Booster Gold #16
After last month's faith-rewarding Booster Gold #15, wherein Dan Jurgens proved that not only has he still got the touch but that, post-Johns, Booster Gold is still a force to be reckoned with, the "Reality Lost" arc continued this month with Booster trapped in World War I, Michelle and Skeets trying to convince Ralph Dibny to let them keep the Egyptian knife that appears to be the source of all their troubles and the mysterious villain from last issue still hovering just out of sight.
DC's (nearly) line-wide "Faces of Evil" event takes its toll on the title here, too, as Booster finds himself facing off with Enemy Ace, DC's German, World War I fighter pilot. And while Booster's simple morality ("No matter what the risk, it can't be wrong to save a life. Ever.") has him fighting to save a young American soldier trapped behind enemy lines, the Enemy Ace alternates between evil and conflicted. He shoots the soldier, then allows Booster to save the young man's life. He delivers them into the hands of the German army, then facilitates their escape when it becomes clear they will be tortured.
"I find Enemy Ace to be a tremendously compelling character," explains Jurgens of his decision to use a little-remembered character like Enemy Ace as the villain for Booster, in an event focused on building up DC's baddies. "We had already begun a storyline where Booster was going to find himself in different eras. To a certain extent, one of the World Wars was a logical destination. Beyond that, 'Faces of Evil' then made it necessary to match him up with a villain. Enemy Ace gave us the opportunity to have a villain that would allow us to step outside the norm and do a different kind of story."
Jurgens, who has written and/or drawn just about every DC character ever created at one point or another in his long career, had never had a chance to put Enemy Ace into use prior to this story. "There have been various times like Zero Hour or during my tenure on Supermanwhen I wanted to do something with him but there was never a natural way to do so," Jurgens says (admirable restraint, given the number of times I can think of comic book writers just kind of dropping a character they like into a book, whether it works with the narrative or not...*cough*Barack Obama*cough*). "Booster Gold #16 was one of those cases where it was so natural and easy that the reaction becomes, 'How can we NOT do that?'" The creator also reveals that Booster will be likely to be plugged into more of these line-wide stories (something that Geoff Johns and Jeff Katz didn't do) as long as the book itself wouldn't be derailed by it: "We are making a conscious effort to plug Booster into more of the DCU. After all, he certainly was instrumental to the DCU in 52. I would say that the only reason he wasn't during his first twelve issues was the need to get a new series on its feet by building characters and the universe around him."
It's worth noting that, as a writer, Jurgens has paid attention to some details here that many mainstream superhero guys might not have thought to (at least not without making it a Very Special Issue): The colors in this book are reminiscent of an old movie. They're dark, gloomy and feel very much like pictures or films of the World Wars do. And it's intentional. "We made a very deliberate effort to change the color palette of the book for this issue. It was signaled at the end of Booster Gold #15 when we saw the splash page with Booster at the end of the story and that continued here," Jurgens explains. He says that they did something similar back in the third issue, wherein Booster found himself in the Old West, drinking with bounty hunter Jonah Hex. "In this case Brian Miller of Hi-Fi and I discussed the absolute need for the story to have a depressing feel to it. I think I said something along the lines of, 'Mud! This is about mud!' [Inker] Norm Rapmund also did a brilliant job in helping to convey the feel we were looking for."
As time fissures start to open up around Booster, helping Enemy Ace get the drop on our hero and damaging the microcircuitry in his costume's blasters and force field, Michelle and Skeets have successfully convinced Ralph Dibny to surrender the time knife to them, telling him that if they leave it in old Gotham, the thief will just come back. It's worth mentioning that, to many younger readers, Ralph is most notable as one of the central protagonists of Brad Meltzer's great Identity Crisis miniseries. That story, of course, brought to the surface a lot of questions about the "mindwipes" that DC heroes had apparently used numerous times over the years to dampen villains' effectiveness, so when the time sphere lifts off, giving Ralph a Men In Black-style flash, readers may be a little apprehensive. But Jurgens dismisses the concern: "'Mindwipe' is too strong a word," he says of what was done to Ralph. "The memories are still there, but they're very wispy and hard to recall. Very much like a dream you remember for the first fifteen seconds after you wake up but then simply can't recall. You might now you had a dream about a kite, for example, but beyond that... nothing! At most, Ralph might experience a sense of deja vu when he 'first' meets Booster a few years later." All of this is a welcome addition to the book, as it will allow Booster (at least most of the time) to operate more or less openly without worrying whether whatever random person he crosses paths with will connect some kind of dots later in history.
The one character to have done so, of course, is Batman. During Johns' and Katz's "Blue and Gold" arc, The Dark Knight pulled Booster aside and, using photos taken by the Joker during Batman: the Killing Joke, in which Booster appeared trying to help Barbara Gordon and being viciously beaten for it, gave him the assurance that he was in Booster's corner, and that Booster had earned his trust. Of course, before Jurgens ever had the opportunity to tell the story where Booster takes advantage of this, Final Crisis #6 was released this week and Batman succumbed to Darkseid's Omega Beams. The finality of death in comics is dicey-especially given that Shiloh Norman survived a similar death once-but for all intents and purposes, Bruce Wayne's emaciated remains represent the end of an era-and the loss of a friend and confidant for Booster. "Gosh. Gee. One would almost think such a thing would have some ramifications for Booster," Jurgens teases. "Right?"
Of course, that mind-jiggering technology could have helped him in this issue, had the time sphere been with him instead of his sister. With everything except his Legion flight ring disabled and facing a hanging death at the hands of the Germans, Jurgens explains, "Booster made a conscious decision not to fly. Once he'd be up in the air, people from a great distance away might well see him."
At the German base where he's taken to be tortured for information about his "experimental flight suit," Booster finds an interesting clue as to the nature of his trip to World War I: The time knife, framed on a wall in the small German army outpost where he and "Private Cyrus," his American charge, are being held. He remarks on the oddity of being drawn to the knife, and only pages later finds it to be his salvation in an unexpected way. A little electrical magic later, his costume is up and running and he gets Cyrus out of there and back to an American medical facility on the front lines. It's there that a surprising revelation about the private's identity is made-one that brings to mind the old ethics-class question, "Would you have killed Hitler as a child if you knew what he would become?"
Okay, so maybe Cyrus' family doesn't exactly turn out to be the Hitlers...and maybe it seems an inappropriate distinction to make in the context of a war comic...but as far as the DC Universe-and particularly Booster-are concerned, the world probably would have been better off without poor Private Cyrus. Jurgens says, though, that it wouldn't have made a difference: "Booster's moral philosophy, at this time, is such that he would find it almost impossible to stand by and watch someone die. The point is that even if he knew who he was really dealing with at that point, he would have made the same decision. He might have struggled with it... but the decision would have been the same."
Moments after the revelation is made, the time knife "boots up" and Booster is again shunted into the time stream. His sister and Skeets, trying to track him in the time sphere, miss him by mere instants and when they remark that it almost seems like their presence is what made him vanish, the mysterious villain who has been trailing the group since the end of "Blue & Gold" arrives and announces that, in fact, it was his doing. His apperance here is interesting because every previous image of him has been pretty much just "being of energy guy," kind of like The Eradicator in the very first part of "The Reign of the Supermen." Here, there seems to be the hint of a costume; if you look closely you can see lines tracing down his bicep and what appears to be either a belt or a design just above the waist. Jurgens suggests that insightful readers might be able to guess who it is. Pressed to disclose whether this would be a recurring Booster villain, such as The Director or possibly the cop who followed him back from his first return to the 25th Century, Jurgens simply says, "This is someone readers have seen before. That's as far as I'll go. And once they do see who it is it will make a lot of sense!"
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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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