Justice League 3000

Cover Description: Booster Gold and Blue Beetle run from the Blue Beetle of the future.

Brief Synopsis: Booster Gold and Blue Beetle adapt to life in the 31st century.

Issue Summary: Blue Beetle and Booster Gold awaken to find themselves in the 31st century. While Project Cadmus watches from afar, Blue and Gold go in search of Blue Beetle's laboratory where they hope to find a Bug spaceship that will help them escape the prison planet. What they find instead is that someone else has stolen Beetle's technology and now plans to kill them rather than surrender it. Reveal Potential Spoilers

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

Costume Worn: MARK I.v2 power-suit

Issue Notes: Regarding the continuity of this issue: writer Kieth Giffen has gone on record as saying that Booster and Beetle's appearance here continues directly from the Formerly Known as the Justice League mini-series and its follow-up in JLA Classified. Since events of Formerly Known as the Justice League have been referenced in Booster Gold, Volume 2, those series must be part of the same continuity. However, Formerly Known as the Justice League is clearly the launching point for the characters here in Justice League 3000, so it must be part of this continuity as well. Since the chronologies of Booster Gold, Volume 2 and Justice League 3000 cannot coexist, so what we have here is either a divergent timeline or an entirely different dimension with more than passing similarities. We do not have enough information yet to be sure which, but if this Booster is truly from a future past the year 3000 (as mentioned in the annotations below), it must be the latter and not the former.

Story Notes: The title of this story, "Another Fine Mess!", was previously used by writers Giffen & DeMatteis as the title to Justice League Europe #3.

This story has been reprinted in:
Justice League 3000 Volume 2: The Camelot War (2015)

Page 1, panel 2
Ted Kord awakens in the future, thinking that his travel through time to the 31st century with Booster Gold had been a dream. This is similar to a running gag in the Back to the Future movies where time-traveler Marty McFly is repeatedly dragged from sleep thinking his travels were all a dream.

Page 2, panel 1
ALTERNATE REALITY: In the DC Universe this Booster Gold and Ted Kord came from, the Earth of the 31st century was the home of the Legion of Super-Heroes. In this reality, Earth has been transformed into the prison planet Takron-Galtos.

Page 3, panel 1
FIRST APPEARANCE: First appearance of Takron-Galtos Sheriff Tariq.

Page 3, panel 2
Blue Beetle says Booster doesn't drink alcohol, but Booster isn't sure. Booster certainly drank in the past, as seen in Superboy and the Ravers #8, but he wasn't nearly the drinker Ted Kord was, as seen in Justice League Quarterly #6.

Page 3, panel 3
"Max" is Maxwell Lord, founder of both the Justice League International and Super Buddies teams. "Ralph" is Ralph Dibny, also known as the Elongated Man, a member of both of those teams. Every year on his birthday, Ralph's wife Sue hosted a surprise mystery party involving many of Ralph's friends.

Page 3, panel 4
HIS STORY: As Booster Gold should know, the recorded history of the DC Universe between the 20th and 25th centuries was lost during a nuclear cataclysm.

Page 5, panel 3
BUSTER GOLD: "Buster Gold" has been a running joke for 29 years now. Isn't it nice to know that some things don't change?

Page 6, panel 1
HIS STORY: Blue Beetle is wrong about Booster's origin. Booster Gold was born on Earth in the year 2442, nearly 600 years before the events in this issue!

Blue Beetle is not wrong about Skeets. Booster's sidekick never appeared in a Giffen/DeMatteis-written story until Booster Gold, Vol. 2. So far as their JLI stories were concerned, Skeets might as well have never existed.

Page 6, panel 2
"Porn collection"? Dialogue this frank could never have appeared in the duo's Comic Code-approved stories in the Justice League International comics of the 80s and 90s. (Which is not to say that we couldn't guess that Booster had an interest in "erotica." After all, he was watching the Playboy Channel in Extreme Justice #4 and made cheesecake calendars featuring Fire in Justice League America #67.

Page 7, panel 1
FIRST APPEARANCE: First appearance of the Blue Beetle of the 31st century.

Page 8, panel 1
The beggar with the monkey has a spore of Justice League villain Starro, the Star Conqueror, on his face.

Page 8, panel 5
Say, is that fellow eating cookies the Martian Manhunter? And is that Frankenstein standing behind him?

Page 8, panel 6
"Can't hurt to look, can it?" Is this a reference to Countdown to Infinite Crisis?

Page 13, panel 1
ALTERNATE REALITY: In Booster Gold, Volume 2, #31, Booster Gold tells his sister Michelle that he never actually married Gladys. In this reality, he insists that he did.

Page 13, panel 5
POWER DOWN: Booster realizes he is missing his Legion Flight Ring. Has it been stolen, or is he in a reality in which it never existed? No Legion of Super-Heroes certainly seems to mean no Flight Ring.

Page 16, panel 1
Beetle and Booster are attacked by the Blue Beetle of the 31st century, who wears an exoskeleton with 4 mechanical legs. Given that Blue Beetle has often been compared to Marvel Comic's Spider-Man (both characters were co-created by Steve Ditko), is it a coincidence that the future Beetle uses a gimmick similar to Spider-Man's "Iron Spider" costume?

Page 17, panel 2
For more information about Blue Beetle's "pudgy phase," see the "Breakdowns" storyline beginning in Justice League America #53

Page 17, panel 3
POWER DOWN: Of course, if Booster's Legion Flight Ring can't exist, his Brainiac 5-designed force field can't either, right?