Booster Gold #14
The second (and final, for now) issue of the Booster Gold monthly made without creator Dan Jurgens on art and writing chores hit stores on Wednesday, completing the two-part fill-in story by writer Rick Remender and art team Patrick Olliffe and Jerry Ordway. Picking up from the Starro-controlled alternate timeline introduced in last month's #13, Booster finds himself teaming with Lady Chronos (a recent creation from Remender's run on The All-New Atom) against her male counterpart and Booster's son/boss, Rip Hunter. Our running-commentary-style Gold Exchange continues here.
Not unlike the end of Blue & Gold, when Booster was overwhelmed by a swarm of Mr. Mind worms only to almost immediately defeat them using his force field, the issue begins with a well-placed force field surge that rescues him from the influence of Starro the Conqueror. From there, the timely assistance of Skeets and a healthy dose of suspension of disbelief regarding last issue and the fluid nature of the DC Universe timeline are more or less required to get through the issue. Last issue, there was no mention of ice weapons as being the best and easiest way to defeat Starro without killing his hosts, but it becomes the preoccupation of this issue, with Booster bouncing back and forth through time and space in search of Mr. Freeze's freeze gun. The result is a scene at the Hall of Justice which seems like a bit of a waste of pagecount (it's there only to "rescue" Lady Chronos from Starro and bring her onto Booster's side) and, later, the best sequence of the book. Without giving anything away, it's safe to say that Booster fans who enjoy this issue will likely cite the phrase "magic hand" as the biggest reason.
When Starro's eventual strategy-take over all the metahumans simultaneously using Rip's time sphere and then forcing them via mind control to kill one another so they can't interfere-is revealed, it brings a number of questions to the fore. First and foremost, one wonders how this "kill thousands of people to assert my control" Starro jives with last issue's "peace through the hive mind" Starro. Second, the fact that Batman and Power Girl are shown as emaciated corpses in the Hall of Justice begs the question of what might have happened to them. With Batman's brains and Power Girl's...well, power...I have a hard time believing that the two couldn't have made good a victory.
An ill-advised deal struck between Booster and Lady Chronos (if she helps him, not only does he let she and her evil male counterpart get away in the end, but also owes her a favor later) serves as the main source of dangling plot threads, which will (editorial willing) be followed up by Remender later, in a story originally written for The All-New Atom that he referred to last time as being Booster- and Chronos-heavy. Written as an agreement of necessity, one wonders how heroic Booster can possibly be if he plans to live up to his word-and obviously after the second Johns/Katz arc, he knows that no matter how good the intentions are (and hers almost certainly aren't), keeping your word when you know you're doing the wrong thing will have disastrous consequences for his mission. Her flirtations with Booster, too, seem contrived and silly given that Rip could easily nip the relationship in the bud by telling Booster whatever it is he's suggested to know at the end of the story.
It's worth noting that while Starro voices a desire to take over the universe by destroying all Time Masters, he never takes advantage of the fact that, having possessed Rip Hunter's body, he has control of the first and most notable of the Time Masters and a bullet to Rip's brainpan would have done exactly what he wanted. It's unclear whether Starro knows (though one would assume so) that Rip is Booster's father, but that may be one explanation as the alien might have decided it's a better strategy to do in Booster and, by extension, kill Rip before he ever has time to open the time lab, save the 52 and all that.
Again presumably tying into the story that Remender has planned using the characters, Lady Chronos refers to Booster as "Michael" and suggests that she knows of some unnamed, upcoming failures on his part that will cause him pain. Were these implications coming from the regular team, the dangling threads would be less troubling, but coming from a fill-in writer whose first arc seems rushed and forced, it's not so promising. Whether or not this story will ever see the other side of a collected edition is questionable, as well, which means that if Remender ever DOES get to tell his story there's no guarantee that the audience will remember what led into it.
On the scale of the average American superhero comic, Booster Gold #13-14 wouldn't be too bad. They're better than about half of what you'll find on the racks on any given weeks. But the standards set by the Johns/Katz run and even the Chuck Dixon story were such that "better than half of what's out there" is a pretty substantial drop from where it was three months ago. With a little luck, Dan Jurgens' first arc-which will wrap up the suspended story begun by Dixon and Jurgens-will bring the book back to its prior glory as DC's most entertaining comic.
Russell Burlingame is a journalist and columnist living and working in New York City. In high school, Russell interviewed Elliot S. Maggin for a review of the Kingdom Come novelization, and since then has worked consistently in and around the comics industry. He interned for Wizard magazine, and has freelanced for Wizard and Newsarama, in addition to a number of non-comics publications, Russell is currently working on a graphic novel based on Cap'n Internet, the comic strip that ran in his college newspaper; and a graphic biography of folk singer Phil Ochs with artist Marion Vitus.
Currently, in addition to his freelance work and his comics projects, Russell writes a number of columns for ComicRelated, including Conscientious Sequentials, The Gold Exchange, What's Perhappenin', Closing Statements, Reflecting 'Pool and To See or Not To See. Russell also takes point on the Hot Shot of the Week feature.
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