Showcase Presents: Booster Gold

*Spoiler Alert*

One of the first colour comic books I owned was a second-hand copy of Booster Gold #18.

Now, if you've never read a Booster Gold comic before, #18 is an interesting one to have as an introduction. For one thing, it actually fills you in on the character's backstory quite nicely and gives you a hint of what it's all about...

But the hint is actually a little off. You see, #18 is full of time travelling cops, superheroes who can save the day without changing into their costume, rings that can give you the power of flight, high tech gadgets and robots, multimillionaires with alternate identities and thieves who have become better men. You learn that Booster Gold was a football player from the 25th Century who fell from grace, then stole a time machine to come back to the 20th Century where he became a superhero using his (stolen) advanced technology. You learn this courtesy of the flashbacks of the cop who has followed him into the past to hunt him down. You learn that he's rich and has geniuses working for him, creating high-tech gizmos to use in his training. You learn that he has a robotic “coach”. And you get this wonderful James Bond style story that involves a dashing man of action saving the day in his expensive suit.

What you don't get is a true taste of Booster's character. You don't get the cocky, overconfident, brash, self-centred, money grabbing, attention seeking, juvenile yet strangely charming jerk that Dan Jurgen's creation is. You don't get the superhero-promoting-aftershave or the “Superman has nothing on me!” moments that give you the truest insights into what you can expect from Booster. On the one hand, he means well and honestly wants to be the hero and save the people and the day. On the other hand, he'll never pass up an opportunity to grab publicity and make money. He's not the squeaky-clean-boy-scout that Superman is. He's not the brooding, guardian-of-the-people-weighed-down-by-responsibility Batman is. He's a jerk who needs a good slapping, but he's also charming, lovable and fun. And he's trying – he really is trying to do the superhero thing properly – so you sort of forgive him for the rest of his faults.

He embodies the whole concept of “new and fresh directions” that was the point of the Crisis. He also embodies the mid-late 80s love affair with capitalism and corporate greed. Reading over the original comics later, it's hard to imaging Booster coming from the future into any year other than 1986. If they ever make a film of this character, I hope they set it in the 80s.

These are the sort of things you learn about Booster as you read the first twenty issues of his original twenty-five issue run, published for the first time since the late 1980s as part of DC's Showcase Presents series.

The Showcase Presents books started by packaging some stories that first appeared in the old Showcase title put out by DC in the 60s and 70s and has since moved on to later comics. This series is possibly the most magnificent thing DC has ever done. By publishing these stories without colour and on cheaper paper than they use for their Archives series, they've made all of these stories affordable and accessible.

There were many of us who were hanging out for the original Booster Gold series to be reprinted, and while the colour and the glossy paper would have been nice, having the whole series in one book for just over AUD$30 is a dream come true.

Finally being able to read the whole series from start to finish is... mixed.

I mentioned before that you find out a lot of things about Booster's character in the first twenty issues. That's because the first twenty issues are good. Okay, so they repeat the origin story a little often (#18 was the fourth time we hear it told from various sources). It's still a rollicking adventure story. The series starts in the middle of everything, goes back to the beginning, comes back to the present, bounces into the future and brings us back to the 80s a few months after we left. It plays with the cliches of the genre quite nicely, letting us have a few while joyfully breaking some others. Jurgens wanted his character to be different and fun, and for the first twenty issues that's exactly what Booster Gold was. Sure, there were moments of pathos, hints of romance and the sense that eventually Booster's irresponsibility was going to come back to kick him up the cloaca, but you never doubted that there would be light at the end of every tunnel and these characters were just going to get more interesting as things went on.

The characters had real legs. Jurgens not only created a group of people you wanted to know more about to start with, he also added to them as he went on. To begin with, there was the shallow, go-get-em agent who was a single parent after his wife walked out (and may have more to him than meets the eye) and the secretary who may be a romantic interest (but for who?) and may or may not become a superhero herself. Then came Jack Soo, who gave up working for S.T.A.R. Labs because designing gadgets for a superhero was so much fun, and Michelle Carter, Micheal's twin sister from the future who saved everyone's life with a stolen school bus, and then went on to steal the Super Suit (with magnetic powers) Jack invented. You just knew there was going to be a showdown between the sister and the secretary over the super suit. You just knew the secretary was eventually going to have to choose between the superhero stud she secretly fancies and the obnoxious agent she initially can't stand...

Except, none of these things happened.

Jurgens set things in motion in the course of those first twenty issues. Things that promised us something fun was going to happen. But then, just as we were starting to really appreciate what he had planned for Michelle, he killed her off. And in such a bizarre, pointless way, too. Part of his playing with cliches, I guess – he sets up a successful rescue and then, hey, waddayaknow, the girl dies anyway. And it doesn't make any sense at all within the terms of the over arcing narrative. As the last five issues progress, it becomes a little bit obvious that Jurgens killed of Michelle because he had to damage Booster and make him miserable – and he had to do that because of forces beyond his book.

One of the things I've always hated about DC is the propensity to create stories that sweep across the entire DC Universe. Every couple of years or so, some major tragedy, catastrophe or crisis happens which is supposed to involve every character in the universe and have cross-over story lines going through every title. This has always sucked. This has always sucked for at least three reasons:

1. Every title has its own continuity – it tells its own stories and follows its own arcs. Usually, only one or two writers manage to get their arcs to flow seamlessly into this company-wide story arc. For everyone else, it's a horrible imposition that seems forced and out of place and ruins the lines of the story. Going back years later to read the stories again, these issues make very little sense and are, simply, awful.

2. You never get the whole story of the company-wide arc anyway. It's mainly carried in the major titles with a few weird tendrils thrown off into series you might not normally buy. Later on, you may get the entire run of all of the Superman comics that fit in with this story, but good luck trying to find that one issue of the Black Canary which links the story from Superman #275 to Action Comics #423. And, if you were a Black Canary fan who owned every issue from that period, chances are that one issue suffers badly from the problem I mentioned in the point above.

3. Some twit always decides this is a great opportunity to kill or otherwise completely ruin one of the minor characters in the universe for the sake of pathos. So your favourite member of the Justice League is going to go insane, destroy all who are dear to him, and then die in a last heroic effort to save the planet. Every single time DC has run a company wide cross-over, they've killed or destroyed someone I like. Someone I would pay good money to see in his or her own series, or at least used more often. They seem to think this makes them clever. It doesn't.

So come the end of 1987 and the beginning of 1988, DC runs this ridiculous Millennium cross-over thing where almost all of the heroes in the universe find someone close to them is, in fact, a Manhunter in disguise. I'm not really going to explain that one, except to say that the Manhunters are against the Guardians of the Universe and trying to stop the Chosen Ones from promoting mankind to the next stage of evolution. It was a stupid story.

Oh, and guess who the sacrificial bunny was? That's right, Booster Gold. Because of his role as the loose cannon in the Millennium story, Booster's life had to get miserable and fast. So Jurgens kills off his sister, introduces a new character (who we hardly ever see) purely for the sake of creating a distraction and turns Dirk, the agent, into the Manhunter in Booster's life. This, by the way, makes no sense. Dirk's character and motivations had been well established, and it's impossible to believe he was secretly a Manhunter. Everything seemed too fast – positively rushed – and clumsy. Motivations – ignored and trampled on. Logical plot progressions – thrown to the wind.

Jurgens spent twenty issues establishing a world that could have easily carried another twenty issues worth of stories... then spent five issues smashing it to pieces with a hammer.

I suppose at least it finished with the promise of a brighter tomorrow. In spite of his role as the sacrificial bunny, causing him to lose his family, friends and home, there was still an indication that Booster would continue to play a role in the DC Universe as one of the good guys. He managed to survive another twenty years as a minor character and guest star in other comics before the writers of another stupid cross over decided to use him as a sacrificial bunny again.

Turns out issue #18 was actually the peak of Booster's career. It showed everything the series could have been, if only Jurgens had been allowed to keep playing by his own rules.

As for the Showcase Presents anthology? Well, if you're a Booster fan, you can't go past this book. If you aren't a Booster fan, I think there's a good chance you will be one by the time you finish the first twenty issues. Then you can join me in my hatred for company-wide cross over stories.