International Exchange: JLI #6

Friday, February 3, 2012
This month's installment of Russell Burlingame's "International Exchange" column includes a small sampling of Dan Jurgens' breakdowns for the issue. It also includes a bit of social commentary.

IX: It's funny–Batman's comments about people feeling angry and pushed to the brink by governments they no longer trust is as true in a world without aliens and superheroes and madmen with atomic backpacks as it is in-continuity. Was that an intentional observation or just the way life and art play together?

DJ: Very intentional.

I've made it clear from the start that there are elements of this book that are supposed to reflect the world we live in. Consensus has become an impossibility. Any topic or situation seems divided with one party on one side, the other party on the other. MSNBC take an unreasonable stance to one extreme, FOX News the other.

And the minute one party actually does achieve supremacy and do something, like in Wisconsin, the opposite side goes so far as to try to throw a governor out of office. It's not a question of, "I want government to get moving again." It's more, "I want government to do what I want it to do." There's a big difference.

So, yeah, people are angry. If the DCU is to reflect our own world, there's no way everyone would embrace heroes because there's no way it could happen in our reality. With that in mind, Batman's commentary extends to both worlds.

After DC's last major continuity reboot in 1985, the first major crossover was Legends. At the time, America was embroiled in conflicts ranging from drug wars to class wars, cold wars to cola wars. Reflecting the social and political turmoil, Legends was primarily concerned with exploring both the role of super-heroes in the contemporary DC Universe as well as the public's reaction to them. After all, what good is Superman to a world that ignores or hates him?

It sounds like Jurgens is interested in re-investigating some of the same territory a quarter of a century later in the light of the terrible economic times and divisive political culture of the modern day. Hopefully, Jurgens and his fellow writers don't take reality too seriously. I'd hate to one day realize that the DCnU isn't a nice a place to live, and I wouldn't want to visit there.
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 Cleaning House

Thursday, February 2, 2012
Football questions always tend to bring the weakest poll response. I guess in the Venn diagram between comic book readers readers and sports fans, not a lot of us end up in the intersection. Maybe Booster Gold made the better choice: you sure can be a hero longer than you can play competitive football.

I thought this comparison between quarterbacks was fitting, mainly because both are well-accomplished and both play in large-market teams. (Boston/New York is very much the way I've always envisioned Metropolis/Gotham.) Besides that, their personalities couldn't be more different! So who did the voters pick?

Last week's poll question: Which 2012 Super Bowl quarterback is more like Michael Booster Carter? (21 votes)

Two weeks ago, we looked at who you might want to join the DCnU Justice League International. This week, we'll look on the flip side of that coin. After all, if we want to add Blue Beetle, we'll need to make some room on that roster.

This week's poll question: Which current DCnU JLI member would you prefer to see leave the team?

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 New Releases: Justice League International #6

Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Whoops! This was supposed to posted earlier this morning! Sorry about that.

Advance solicitations indicate that today's release of Justice League International #6 will be a character piece bridging the gap between the first and second story arcs in the young life of the DCnU JLI. Last week's preview (discussed here) also indicates that the issue will have a strong focus on Booster Gold. Focus on character with plenty of Booster Gold? That's sounds like our kind of comic book!

Buy this issue and make Skeets happy.
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 Jurgens on JLI #6

Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Josie Campbell of Comic Book Resources interviewed Dan Jurgens last week about his plans for the future of the Justice League International. Perhaps more interesting than the future is the still-muddled past of familiar DC characters in the unfamiliar DCnU.

CBR: In terms of what's next for the team, you already dealt with one big, planet-destroying menace in Peraxxus in the very first arc. As a writer, where do you go from there? How do you top a guy who nearly destroys the Earth?

DAN JURGENS: I think since the first arc was very much, for lack of a better term, plot-oriented or adventure oriented, I think what we want to do now is something that is more character oriented. Sort of like your question about Guy and Batman -- why are they there? Obviously we saw how everybody was brought together and were really thrown into the deep end right away without having any real knowledge of how they function together. Booster kind of knew Fire, he kind of knew Guy; the idea is that they had met previously but certainly had not worked as a team previously. If you've never done that, why are you going to continue to hang out with these strangers? So the more character-driven aspect of it where they ask themselves these questions becomes much more part of where we're going from here, and we see some of those things dealt with in issue #6, which comes out [next] month, and then really kicks off with #7.

"Booster kind of knew Fire"? Prior to Flashpoint, Booster Gold and Fire had shared panels in over 140 different comic stories over the past 24 years. According to Jurgens' response, most of those co-starring appearances are no longer part of DC's history. Should readers be sad to see the relationship erased or excited to see it starting over?

You can find the full interview here. (Thanks to Morgenstern for pointing out this interview.)
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 If This Hero Thing Doesn't Pan Out...

Monday, January 30, 2012
At long last, someone has finally answered the question of what Booster Gold would have looked like as a prospector in 19th-century California. Chaz Folgar recently submitted the following image to Comic Book Resources' "The Line it is Drawn" column as part of its "place comic book characters into different time periods" challenge.

Click the image above to go see a larger copy of this and other fine works at Comics Should Be Good's website. You can see more of Folgar's work on his website, Chazfstan.wordpress.com. As Skeets would say, "dig it."
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February 4, 2012:	Boosterrific.com comic database last updated
640:	Number of unique comic books in the database
$2,302.00:	Cover price of all books in the database
$2,744.49:	Estimated value of all books in the database
119.22%:	Percentage increase of value over cover price
14,686,900:	Estimated U.S. Booster Gold comic books sales since 1996