Booster Gold #47
Written by Dan Jurgens
Art by Rick Leonardi, Dan Jurgens, Don Ho, Norm Rapmund, and the guys at Hi-Fi Designs
The last issue of Booster Gold, I always believed I’d see the day, but I’m still pleasantly surprised that it lasted this long. Sure, I could have gone for a Booster Gold #50, and I think that it totally deserved to hit the milestone, but I’m going to choose to accept that I got several years of a great title featuring one of my favorite characters, and that for the most part, my favorite writer-artist, who happens to have created him, got to be the one to keep it going. Booster has been a real treat for me week in and week out for a long time, and thankfully it gets to end on a high note.
Dan Jurgens skips ahead in the wake of the last issue, having Booster already be captured and in the presence of General Adam instead of doing another full issue slugfest with Doomsday. The man who would have been Captain Atom has been the villain of this arc, despite Doomsday being around, Nathaniel Adam is the bad guy, so seeing him actually go face to face with Booster for an issue was a nice way to put together the finale. I mean, you can’t have the good guy not face off with the bad guy, that would just make for sloppy story telling! This leads to more of them believing Booster to be an Atlantean, and the way it’s portrayed you can’t tell if Adam truly believes our favorite time traveler to be an enemy agent, or if he just desperately wants him to be to justify his presence as an attack by Atlantis. Is he a man that fears war enough to not want to risk being sucked into it absently, or is he such a hawk that he’ll do anything to justify the declaration?
Doomsday is brought back into the fray by way of coincidence working into Jurgens characterization of his fabled hero killing creation. He sees an image of Subject One, Kal-El of Krypton, flying through the skies. That’s enough to wake up Doomsday, it always was, it always will be, realities and time streams be damned. Doomsday awakens which marks the first time that Adam and his people have seen the monster express any sort of actual will of its own, revealing that it’s not quite as brain dead as they expected. This leads to a relatively short fight (by Doomsday standards) of Booster getting the crap knocked out of him again. Alex provides a much needed day saving in a relatively unique way, and while I would never ever want to see Doomsday even blink at that sort of a method in the DC Universe, it works here.
That reminds me, let me talk about Alex, the Greek woman with meta-human abilities that inadvertently joined up with Booster a few issues ago as a meta-human companion to his Doctor with a force field. While she was obnoxious in her debut issue, she’s really managed to grow on me as she found herself enter the elite list of “Potential Booster wives candidates”, which remains the biggest unanswered question of the run. Of course, any woman who spends enough page time with Booster gets entered in there (save for his sister), but Alex feels kinda right. Maybe it’s because she’s from an alternate timeline, maybe it’s because she actually respects what he does, but she brings a most welcome voice to the series. Hell, I wasn’t even that surprised with what Dan decided to do with her. There’s some very in character elements with Booster trying to do things damned be the consequences, as well as his own ego finally burning through. Booster finds himself in a moment where he’s able to save everything and everyone, fix everything, and Dan does a fantastic job with the outcome.
Interesting to note in this issue is that Rick Leonardi and Don Ho provide the pencils for the majority of the issue, as Dan and Norm Rapmund only team up to bring us the final three pages of the normal sized issue. Now, I don’t want to knock Rick and Don, but they aren’t Dan and Norm, and thankfully they don’t try to be. Now, that isn’t to say that Dan’s pencils aren’t solely missed, as Leonardi’s work feels like a rush job. There are a lot of inconsistencies amongst the characters, and there are parts that feel like someone inked and colored rough pencils. It’s not bad looking, but it’s not great either. Honestly? The art, while bearable, is the worst part about this issue. The last few pages are Dan and Norm, and man, those pages look good. The level of detail from page to page is astonishing as we go from Booster with a few cuts and bruises that randomly appear and disappear to a hero that has his bumps and bruises and looks like he’s been through hell. If this issue had ended without Dan getting to draw Booster one last time, then it would just be tragic.
Booster’s trip through the Flashpoint was never about him fixing reality, or time, or anything. The nature of his job, his abilities, all of it, that kept him a constant when everything changed; not unlike Barry Allen, hell, Booster even felt his own memories begin to fade the longer he stayed unprotected. Hell, Barry even shows up, just like the cover shows us, for the finale. And not to spoil too hard, but Booster does make it out of Flashpoint and off to Vanishing Point. I won’t say how, or what happens, but I will say that his new look in JLI is explained here, and Booster very well may be the first look we’ve had at the post-Flashpoint DCU. We also find out who wrote about Flashpoint all over Hunter’s blackboard.
Could Booster have ended with a character driven issue that explored his growth as a character over the last four years? Sure. Could it have ended with some major revelations as to the nature of his future and Rip Hunter’s past? Of course. Could Ted Kord have come back to life and been his new time cop partner? Crazier things have happened. Did we need any of that to say goodbye to Booster? We really didn’t. We got a well told story with Booster, and while it doesn’t feel like an ending, or a last issue, it does feel like maybe it could be the end of one chapter and the start of the next one. I’ll miss seeing Booster on his own every month, but thankfully I won’t have to miss Dan Jurgens writing him.
Overall?
8.5/10
