on it in 2021, launching Blue and Gold by writer (and Booster Gold creator) Dan Jurgens and artist Ryan Sook.

It apparently proved to be the wrong time, as the book lasted only eight issues. (By way of contrast, Jurgens' last Booster Gold series, which launched in 2007, lasted 47 issues, until it was canceled as part of the New 52 initiative.) That means DC must have decided to axe Blue and Gold around the time the first issue or two were being released.  

This makes the last issue particularly interesting. The two characters are sitting around talking to their friend and partner Terri Collins (Originally Trixie, from the first, 1986 Booster Gold series). The subject is the new endeavor that they've been trying to get off the ground, a crowd-funded personal superhero service for people who need help but can't get Superman or Batman's attention, but it sounds pretty clear they're talking about something else. 

"They believe in your mission and contributed," Terri tells Beetle of all their fans. "But to sustain an expensive operation like this, we need the kind of money they don't have."

"A great idea like ours should have worldwide support!" Booster laments. "So where is it?"

"Sometimes, great ideas die because they're ahead of their time or people don't understand how to manage them," Beetle says. "We gave it our best shot, Booster."

So, what went wrong? Honestly, having just read the book's entire run in a surprisingly hard to find trade paperback (more on that later), I don't really have any good theories. 

Jurgens' plotting isn't exactly original, and I personally found at least one aspect of it pretty irritating, but he obviously gets the characters just fine, indulges in the expected nostalgia service to fans and presents a perfectly decent superhero comic, of the very same sort he did with the previously mentioned 21st century Booster Gold comic. 

While Ryan Sook's art isn't necessarily to my liking (its sense of realism gives off uncanny valley vibes to me), he's a talented and well-liked artist. He doesn't draw all of the book, of course (He handles five issues, and parts of a sixth), but all of the guest artists are great ones (Cully Hamner, Phil Hester, Paul Pelletier and a strategically deployed Kevin Maguire plus Jurgens himself). 

And it plays nice enough with the DCU, featuring an appearance by the then-current Justice League in the first issue (That would be the Brian Michael Bendis one, which I never read any of; maybe a League prominently featuring Naomi and Black Adam isn't the sales-booster that other Leagues have been?), appearances by Batman and Guy Gardner (both in the present as well as in flashback), guest-star Jamie Reyes (in an issue with a nice cover) and connectivity to ongoing continuity. (Although I must confess I have no idea how it is that Blue Beetle came back to life after his death in 2005's Countdown to Infinite Crisis; was he resurrected via time travel shenanigans in the pages of Booster Gold and I simply forgot about it, or just rebooted back to the land of the living through DC's series of continuity reboots between the New 52 and Dark Nights: Death Metal...?)

So, I guess I'm just going to assume it was a matter of timing, and that the market and the fans just weren't ready for a nostalgia-driven, comedy-infused superhero book featuring a pair of characters best known for a decades-old run on the Justice League franchise. At least, not on an ongoing basis. 

Jurgens kicks the book off with a Justice League adjacent story, which is more than appropriate given the fact that most readers most associate the leads with their time on the League...as well as the fact that a Justice League appearance is usually a pretty good way to ensure a certain number of eyeballs (It certainly got me to check out 1997's Resurrection Man #1!).

The League has been defeated and are currently being held captive aboard a huge alien spaceship, which is about to leave Earth orbit with them. A live-streaming Booster Gold  intervenes (seen by viewers on "Instaslam Live," one of the many, many mentions of off-brand, DCU answers to real-world social media that pepper the book), but his suit's powers prove no match for the ship's defenses.

With Booster on the ropes, Skeets recruits Ted Kord to help, and before long his beetle-shaped ship makes the scene. Together, the heroes are able to infiltrate the ship, and Skeets and Beetle manage to hack its computers, saving the League.

Afterwards, Booster is confident the League will offer them membership (Not a crazy assumption, given this line-up has Hippolyta, Naomi and Black Adam), but when Booster is out of earshot, they instead offer membership to Beetle only, not accepting the pair as a package deal. Beetle declines, later telling Booster they didn't want either of them. 

As for that actively irritating bit, Jurgens includes little narration boxes in many of the panels featuring Booster's social media followers commenting on the action, adding another, very busy narrative thread to that of the art and dialogue for readers, and it makes for panels so dense that I honestly stopped reading these at some point, as they come and go throughout the book. 

(To make them somewhat more interesting, two of the commenters appear to be Bibbo Bibbowski, whose handle is "b-bo" and who spells Superman the same way he pronounces it for some reason, and Guy Gardner, whose handles is "gg." Two other frequent commenters, each a young, female superfan of one of the leads, will appear in person later in the book.)

After a bit of status quo readjusting—Ted is fired from Kord Industries, cutting off his access to their tech and, more importantly, their funding—the pair turn to crowd-funding for their new venture. This is a social media-driven, store-front superhero business they call "Blue and Gold Restoration" (which really sounds like they fix houses), one that promises easy access to their customers and help in areas often overlooked by League-level heroes, from rescuing cats from trees to investigating haunted houses to dealing with alien abduction.

This may sound a bit familiar, as it's not too far removed from their venture with other JLI alum in Formerly Known as The Justice League and "I Can't Believe It's Not The Justice League", and reminiscent both of Marvel's original Heroes for Hire concept (which Jurgens has a reporter at a press conference mention) or even what Fire and Ice were up to in their recent miniseries, which actually followed the cancellation of Blue and Gold). 

If that concept seems intriguing to you, don't get too excited. It's mostly confined to the background of the goings-on, a goal our heroes work towards as they are constantly interrupted by fallout from their defeat of the alien ship in the first issue. An alien princess named Omnizon has come to Earth to claim it as a possession of her home planet, as they planted the high-tech equivalent of a "flag" on it and claimed it as their own 70,000 years ago, well before any modern governments had formed or there were any superheroes around to oppose them.

This conflict will fill most of the first six-issues, which, honestly, wouldn't have been a bad miniseries, setting up a new status quo for the two heroes, and giving them a point from which Jurgens and other creators could launch further miniseries or anthology shorts, or have them guest-star in other books. 

Joining our heroes are a Kord-invented, female-voiced floating robot personal assistant named "Buggles" that gives him his own Skeets (and gives Skeets someone else to talk to), and Rip Hunter, who Jurgens established an important, if secret, connection to Booster during the character's second ongoing. (In fact, Rip basically saves the title characters from Omnizon and her people, rather undercutting their efficacy as superheroes.)

Probably the highlight of these half-dozen coulda-been-a-miniseries issues is issue #4, "Spllittin' Image," which provides the most direct shot of nostalgia. Sook handles the "present day" art, depicting Booster and Beetle during a live televison interview about Blue and Gold Restoration. 

When the subject rolls around to how they first became friends, they each tell their own version of the same story, in which they battle Blackguard shortly after Booster joined the Justice League. Kevin Maguire, the artist most associated with what we now refer to as the JLI era, draws the seven pages or so that depict Beetle's version of the story (which also includes Guy, Batman and a group shot of the team), while Jurgens himself draws those devoted to Booster's version (with the same guest-stars).

Ultimately, Guy Gardner crashes the interview ("Time to set the record STRAIGHT", the social media account belonging to "gg" says just before Guy appears), and tells the real version, in which Batman sends him in to rescue Blue Beetle and Booster both from Blackguard (Maguire and Jurgens split the art duties on Guy's version of the story). 

As for the last two issues, these read more-or-less like Jurgens starting a new arc and then wrapping it up more quickly than expected, establishing the characters' new status quo in a way that is more sustainable than their trouble securing funding from their fans and/or having DC continue to publish their book would suggest. 

Guest artists Pelletier and Hester split art duties on issue #7, while Sook pencils the entirety of #8. New Blue Beetle Jamie Reyes (the Blue Beetle with the most recent solo titles and a live-action movie) comes to visit Blue and Gold and is attacked off-panel by a mystery villain who turns out to be The Black Beetle, a time-travelling villain from Jurgens' most-recent Booster Gold series with a mysterious connection to our heroes. That connection is revealed as he's defeated and, after some hang-out time, the title characters meet with Terry and discuss their failure.

At the last minute, the DC hero with the biggest back account swoops in to save Blue and Gold Restoration with a pretty massive donation, allowing our heroes' free superhero services to apparently carry on beyond the pages of this book ("Definitely Not... ...The END!" a last-panel tag reads, although I don't know that we've seen the heroes since, have we...? As with a similar tag in the last panel of Gail Simone and Adriana Melo's Plastic Man, that seems to have been an aspirational promise of future adventures, rather than a promise from the publisher).

Of course, in the real world, there was no benevolent billionaire to continue to fund Jurgens, Sook and company's work, and thus Blue and Gold didn't last beyond that issue. 

As to why I am reading this trade in 2025, after having passed on both the serially-published comics and the trade's initial release (So, um, as a fan of the characters who didn't buy any of their comics, I suppose I'm part of the reason the book didn't make it), well, I was reminded of its existence after reading Fire & Ice: Welcome to Smallville last October.

I was surprised to find out that the consortium of libraries that the library I work at shares materials with (which is based in Cleveland and is comprised of over 40 library systems all over northeast Ohio) didn't have any copies of the trade at all. 

So instead, I turned to my hometown library. They didn't have a copy either, but the consortium they belong to had a single copy, at Way Public Library in Perrysburg, about two hours away. I reserved it last fall, and it just now became available.

So Blue and Gold apparently didn't prove too terribly popular with Ohio libraries either, I guess...

Trades I Waited For (Pt 3): Booster Gold: Past Imperfect

I’ve often wondered why the Booster Gold character is popular, if it was because of some element of creator Dan Jurgens’ inspirations for the character and his initial run on the 1986-launched, 25-issue-long series, or if it was because of Keith Giffen and DeMatteis’ re-creation of the character as a central part of their ensemble Justice League cast from the late eighties and early nineties.

Okay, “often” is overselling it. I’ve actually only wondered about it like once or twice, when DC handed the last volume of the series over to him after the Geoff Johns/Jeff Katz run that kicked off the new title, and returned it to him after the brief Giffen/DeMatteis run, the first half of which comprises the contents of Booster Gold: Past Imperfect.

(More often I’ve wondered why the hell the character is named “Booster Gold.” I still don’t know).

This trade seemed to offer an opportunity to at least examine the different takes, as it featured the writing team perhaps most popularly associated with the character scripting his adventures on what is essentially the Jurgens’ version of the character’s book (Remember, Jurgens runs bookend Giffen/DeMatteis’ here, and this is at least semi-serious Booster Gold as solo adventurer, not part of a wacky ensemble).

DC found a pretty perfect collaborator for the writing team with Chris Batista, who shares many of the same virtues and their most famous artistic collaborator, Kevin Maguire, without actually being Kevin Maguire, allowing him to strike a better balance between the Bw-ha-ha and straight Booster a bit better than Maguire might have been able too.

Not that Maguire is absent, of course; he provided the covers for the first five issues, including these two, which I really liked:Giffen and Maguire open with Booster doing the sort of thing he does now, visiting a point in DCU history in order to perform a task for Rip Hunter, Time Master (here he’s at the destruction of Daxam in the 30th Century…which is part of “The Great Darkness Saga” or some Legion thing I’ve never read, I think) where he battles the Emerald Empress and picks up an adorable orphaned moppet, who provides a verbal sparring partner for Rip.

From there, much of the book involves Booster’s efforts to prove to the world that the post-Brightest Day Maxwell Lord is actually an evil son of a bitch who wants to exterminate super-humanity, but, as in Justice League: Generation Lost, only he and a few old teammates remember Lord or his evil deeds.

So Booster goes back in time to the days of the JLI seeking proof, and ends up getting extremely sidetracked hanging out with his friends.

Unsurprisingly, Giffen and DeMatteis excel at these portions, and they continue to effortlessly write these characters and revisit old routines. Few characters and concepts are as well-suited to such blatant nostalgia as Booster Gold, a character whose current status quo is that he can travel back to the good old days at will.

Among the many running gags they fill the storyline with is that everyone immediately sees through Booster’s attempt to disguise himself as his own younger self in order to infiltrate the JLI, and while there’s a decent chunk of time spent featuring Booster bouncing around the embassy and revisiting the cast, a tangent adventure is quickly embarked upon, and Booster and the past era’s Blue Beetle, Mr. Miracle and Big Barda visit an alien planet for an adventure, and Giffen and DeMatteis pull off a neat trick of giving the audience what we think we want, except one of the characters is now a chipmunk…?After the JLI storyline, Booster travels back to World War II in order to team up with another old JLI character, Captain America parody General Glory.

It’s all fast-paced, fun, funny stuff, and while I can see who Giffen and DeMatteis’ quirks might not be to everyone’s tastes (I don’t think all of their gags land, but they tell enough that it hardly matters whether even 75% of them are funny or not; rare is a whole page without a successful gag), it tasted fine to me.

I look forward to the next collection, which I imagine will finish up the remaining five issues of their run on the book.

Dear next Booster Gold writer, may I make a suggestion or 65?

When seeking cannon fodder to fill-up an alternate timeline in the current Booster Gold story arc, writers Jeff Katz and Geoff Johns unearthed Max Allan Collins and Terry Beatty’s Wild Dog, a super-vigilante character that starred in all of five comics in the late ‘80s.

I can see that the appeal of the Booster Gold title could be quite limited, but the fact that it’s a book in which Wild Dog can appear is one of its greatest strengths. It’s a comic book about the time stream of the DCU, which means it’s also a comic book about DC comics and the company’s publishing history and, thanks to the smaller outfits they’ve gobbled up over the years, that’s a lot of comics and characters. No matter when the comics were published or when they were set, characters and story elements from them can turn up in Booster Gold.

So far our hero’s teamed up with the Silver Age Flash, lost a drinking contest to deformed cowboy Jonah Hex, nearly got killed by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s notorious Batman: The Killing Joke one-shot and crossed-over with 14-year-old event comic Zero Hour.

Recently it’s been announced that Katz and Johns will be leaving the title after just four more issues. Does that mean the series is doomed, or will a new writer be able to keep it going?

I hope the latter. After all, there are a lot more stories I’d like to see. Sixty-five of them, to be exact.

For example, in no particular order…

The 853rd Century’s Legion of Executive Familiars
Enemy Ace and Balloon Buster
Biff Bradley
Slam Bradley
The Crimson Avenger (hat, not fin)
The original Global Guardians line-up
Viking Prince
The All-Star Squadron
The Young All-Stars
The Justice Experience
Zatara, two-fisted magician
The Red Bee
Vandal Savage and Ra’s Al Ghul…in the Jazz Age
Uncle Sam
Robby Reed
Pablo Picasso (stealth crossover with The Salon)
The Losers
The original Red Tornado (with the bucket helmet)
Pre-butler Alfred Pennyworth
The Old Gods (the ones who died to make way for the New Gods)
Arion and/or Atlan
Elongated Man and Sue (Showcase Presents era)
The Haney Batman, complete with Whirly-Bat
A Post-Infinite Crisis version of Wonder Tot
Streaky the Super-Cat and/or Comet the Super-Horse
Davy Crocket
Abraham Lincoln
QWSP (mischievous, not malevolent)
The Jester
Golden Age Airwave
Some New Bloods (I like Nightblade, Sparx and Anima best)
Rex the Wonder Dog, from back in the day
Superboy and The Ravers (featuring Rex the Wonder Dog from the ‘90s)
The lady versions of Wildcat and Dr. Mid-Nite (and their terrible, terrible costumes)
The Golden Age Manhunter (the one with the dog)
Signalman (pre-Meltzer)
Claw the Unconquered
The Vigilante (cowboy version)
The Inferior Five
Captain Compass
King Faraday
The (late) Question
The Justice League that only existed in 52 #24
The Justice League from right after Superman died (the one with Agent Liberty, The Ray and Black Condor)
Tomahawk
Aztek
Golden Arrow
Azrael, The Eradicator and Artemis
Red-suit Hawkman
The Blackhawks
Sugar and Spike
Edgar Allen Poe
Jonah Hex from Hex
Wesley Dodds, all Sandman Mystery Theatre-ed out
The Forgotten Heroes (this version)
Conner Hawke, Tim Drake, Koryak, Impulse and Cassie Sandsmark
Grown-up Lian Harper
The Unknown Soldier and Human Target
Elongated Man and Plastic Man
Superman, King of the World
Blue Devil (Year One)
The original Robotman
The Heckler
Primal Force

BOOSTER GOLD

likes to write letters to Ben & Jerry's corportate headquarters to see if they would be interested in producing a Booster Gold signature flavor.

From the Pages of 52

Ready for the second round of the Official EDILW 52 Post-Game Armchair Editing? You know I am!

In this installment, we're going to take a look at how DC could best capitalize on the success of 52, both creatively and commercially. So we'll be breaking spin-offs into three categories: The comics that DC has already announced, the ones they should announce, and the ones they shouldn't announce.

Each series, be it imminent or hypothetical, will be followed by two scores, with the first number designating the project's creative potential on a scale of one to ten (with one being World War III and ten being All-Star Superman), and the second number designating the project's commercial potential (with a one being Manhunter and a 10 being Justice).



Comics That DC Has Already Announced:







BLACK ADAM

There's no question that 52 (and Geoff Johns' JSA run before it) made a star out of Captain Marvel's evil double, so finally giving him a book of his own to star in was a no-brainer. It's somewhat odd to see it coming so soon after the end of 52 though, since he was given a rather elegant send-off into limbo (not the bit with the boots, but the end of #50, where he's left wandering the world guessing his new magic word).

Re-powering him in the near future should probve problematic (dude is up there with Hitler in terms of bodycount now, right?), although his series could very well focus on his past, or, even more interestingly, as his presnet stuck in Teth-Adam form. Can DC resist temptation and keep him a powerless human being throughout an entire series? It will be interesting to see. Writer Peter Tomasi's Light Brigade was a very good series, penciller Dough Mahnke is an incredible talent, able to handle quiet emotion even better than big supehero brawls (which he does quite well, as his run on JLA proved), and inker Christian Alamy rules the school, on both pencils and inks. 7/10









BOOSTER GOLD

Now this is something of a surprise, even though I didn't really believe that Booster had died way back in Week 15, and he was long my prime suspect for Supernova. But on the list entitled DC Characters That Are Capable of Carrying Their Own Monthly In Today's Market, I'd suspect Booster Gold to be somewhere between Martian Manhunter and Space Cabby (Fercrisakes, I can barely take his name as the name of a superhero seriously, let alone as a title of a good comic book, and I love the lug). Nevertheless, the very last issue of 52 seems to have given his book a neat premise, even neater than the time-travel focus that was mentioned when it was first announced (which would have made it like the ill-fated but excellent series Chronos), since it now seems he'll be exploring the new, economy sized multiverse (which would make it more like Exiles, I guess).

Plus, he's got a cast including Supernova, Rip Hunter and Skeets, so that's something (now just add a Ted Kord to the mix—shouldn't be too hard to save him from death using time travel a la Marvel's Captain Marvel and a few dozen other super-characters I can think of—and we're really cooking). Based on the cover, the first storyline will involve Booster journeying to an earth where pre-invasion Iraq was run by a Baathist regime consisting of characters throughout the old DC multiverse, and he's hunting them down for the U.S. marines.

The announced creators are, at the outset, Johns and Jeff Katz. As an architect of the new multiverse, Johns is obviously a perfect choice. I'm less sure about this Katz character, mainly because DC hasn't had much luck (creatively or commercially) with recruiting professional writers from other media to handle their characters of late (Think those knuckleheads who wrote Flash: The Fastest Man Alive, Jodi Picoult, Tad Williams, John Rogers and Richard Donner*).

Art comes courtesy of penciller Dan Jurgens. I really like seeing an artist of his caliber drawing characters primarily known by other talents (on that cover above, for example, we get to see a Jurgens version of Frank MIller character and a C.C. Beck character). The cheif (okay, only) pleasure of that ill-considered ten-part "History of The DCU" that ran in the back of the first ten issues of 52 was seeing Jurgens "covering" other artists throughout this series. 8/10







52 AFTERMATH: THE FOUR HORSEMEN

Now this is weird, on just about every level. The Four Horsemen? They only appeared in a few issues of 52, and were all killed in thier last appearances (one is even currently a pair of boots, which should be showing up in Black Adam at some point). Weirder still is that DC is calling this book 52 Aftermath—it weakens what is currently a pretty strong brand (in the same way that putting "from the pages of 52" atop the World War III books did), and how is it that those five words are somehow deemed more likely to move books off the shelves than the names of DC's top three icons?

I've got next to nothing to go on here, but I suppose it's nice to see DC's "Trinity" actually doing something together. I've said before that I think the concept is more than a little forced (Sure, Wonder Woman is the third most well-known DC character, but there's as big a gap between her overall Q-rating and that of Superman and Batman's, and a much, much smaller gap between hers and, say, Robin, Aquaman, Supergirl or even the Flash). Superman and Batman seem to team up a couple times a week—they even share an ongoing title devoted to their team-ups—but how often does Wonder Woman get included in their adventures unless there's a whole Justice League involved? Rarely, to the point of hardly ever.

On the positive side, it's written by Keith Giffen, who should reeaallly be doing some more writing at DC these days, and drawn by 52 pencil army veteran Patrick Olliffe, whose art I look forward to seeing in a less deadline pressurized book. 5/5




INFINITY INC.

No cover image of this book yet, nor has an artist been announced (or, if there has, I totally forgot who it was), but this was actually one of the earliest 52 spin-offs announced. It's also one that perplexes me. I really dig Steel; I have since "Reign of the Superman." Morrison and Waid used him quite brilliantly in JLA (though I was more than a little irritated that Waid dumped him from the line-up when he inherited the title), his own monthly had some ups and downs (with the Preist/Cowan run that ended it consisting of the most consistent up**), and I've often found myself unreasonably concerned about his well-being (Our Worlds At War) and character design (I don't know who designed that bug helmet, but it sucks).

Now, what Steel has to do with Infinity Inc., other than the fact that Natasha/Steel II (Or Steel III, if we count Commander Steel's grandson as Steel I?) joined the a team which co-opted that name, and that he himself kicked a few of their asses, I don't know. The pitch for this book is that John Henry and Natasha would be leading a new team of Infinitors, forging the loser leftovers from the Everyman Project into real heroes.

All of which strikes me as a pretty shrug-inducing idea for a monthly, particularly from writer Peter Milligan, who already wrote the hell out of the concept of shallow, fame-hungry heroes-as-celebrities once with X-Force/X-Statix. I'd much prefer a more flexible Steel solo title (even if it begins by dealing with Everyman Project/52 fall-out) and/or Steel back in the League (even if mainly/only in a building-stuff for the knuckleheads on the team capacity—outside the Trinity, it's not exactly a group that has any rocket scientists, and steel is both a literal and metaphorical rocket scientist).

Finally, this book uses the tried-and-false tactic of taking a DC brand name of next-to-no-value (Blue Beetle, Atom, Firestorm, Aquaman, Manhunter) and giving it to different characters, thus successfully alienating the only people who actually are attracted to that brand name. 4/2




Comics DC Should Announce:



DOC MAGNUS AND THE METAL MEN

I've mentioned this one before, but I'll mention it again because, goddamit, this would be awesome. Seriously, close your eyes and think about what the best part of 52 was—why yes, that's right, the Oolong Island bits. And who was the star of those? Doc Magnus. Paired with Waid's mission statement for the team, setting Magnus and his inventions up against the very mad-scientists he co-starred with in 52 seems like an easy continuation of the series (as well as a natural and organic one).

When one considers that Metal Men film is apparently currently in development, this really, really has to happen.

Unfortunatley, DC has screwed this pooch almost immediately, with the Metal Men's post-52 appearances consisting of cameos in "The Tornado's Path" and a horribly drawn, completely nonsensical story in Superman/Batman. While Waid and Morrison would be perfect (as would Darwyn Cooke or Michael Allred or Evan Dorkin or Kyle Baker, none of whom seem terribly likely), so too would Tom Peyer, Scott Beatty, Ty Templeton, Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis and...that's all I got off the top of my head, actually. After reading the first issue of Mark Verheiden and "Pat Lee"'s story in Superman/Batman, I'm tempted to say anyone but them, but I'm sure there are actually all sorts of people who could fuck a series like this up. 10/10




GHOST DETECTIVES

And speaking of things that just have to happen, there's the incredibly happy ending that the Four Horseman of 52 managed to give the Dibneys in #52. On one hand, this seems like a nice set-up for future Dibny stories, but on the other, it seems like a perfect place to end their story, doesn't it? It is, after all, Ralph's version of heaven, and why muck it up by having us watch them? I say put this book off until Mark Waid has the time and inclination to write it. (In the meantime, we can always see the Dibnys and Sat. Era or JLI Era stories in JLA: Classified, or a Croaton Society mini set in the past). 7/7



CAPTAIN MARVEL

This is another one I'm repeating myself on, but if there's one thing we pride ourselves on here at EDILW, it's consistency (Which is a nicer way to say redundancy). Now that the villain behind Skeets (or, in this case, inside him) has been revealed, it's clear that on one level, 52 boils down to a story of Captain Marvel villains Black Adam, Dr. Sivana and Mr. Mind fighting one another and much of the DC Universe.

It was unqeustionably DC's biggest hit of the year, and the largest swathes of it's stars came from Captain Marvel's cast...and not even any of the heroes, just some of his villains. Surely if Black Adam and company can carry a friggin' weekly, they could (help) carry a monthly, no?

Of course, one could argue that the success of the Marvel character in 52 owed more to the people writing them than the characters themselves, and one could point to the cancelled Power of Shazam! series as evidence of this. It's true that Cap isn't an easy character to "get," as Judd Winick's body of work so readily shows. Those that seem to get him the best—Morrison, Waid, Johns, Alex Ross, Jim Krueger, Kurt Busiek, Jeff Smith—are all pretty busy dudes, with a lot on their plates (and the stature to work on pretty much whatever they want). And I'd personally prefer no Captain Marvel DCU comic to a wretched Captain Marvel DCU comic (a la Trials of Shazam). So maybe the time isn't right for a new Shazam! monthly, but don't sleep on it too long DC—if that Shazam movie ever gets made, you're gonna want to have a comic book on the stands by then. 10/8



MISCELLANEOUS MISSING YEAR MADNESS

Again, these are all series I've mentioned before, but here goes anyway: Batman, Robin and Nightwing sailing around the world traning, something that I'm actually surprised we haven't seen more flashbacks to yet; it's certainly a thousand times more interesting than Royal McGraw's weird continuations of '70s storylines, John Ostrander's inventorty-tastic tale of Grotesk and Johnny Karaoeke and whatever the hell's been going on in Robin and Nightwing OYL); what went down in Gotham City (they could even reuse the name Gotham Nights, from those early '90s miniseries about Gotham citizens who weren't sueprheroes or supervillains); the Teen Titans' nutty year (we saw some of it alluded to in "Titans Around the World," 52 and we got to see Terra II's heart get punched out for no reason in World War III, but I'd kinda like to see those 50 teens coming and going through the tower, as well as see how Wendy and Marvin hooked up with the gang and...hey, where the hell did they disappear to in the last story arc, anyway?); and the further adventures of Firestorm II's shortlived JLA (C'mon DC, the world needs more Ambush Bug and Super Cheif team-ups, and you're not really using JLA: Classified for anything right now anyway!) 10/10




Comics DC Shouldn't Announce:



ANIMAL MAN

I like Animal Man, and always have. He was pretty cool before Grant Morrison got his hands on him, and, obviously, he was much cooler afterwards (I have a soft-spot for vegan activists superheroes). I even dug a lot of the post-Morrison Vertigo stories, particularly those written by Jamie Delano, many of which would have fit into the DCU just as easily as the VU (with a few minor alterations).

In his just-ended weekly debriefs with Matt Brady at Newsarama.com, Michael Siglain asked Newsaramites whether or not they'd want an Animal Man mini or ongoing. Some apparently did.

Well, they're wrong.

We don't need or want an Animal Man mini or ongoing, at least not at this point. Now, I always enjoy seeing Buddy Baker whenever he shows up, even if the stories aren't all that great, and am certainly in favor of him showing up in DC books a lot (even on a regular basis, in, say, JLoA or, possibly, a Forgotten Heroes book; though the former already has an animal-powered hero and the latter doesn't seem like a good publishing move at this point), but I don't think we need him in his own book.

It basically boils down to the fact that Morrison handled his last solo, ongoing DCU adventures so consumately in Animal Man that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot in the way of new story to tell...at least not new story capable of living up to what Morrison and several of his followers managed. A new Animal Man series seems predestined to suffer in comparison (A similarly effected character is Swamp Thing; I know there have been good Swampy stories since Alan Moore's run ended but, at the same time, most of seemed perfectly superfluous).

Sure, he worked fairly well here in 52, but then, he was part of an ensemble through most of it, and was partially written by Morrison throughout. as well A new Animal Man series would have to be able to be at least as good as (or at least not too much worse than) Morrison's Animal Man, and there are precious few writers capable of following Morrison in any successful fashion. Waid and Millar (sometimes), Tom Peyer and Jamie Delano have all done it successfully, but I have trouble thinking of any others.

So I vote no on Animal Man in his own new comic, but yes on more Animal Man in any (and everybody) else's comic. 3/7



THE QUESTION

I like Renee Montoya. I like The Question. But I don't like Montoya as The Question II. (Just like I like Aquaman and like Batman, but wouldn't like Aquaman as Batman...at least not permanently***). Granted, Montoya-as-Question would probably be a lot less grating in a title of her own than as part of a huge story involving an ensemble cast (As I've complained about somewhere in then neighborhood of 50 times previously, Montoya's scenes were the only first-person narrated ones in 52), but her storyline was one of the least popular in 52 (along with Steel's) and thus she doesn't seem to be a great character to be given her own title. Also, the forced-legacy rule is in full effect here. Fans of the the Question are the only people who are going to be attracted to the name "The Question" on a comic book, but they're going to be more interested in one starring the Question, not a different character with the Question's name (This one strikes me as particularly tragic since Vic Sage is such an incredibly unique character, and that JLU recently raised his profile in mainstream consciousness more than it's ever been, and because Sage more closely resembles the Watchmen character he inspired than Montoya). I suppose one of the other 51 Sages could enter into the DCU at any moment now and resume Question-ing, so it's not as tragic as it was a few week's ago. 3/1


BATWOMAN

This is an ongoing title that has been rumored for a long time—even the swell-looking logo design has been leaked onto the Internet—although it hasn't been announced. I couldn't possibly be less interested. Kate Kane is a terribly uninteresting character, whose defining characteristics seems to be that she's a lesbian (albeit a man's fantasy of a lesbian, a "buxom lipstick lesbian" as the New York Times put it), is Jewish, and used to sleep with the new Question. Strike two is that her costume draws attention to her long flowing, easy-to-pull-in-a-fight hair and her lips.

The female version of Batman she'd be replacing in DC's publishing line if she does get her own ongoing is Cassandra "Batgirl" Cain, who was a much more complex and unique character (just grabbing randomly at elements of her character, she was illiterate, shy, quiet and thus far pretty much completely uninterested in the opposite sex), and had a much less male-fantasy gratifying costume (No matter what Johanna Draper Carlson says).

On the plus side, it would be cool to have a female super-person with the word "woman" instead of "girl" have her own comic book (Is Wonder Woman the only DC superhero with the word Woman in her name that hasn't been killed or erased from the timeline somehow at the moment?), but that could have been accomplished just as easily by changing Cassandra Cain's name, now that it's "One Year Later" and I think she's 18 now.

Personally, I'd likely pass on this book, unless they assemble a dynamite creative team. The one storyline that would interest me would be the one dealing with her origin, or the missing year in Gotham, during which a lot of pretty exciting things happened that we haven't seen (Harvey Dent, Kite-Man, Nightwing flirting, Commissioner Gordon returning, Apokalyptian firepit-making). Oh, and I suppose a meeting with Cassandra Cain and/or Oracle would get me to pick an issue up. 5/7


*I don't mean they're all creative failures; I really dug Williams' Helmet of Fate and first issue of Aquaman (his run already seems to be falling apart as of his second issue, however), I haven't read much of Rogers, and I haven't read enough from Donner to sum up his run. But none of them have been able to tell good stories and sell as well, say, Johns, David Goyer, Greg Rucka, Kevin Smith and Brad Meltzer.


**Hey, 52 fans! Check out Steel #38 , which features a Steel/Question team-up!


***EDILW readers who have been taking their ginseng will remember I made a similar comment before; however, since I forgot when and where, I assume you all have too, so there, I've used it again.

Actually Essential Storylines: Booster Gold

This week’s issue of 52 feature the origin of the late, great Booster Gold, whose origin we really don’t need to know anymore, seeing as how he’s dead, and has been dead for week’s. That is, of course, unless he’s not really dead.

Aside from the poor timing of the origin feature, an issue writer Mark Waid apparently sought to address by adding a disclaimer saying that this story is “an exceprt from the Justice League Archives.” Really? Then where are all the other origin stories from, I wonder?

Waid nails Booster Gold’s original origin story, and again DC has found the perfect penciller to draw it, tapping Booster’s creator Dan Jurgens to do the honors. Oddly though, little of import is really covered. There are only seven panels, six of which deal with Booster’s time in the 25th Century, and the seventh deals with where he was at the start of 52, with no mention of his years on the Jutstice League or the role he played in Infinite Crisis.

As always, there was a list of “Essential Storylines,” which similarly ignored most Booster Gold’s time as a player in the DCU.

Here’s what DC suggested:

Booster Gold #1: Can one issue really be considered a “storyline?” I don’t know, but you should be able to find the first issue of Booster’s solo book, where he made his first appearance, as well as the rest of the run in a good quarter bin. None of it has ever been collected into trade.

Formerly Known As the Justice League: After the classic JLI team of Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire tested the waters in a JLA 80-Page Giant (see below), they initiated a full-blown, reunion special type story in this miniseries that gathered up many of their old JLI characters and re-christened them “The Superbuddies.” It’s interesting that this series is listed as “Essential,” since it’s very first page totally contradicts a major element that follows (whether Max Lord is a cyborg or a normal human being with a breakable bone neck).

Countdown to Infinite Crisis: This special, over-sized one-shot was a Blue Beetle story first and foremost, but Booster Gold played a major role in it, at one point seeming to sacrifice his life because his knowledge of the future told him that the Brother I satellite was about to send a death beam toward Beetle’s home computer. Booster survived, and they never mentioned why Booster took his seat when he did again. It’s worth mentioning that Booster and Beetle, and maybe Barbara Gordon, are about the only characters in this story that seem even remotely in character.

The OMAC Project: This miniseries followed up the Countdown one-shot (which it would ultimately be collected with), and featured the Trinity trying to follow-up on the Max Lord/Checkmate conspiracy that killed Beetle. Booster has words with Batman and Wonder Woman, before ultimately gathering his own teammates—Guy Gardner, Fire, Rocket Red, Mary Marvel—to try and avenge Beetle. This is where Rocket Red buys it. At the end of the series, Booster says he’s going back to the future, a line which complicates everything involving Booster that follows, since we don’t know which Booster it is that shows up in Infinite Crisis and 52. Skeets’ presence in the latter is particularly confounding, seeing as how it’s said he was dismantled in Countdown.

52: Well, obviously.

Here’s what they missed…

JLA/JLI/Extreme Justice: Booster Gold joined the recently re-formed Justice League of America after he made his superhero debut, being recruited by Max Lord and foisted onto the team (this is one of the few League stories from the Giffen/DeMatteis era that’s actually been collected into a trade, Justice League of America: A New Beginning).

He quickly became accepted however, and became one of the team’s mainstays, being regularly featured in the re-named title Justice League International (later re-re-named Justice League America), and it’s sundry spin-offs and specials, including annuals, a quarterly, Justice League Europe, Mister Miracle and so on.

After “Breakdowns” closed out the Giffen/DeMatteis era, the stories got much, much worse (despite some valiant efforts by the likes of Dan Jurgens to fill some un-fillable shoes). Booster served on the Superman-led JLA, along side Beetle, Guy, Fire, Ice, Maxima and, um, Bloodwynd. He was around to get his ass kicked (along with the rest of the League) by Doomsday, on his way to beating Superman into a death-like coma. His super-suit trashed and Beetle in a coma of his own, Booster would go into one of his many stretches of semi-retirement in the aftermath of the Death of Superman.

Booster Gold would play a fairly major role in Justice League crossover story in six-part story “Judgement Day,” which ran in all three Justice League titles in 1994. Tricked-out in a bulky, ‘90s-looking armor that resembled a football uniform, Booster lead the League’s response against the apocalyptic threat of the Overmaster. In a story that 52 would loudly echo, Booster was relying on his knowledge of the present as his past (being from the future and all) and, according to his records, he was supposed to be the big hero of the day. Instead, he loses his arm and almost dies. It turns out his knowledge of the present gained from the future isn't as accurate as he thought it was. Sound familiar?

Around about this time, Booster followed Maxima and Beetle into Captain Atom’s faction of the Justice League, and thus starred in the most unfortunately-named Justice League comic of all time (including Superfriends and Total Justice), mid-‘90s embarrassment Extreme Justice, which was drawn in a awful Rob Liefeld clone style (shudder!). The title would actually get much, much better as time wore on, and the team added Amazing Man II and Firestorm to its roster, and it eventually even brought the Wonder Twins and the Legion of Doom (sweet swamp base and all!) into the DCU proper.

That was the last League-related team Booster served on until he re-joined Blue Beetle and the others in the Superbuddies. That team also appeared in an arc of JLA: Classified, “I Can’t Believe It’s Not the Justice League.”

Crossovers, cameos and crowd scenes: Once Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell relaunched the JLA, Booster would have less and less to do with the team, generally only appearing in stories that called in the entire reserves, like the Mark Millar-written Amazo story, the Devin Grayson/Phil Jimenez JLA/Titans miniseries and Morrison and Porter’s Viking funeral for their run, “World War III.”

In the big, line-wide crossovers, Booster played a fairly large role during the years he was on the League, particularly in Millenium and Armageddon 2001. He would usually earn at least a cameo in major intercompany crossovers even after he was no longer on the League, as in Our Worlds at War and Identity Crisis.

In The Kingdom, the Mark Waid-masterminded, in-continuity follow-up to Kingdom Come, Booster was given a new (and short-lived) status quo as a business man. In one of his few get-rich plans that didn’t horribly backfire on him, he opened a superhero theme restaurant called Planet Krypton, as detailed in the Waid/Barry Kitson collaboration, The Kingdom: Planet Krypton #1. When his restaurant becomes “haunted” by strange phantoms, Booster calls in the World’s Greatest Detective to solve the crime, and Batman finds himself face to face with visual memories of the Earths that were seemingly destroyed in Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Blue and Gold, revisited: Hardcore fans of either Blue Beetle or Booster Gold sometimes argue that their association with one another, and their quick evolution into something of a comedy duo, hurt both of the characters as individuals. There may be an argument to be made there, but I have a hard time seeing it. Honestly, both heroes are at their very best when in one another’s company.

DC’s writers seem to agree, as the late ‘90s and early aughts saw several revisitations of the Blue and Gold team. Giffen, DeMatteis and Maguire told a story starring the pair set during the early part of their run—when Guy Gardner had konked his head and become a sissy—in JLA 80 Page Giant #1. In the pages of Martian Manthunter #24, writer John Ostrander pulled off a great Giffen/DeMatteis impression with a story of one of Blue and Gold’s practical jokes going awry. To mess with J’onn J’onnz, they removed every single pack of “Chocos” cookies from JLA HQ (and the surrounding area), and the results were not pretty, as it is revealed that his Martian physiology caused him to become physically addicted to the chocalate sandwich cookies formerly known as “Oreos.” J’onn turned into a Hulk-like monster (Doug Mahnke draws, while Tom Mandrake draws a wonderful cover).

Booster and Beetle were the stars of the JLI’s issue of the still criminally uncollected JLA: Incarnations, in which Ostrander (again!) and Val Smeiks send the pair undercover to infiltrate a supervillain resort, and Batman and J’onn are needed to bail them out. And while whether it counts as in-continuity or not can be questioned (there’s nothing in it that contradicts DCU continuity), Booster and Beetle were featured in an issue of the brilliant but cancelled Adventures in the DCU.

Other universes: Booster doesn’t show up in many of DC’s Elseworlds or other out-of-continuity stories. In the 1997 prestige format one-shot Justice Riders, he forms part of an Old West JLA alongside Diana Prince, Hawk shaman Katar Johnson, manhunter John Jones, Kid Flash and the Beetle (Booster is cast as a Bat Lash-like gambler; the story's well worth looking for if you can find it, thanks to it's beautiful JH WIlliams III and Mick Gray art). He also rather frequently appear in the Justice League Unlimited comic, a tie-in to the cartoon, however (Yes, it is a comic book based on a cartoon based on a comic book. What of it?).

Other media: Booster Gold was one of the many DC heroes on the gigantic Justice League line-up featured on Justice League Unlimited. While he appeared in a lot of crowd scenes, he only had one real spotlight episode, but it was a doozy. In “The Greatest Story Never Told,” Booster and Skeets are assigned to crowd control while the rest of the League take on a massive threat. He eventually wanders off and has his own adventure, saving the universe. Which he’d be only too happy to tell you about given half a chance.

Don't cry for Booster Gold

You’ve probably already heard about what happened to Booster Gold last week. In an attempt to save countless innocent lives in downtown Metropolis (and/or his own flailing reputation), Booster pushed his power suit to its absolute limit, lifting a nuclear sub high into the air where it detonated.

When his rival Supernova flew up to rescue him, all he found was a skeleton.

According to DC’s Dan Didio, dead really does mean dead this time. Booster Gold is really, permanently dead, he told Newsarama.com last week.

I don’t buy it. Maybe I’m just experiencing the first stage of grief over a beloved B-List character, but I don’t think Booster Gold’s really dead, and, if he is, I don’t expect him to remain dead very long.

For starters, he died in the fifteenth issue of a 52-part story, and there are plenty of unknowns swirling around him within that huge story, including how he has apparently damaged the time stream and who exactly the guy calling himself Supernova is (Popular speculation: He’s another version of Booster Gold).

But assuming Didio’s being straight up and that really was the end of Booster Gold we saw last week, Booster’s eventual return isn’t just likely, it’s inevitable.

For starters, he’s a fictional character in a fictional universe, the laws of which are constantly being written and revised by scores of writers. As Grant Morrison pointed out in the brilliant climax of his Animal Man run, the killing and un-killing of people in the DCU is a piece of cake, even if the resurrection scenarios aren’t always the most believable (“Why can’t you just say…I don’t know…say it was all a dream or something?” Animal Man pleads with Morrison when he asks him to bring his family back to life. Morrison responds, “Are you joking? That old cop-out went out with the ark,” before he eventually does just that).

Secondly, DC seems to have a major problem with killing characters off. Though the current crop of writers and editors seem downright eager to kill characters these days, the very same writers and editors are constantly resurrecting characters that other writers have already killed off. It’s not just those of Hal Jordan and Oliver Queen’s popularity. The most minor villains, from Major Force to Copperhead, can die and return to life without so much as an explanation (My favorite totally haphazard resurrection was that of minor Robin rogue Lynx, who died in “War Games,” only to return to life in a recent issue of Robinand die all over again).

And as for Booster Gold, perhaps no death in comics history has looked so easily reversible. When it comes to our suspension of disbelie as readers, there are degrees of how much we’re willing to buy. Some resurrections are fairly easily accomplished, such as Firestorm’s in Identity Crisis, Zauriel’s in “World War III,” or any of Red Tornado’s several dozen deaths over the decades. Others are more difficult, but they merely require more plot contortions on the writer’s part, like Jordan’s in Green Lantern: Rebirth or Queen’s in Green Arrow: Quiver. And of late, DC has even shown a willingness for extremely lazy resurrections, of which Jason Todd’s takes the cake—he simply came back to life, and if you want to know why, well, it was a continuity error (Um, caused by Superboy-Prime. Punching the walls of the multiverse. Swear to God).

Booster Gold was a time traveler; he was born in the 25th century and traveled back to the 20th with advanced technology to try to become a superhero and make a killing on self-marketing (lottery fraud might have proved safer). So, if he died last week, is he really dead? After all, if time’s linear, he still hasn’t been born yet. He’s traveled back and forth from the present to the future before, and there was some speculation that the Booster Gold who said he was leaving the 21st Century at the end of The OMAC Project wasn’t the same one who returned in the pages of 52.

With access to time travel technology, it’s very easy to avoid one’s own death, at least in DC Comics. Parallax pulled that trick in “Emerald Knights” (I never understood while he only pulled that trick once), and Bary Allen, one of the few DC superheroes to stay dead more or less permanently so far, has repeatedly returned for adventures set long after his death through the magic of time travel.

While some resurrections are so complicated they need a whole story arc (Hourman I, Green Arrow I) or miniseries (Jordan, Donna Troy) to explain, a time traveler’s death can be done in a sentence or two.

In fact, it’s been done. In Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis #2, Merlyn notices the recently deceased Chronos over at the next table.

“Don’t ask,” the Monocle responds. “He says he’s the one from twenty-seven seconds pre-his-own-death.”

“I hate time travelers,” Merlyn says. But love ‘em or hate ‘em, you can never really kill ‘em.