Alright, hold on a second here. Booster Gold? This entry is for Booster Gold? A character who rather routinely gets his own solo books or even team-ups with his good buddy Ted Kord? A guy who is something of a perennial Justice League second stringer? A guy who is even getting his own HBO Max TV series according to current DC film and TV head honcho James Gunn? Why would I be doing a Bootser Gold entry?
Simple: sometimes these columns are for characters whose personas are, shall we say, inconsistent. I have, since entry #8 (the Spectre) also put out these articles for characters who seem to vary wildly depending on what’s going on and who is responsible for the story, and oh yeah, Booster Gold definitely qualifies for that.
Booster Gold, created by Dan Jurgens, first appeared in Booster Gold #1 in February of 1986. He may have been the first attempt DC made post-Crisis to create another iconic hero alongside the likes of the Flash and the Green Lantern, not quite the top of the ladder in terms of recognition, but at least someone most casual comics readers would more or less recognize without too much trouble. His real name was Michael Jon Carter, and he was from the future, namely the 25th century. In his own time, the future Booster Gold was a star college athlete until his disreputable father came into his life and convinced his son to help him cheat at gambling. Caught, Michael was tossed off his team and out of his college, eventually finding the only job he could hold down was as a night watchman in a museum. He worked there with a security robot named Skeets, an advanced AI drone, and after studying the exhibits for late 20th century superheroes, he decided to become one. Borrowing various pieces of tech and a time machine from the museum, he went back in time to become Booster Gold. His powers were basic: flight, a forcefield belt, wrist blasters, and enhanced strength, all thanks to his stolen suit. Among his goals in the present was to basically earn money as a superhero to make a comfortable living for himself and presumably Skeets.
So, that tracks so far. What doesn’t always follow is how competent and intelligent Booster is. In his own series, he actually was reasonably capable and intelligent. It was when he joined the Justice League and met his best pal Ted “Blue Beetle” Kord that things got a little different.
To elaborate a bit, as with Ted, because he joined the Justice League International at a time when the series played more like a sitcom than a standard superhero team books, and because Booster with Ted would get into all kinds of get-rich-quick schemes, he’s a character that has been characterized one of two ways: he’s either a competent superhero who is really trying to do his best while also trying to be something of a celebrity, or he’s a hapless idiot who just screws up all the time.
It’s not hard to see how that could have happened given the tone of his original Justice League tenure, but it’s easy to perhaps forget that Booster actually quit the League when he was tired of looking like a laughingstock and formed a new, corporate sponsored team called the Conglomerate that was supposed to be a much more serious team and perhaps would be if they weren’t called off to do so many ads and corporate sponsorships.
As such, it generally comes down to who is handling Booster to see if it’s Competent Booster or Idiot Booster who is going to show up. And while Competent Booster can still be treated as a comedic character, he’s also not a moron. His creator Dan Jurgens tends to treat him as Competent Booster, and writer Geoff Johns, after the 52 mini-series, took an interesting route that showed Booster was the “greatest hero you’ve never heard of” by showing Booster often saving the day (even if he screws up quite a bit along the way) but doing so secretly for cases involving time travel that he’s the only one who seems to be really equipped to handle. He had help there from an often-frustrated Rip Hunter, eventually revealed to be Booster’s secret son.
On the Idiot Booster side, there’s the creators who handled his original Justice League tenure (though, to be fair, just about everyone in that run was at least a little dumb at times), his various appearances in animated form where he’s played for laughs even in more serious superhero shows, and most prominently perhaps whenever writer Tom King gets his hands on him, famously writing a Batman storyline where Booster, trying to give Bruce Wayne a wedding gift, temporarily altered time to make it so Bruce’s parents lived. But the alternate timeline was actually terrible, with Bruce as a spoiled billionaire and Catwoman, the bride-to-be, was a more feral and hostile version of herself, meaning both partners were worse and Gotham City as a whole was terrible, and that’s not getting into what King did with Booster in Heroes in Crisis…mostly because I haven’t read Heroes in Crisis and after learning a bit on what that well-meaning story was actually about, I don’t plan to either.
So, it’s not that Booster is a forgotten or misplaced character. It’s just hard to say which Booster will actually show up. This is a character who has appeared in multiple cartoons, did a live action appearance on Smallville, and was set to be played by actor Donald Faison on DC’s Legends of Tomorrow in an upcoming season before that show was unexpectedly canceled on a cliffhanger where the guy the Legends knew as “Mike” was actually a “Booster” and the whole thing seemed rather promising.
So, really, that Justice League era, it was beloved for a reason. It’s a great run. But many of the characters in there, well, they’ve had a lot of characterization problems in the years since then.
Huh. I think I know who next week’s column is going to be on.
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