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Boosterrific.com: The Complete, Annotated Adventures of Booster Gold
Boosterrific.com: The Complete, Annotated Adventures of Booster Gold

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Booster Gold

“Tense Future!”

Volume 2, Issue 32, July 2010
Released May 12, 2010

Cover Price: $2.99
Guide Price: $3.00 (as of 2011)
Estimated Issue Sales: 20,343

Boosterrific.com Rating
  • Currently 5.0/5 Stars.
Fan Rating
  • Currently 4.0/5 Stars.

Booster Gold, Vol. 2, #32. Image © DC Comics

 

ARTISTS

Writers: J. M. DeMatteis, Keith Giffen
Penciller: Chris Batista
Inker: Rich Perrotta
Colorist: Hi-Fi Designs
Letterer: Sal Cipriano
Assistant Editors: Elisabeth V. Gehrlein, Rex Ogle
Editor: Michael Siglain
Cover Artist: Kevin Maguire

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CHARACTERS & SETTINGS

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ISSUE DETAILS

Cover Description: Booster Gold winks and gives the view a thumbs up. This cover art was used for promotional give-away posters promoting the issue and Giffen's/DeMatteis' return to writing Booster Gold.

Brief Synopsis: On a mission for Rip Hunter, Booster finds himself trapped in the future and struggling to save some ill-fated tourists.

Booster Gold's role in this story:
Featured (Booster Gold plays a prominent role)

Costume Worn: MARK I.v2 power-suit

Issue Notes: This issue marks the return of the writing team of Giffen and DeMatteis to the adventures of Booster Gold. The pair are known for their time on Justice League International in the 1980s, when Booster was a member of the League.

This story has been reprinted in:
Booster Gold: Past Imperfect (2011)

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ANNOTATIONS

Page 1, panel 1
Booster Gold is on the planet Daxam, a world whose inhabitants, like Superman, gain super powers in the light of a yellow sun. Daxam's most famous resident is Lar Gand, better known as Mon-El and Valor, who has fought beside Booster Gold on 20th-century Earth on several occasions. As if it needed to be mentioned: Booster Gold's opening quote is a reference to the 1984 movie Terminator. Also note that the narrative box indicates that the time is currently the 30th century. It will be relevant later. (Yes, there will be a quiz.)

Page 1, panel 2
A PAIR OF DOCS?: Darkseid is a New God, absolute ruler of the planet Apokolips. He has long been trouble for the heroes of Earth. (Booster Gold met Darkseid face to face and lived to tell the tale. See Justice League International #21 for details.) Events of this issue take place during the Great Darkness War, as originally presented in Legion of Super-Heroes, Volume 2, #290-294, published in 1982. One of the writers for that story was, of course, Keith Giffen.

Page 1, panel 5
FIRST APPEARANCE: First appearance of little orphan Rani. No matter how Booster defines a "cosmic war," he's not exaggerating. To be specific, Booster Gold has witnessed or participated in some way the Millennium, Invasion, War of the Gods, Bloodbath, Zero Hour, Judgment Day, World War Three, Our World At War, Infinite Crisis, 52, Sinestro Corps War, Final Crisis, and Blackest Night crises. Booster was even unintentionally responsible for starting the Dominator War on Earth. And those are just the major events in his 25-year career.

Page 5, panel 5
HIS STORY: Booster Gold was born Michael Jon Carter in the year 2442, over 500 years prior to the present events.

Page 5, panel 7
POWER DOWN: Booster Gold's power suit and force field have been damaged by the Daxamites. Since at this time the planet Daxam was bathed in the light of a red sun, any single Daximite would be powerful enough to destroy Booster's costume, much less an entire army of them.

Page 6, panel 4
The sign on the wall translates directly to "prison." The intergalactic, future language Interlac, while first seen in comics in 1969, was finally given form in 1984 by, you guessed it, Keith Giffen.

Page 8, panel 1
This is Booster Gold's first encounter with the Emerald Empress. The Empress is a long-time foe of the Legion of Super-Heroes and bloodthirsty murderer. She is also possessor of the Emerald Eye of Ekron, an orb of spectacular power with ties to the Guardians of the Universe. The Empresses' peculiar speech may be due to her symbiotic relationship with the Eye.

Page 9, panel 5
Social Diseases are a euphemism for sexually-transmitted diseases. Though Booster has often been a womanizer, it is doubtful that someone with access to the entire spectrum of the time stream and the associated medical science of the universe would suffer from any diseases at all.

Page 9, panel 6
Will Wal-Mart, a discount department store founded in suburban Arkansas in the 1960s, travel to other planets by the 30th century? It boggles the mind.

Page 10, panel 1
It's worth pointing out that despite the previous comment about Booster's womanizing, Booster Gold has had very few ongoing romantic relationships in the 20th/21st centuries, and none of those women have been demonstrably unstable.

Page 10, panel 2
Booster speaks in Pig Latin, an artificial manipulation of the English language whereby the speaker transposes opening consonant sounds to the end of a word and couples them with the hard "a" vowel sound. Pig Latin is usually employed to disguise spoken comments from a casual listener. In this case, Booster is trying to call the Emerald Empress a "total loon" without her understanding.

Page 10, panel 5
"Punt"? This is not the sort of football that Booster is typically associated with.

Page 14, panel 1
HIS STORY: Despite being a star player, Booster was expelled from college for gambling on his own football games.

Page 16, panel 2
Booster Gold's recent track record has been terrible: in the past three issues he has failed to save his sister's boyfriend, a bystander's dog, and now a busload of civilians. That's got to be a hard pill to swallow, whether you believe in Rip Hunter's theory of Solidified Time or not.

Image Copyright DC Comics

Page 18, panel 4
On 30th-century Daxam, the men must wear Kilts. The sign to the bathroom apparently shows a woman, but below the sign is the letter "m" in Interlac.

Page 18, panel 5
Booster slyly references his early days as CEO of Goldstar, a company built largely through leveraging Booster's knowledge of the past.

Page 19, panel 3
Booster Gold and Rani join Rip Hunter and Skeets at Hunter's Arizona Lab in the 21st century. Hunter jibes Booster with a reference to Sundollar Coffee, a product that Booster Gold once endorsed.

Page 19, panel 6
Booster Gold and Rip Hunter can't agree on when Booster was on the planet Daxam. For inexplicable reasons, Rip seems to have confused the seventh and eighth of April. While you'd think that the DC Universe's Time Master would be above such a gaffe, certainly the DC editors should have been. Remember that narration box in the first panel of the first page? If Booster was in the year 3082, he was in the 31st and not the 30th century. Editors, take note: if there is one thing that cannot be tolerated in a story about time traveling, it is confusion about the dates!

Page 20, panel 1
Post-It is a brand name trademarked by 3M, first marketed in 1977. Booster Gold and Rip Hunter, men who have access to all of history, communicate via hand-written sticky notes? Awesome.

Page 21, panel 4
Skeets' distaste for pets was first demonstrated in Booster Gold, Volume 1, #2 in 1986.

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REVIEWS

Boosterrific Review: Drama? Check. Action? Check. Humor? Double check.

Some will no doubt decry the injection of humor into the dangerous world of a time-traveling Booster Gold. But the style of Giffen and DeMatteis cannot be denied. The new style of fast-paced, prime-time television style prattle could not be more differentiated from predecessor Dan Jurgens' more methodical soap opera pace. Maybe not a change for the better, but certainly not a change for the worse. If this issue is a sign of things to come for Booster Gold, the future looks bright, indeed.

Boosterrific Rating:

  • Currently 5.0/5 Stars.
Boosterrific!

Average Fan Rating:

  • Currently 4.0/5 Stars.
(7 votes)

  • Currently 2.0/5 Stars.
Gregory A. Swarthout (Apr. 6, 2011, 15:55:45)
Okay, I'll say it, "the emperor has no clothes". While I can live with the art change, the writing is a big step down from the previous writing team. Ugh!

  • Currently 3.0/5 Stars.
BoosterPowershot (Oct. 21, 2010, 10:43:28)
The first issue takeover by G/DM team, I felt, was rocky at first. I was immediately put off by the start of it. HOWEVER, the issue picked up better around the time that Booster "let's" the people he's trying to protect, die. I like Chris Batista's artwork just as I did in the Last Days of Animal Man.

  • Currently 5.0/5 Stars.
ncllcn (Aug. 19, 2010, 23:49:41)
The transition of writers/artists went better than I would have thought. Loved seeing the Emerald Empress, I do hope if Booster goes back to that time period he has more run ins with her. Rani adds a new dimension. I thought Rip's reaction to Booster bringing her back was a little subdued almost like he knew it would happen, usually Rip would flip over a thing like that. The mix up on the dates was odd too, hope there was more to it than a simple mistake. The humor was done well I thought. Good first issue all around for the new team.

  • Currently 5.0/5 Stars.
Fatastar (Aug. 12, 2010, 17:44:38)
Rani is an interesting addition. I loved how she and Booster interacted, at first it was bratty kid and bratty grown up, but at the end he was almost paternal.

  • Currently 4.0/5 Stars.
Erin (May. 18, 2010, 14:48:26)
I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. What brought the score down on this one was how much they repeated jokes, certain character interpretations and my own uncertainty with how they had Boosters' actions directly affect other characters. Skeets seemed too much like L-Ron for my taste. But Booster kept his heart and his intelligence, which I'm grateful for. Loved the art and can't wait for the next issue.

  • Currently 5.0/5 Stars.
Superman (May. 16, 2010, 10:35:50)
Keith and J. M. certainly did not disappoint.

  • Currently 4.0/5 Stars.
KMD (May. 14, 2010, 13:48:05)
While parts of the work were excellent, I found a good deal of the attempts at humor a bit too much-oh good, another I have to go to the bathroom joke. Yay. Is than an 8 or a 5?

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