A little something different today for Booster Gold #21. Rather than show you the page that's my favorite — probably page 6, but I like Ty Templeton inking Dan Jurgens so much, it could be just about any of them — I'm going to showcase the page I think is the most interesting. Page 21:

As I said, I love the art, the beautifully naturalistic posing, musculature, textures, and expressions. But what makes this page so interesting to me is the layout.

Since Booster Gold is the first to speak in panel one, he's on the left. As a rule in English-language comics, speech balloons should be read in order from left to right (following the visual scanning tendency imparted by our left-to-right language construction). Therefore, it generally follows that in American comics, the first speaker should appear on the left side of the panel. In this case, that's Booster, who Jurgens the artist cleverly puts in the long cast shadow of the evil alien mastermind. So far, so great.

The alternating tight close-ups in panels two and three follow in the familiar tradition of the cinematic Western showdown between gunslingers, with Booster playing the white hat cowboy against the gloating villain. The allusion to a gunfight is especially apt given Booster's charged wrist blaster and accompanying death threat. That's a bluff, of course, but the alien hopefully doesn't know that.

And then there's panel four. By the same rules as panel one, the first speaker, Booster, should be on the left. But there's extra reason to put Booster on the left here because Booster was established on the left in panel one. Sequential art and cinema follow many of the same rules, one of those being the convention that speakers shouldn't abruptly swap positions during a scene. Cinema calls this the 180-degree rule. While this rule can and sometimes should be broken, doing so always calls attention to the violation, which is unwarranted here. So it might seem that panel four is following all the rules. But it's also wrong.

From the position of the reader, when the alien Rangor tells Booster Gold to "look," he points behind Booster to the left. In sequential art, where each panel represents a specific moment in a sequence, Rangor is essentially pointing the reader backwards in time. The figures in the panel should be posed such that Rangor points to the right, visually guiding the reader's eye to the issue's big reveal on the story's last page.

In the original publication, this is especially egregious as page 21 was printed on the left side of a two page spread!

When the issue was reprinted in Booster Gold: Future Lost, DC had the good sense to revise this so that page 21 was printed on the righthand side. The reader has to turn the page to uncover the surprise ending. It's a big improvement.

While we're here, I'd be amiss not to call attention to the contribution to these panels by colorist Gene D'Angelo. The first panel is a primarily an unsettling orange. Then each panel becomes progressively cooler in color temperature — pink, light blue, dark blue — as Booster's hot-blooded threat is chilled by the villain's machinations. It's a very nice touch (that looks even better with Jurgens' pyramidal layout).

Did I say this wasn't my favorite page? I might have to rethink that.

Booster Gold comics: even when they're bad, they're good!

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