Thursday, April 14, 2011

Bye, Bye, Booster

Yesterday, I bought my last issue of Booster Gold for the foreseeable future.  That's because, just shy of a year after coming on to the book, writers Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis are leaving.  Beginning next issue, Booster's creator Dan Jurgens returns to write and draw the series. 
There are a couple of reasons why I'm dropping the series.  Dan Jurgens is one of them.  While I did enjoy the original Booster Gold series, I've not been too wild about most of what Jurgens has written since.  His Superman was ok, though not especially memorable, but I've never been able to forgive him for Zero Hour.
There's also the fact that the next few issues of Booster will be closely tied to Flashpoint, DC's latest company wide crossover event.  I'm not even remotely interested in this so-called event, and plan on avoiding it as much as I possibly can.
Sadly, Giffen and DeMatteis are being taken off of Booster just as they were beginning to hit their stride.  The latest story line, involving time displaced Nazis and Booster returning to the 25th century to stand trial for the theft of the time machine that brought him to our time and the devices that gave him his powers and then meeting and battling across the timestream with a future version of himself called the Perforated Man, has been the best of their run and one of the best Booster Gold stories I've ever read. 
It seems to me that while they may have been writing the character's eponymous title, Giffen and DeMatteis were never really in control of Booster Gold's destiny.  The first half of their run, though fun and enjoyable, reads like they're just marking time while the really important events in Booster's life were unfolding in the limited series Justice League: Generation Lost and Time Masters: Vanishing Point.  In fact, it appears  that from the begininng Giffen and DeMatteis were only meant to be filling in while Jurgens went off and did Vanishing Point.
Considering the great things they did with the Booster back when they did have total control of him during the period following the cancellation of his first series when he was in the Justice League International, it's kind of a shame the pair never really got to strut their stuff on the character's own book.

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