I planned all week to prepare an installment of My Favorite Pages today, but after hours of working on a project that is already almost a year overdue (through no fault of mine), I just looked at the clock to see it's already 3:14 in the morning. To make matters worse, the next issue should be Justice League International Annual #5, but I forgot I don't have a copy of that on hand. Oops. Too late to fix that now.

I could give up, but instead I'll take a page from our favorite hero, put on a brave face, and press on despite the adversity (partially of my own making).

We skip ahead to Justice League Task Force #13. You know, the one were Booster Gold dies!

Dies for the first time, I mean. Depending on how you're counting, there's also 52 and Convergence and Death Metal and DC K.O., of course. But it all starts here!

Booster dying is not my favorite part of this issue. I much prefer the very first page of the issue where we get a look inside Booster's delusional (and, yes, dying) head. Sal Velluto's layouts are a big improvement over recent issues of Justice League America, but note especially Glenn Whitmore's color-negative secondary color scheme for the environment, a not-so-subtle indication that the situation is the opposite of what it appears to be for our usually primary-colored hero. It's a nice touch.

"The best-laid schemes of mice and men," eh, Booster?

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get back to work. (Man, a time machine really would come in handy right now.)

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Part 7 of the "Kingdom of Zod" story arrives at your Local Comic Shop tomorrow in the form of Superman Unlimited #17. Since there's no reason to expect Booster Gold will be in that just as he was not in parts 5 or 6 last week, I'd like to talk about something else today, specifically 2007-2008's Countdown to Final Crisis.

Since this is a Booster Gold blog, I should mention up front that Booster Gold played only the most tangential role in this weekly series follow-up to 52, making only cameo appearances in the 2-page backmatter of issues #43, 42, 41, and 20, while the "Dark" Booster Gold of an alternate Earth (presumably Earth-3) briefly appears in issues #16 and 15 just to get his butt kicked. (If you're confused by that numbering, know that Countdown numbered its issues backwards from #51. "Count Down." Get it?)

But I don't mention Countdown today because of its Booster Gold content (or lack thereof). I mention it because this past weekend I finished reading it for the first time. For financial reasons, I chose to forgo buying most issues when they were new, and after strongly disliking Final Crisis, I never had the interest in going back. A collection I recently acquired had almost all of the outstanding issues, so I finally took the plunge. I have to say, younger me made the correct decision; it's every bit as bad as everyone said it was back in 2008.

From the very start, Countdown is a jumbled, meandering, repetitive and self-contradictory mess, badly hindered by art teams who didn't communicate and editors either unwilling or unable to rein in a series of terrible creative choices and corporate mandates. In its best moments, the story is clearly just marking time; in its worst it's wallowing in torture porn. Reading this as it was coming out must have frustrated more than a few readers away from DC Comics, necessitating the line-wide New 52 Reboot just three years later. In summary: it stinks.

The good news here, and there is good news, is that Countdown has remained unpopular with readers and creatives alike. So far as I can tell, it has been largely ignored and forgotten in the years since its release. With any luck, it remains possible that more recent DC "event" stories with significantly more Booster Gold content could experience a similar fate. Therefore, in a very accidental way, the story of Countdown is a story of hope, and a little hope is never a bad thing.

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Justice League America #56, released September 17, 1991

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