Wednesday, May 25, 2022
25 Years of Mindless Behavior
For years and years, artists believed that the best way to show what a comic strip character was thinking was to put their internal dialog in fluffy, bubbly word balloons. According to comics historian Brian Cronin, credit for that innovation belongs to Rudolph Dirks' Katzenjammer Kids newspaper comic strip in the early years of the 20th century.
However, at the dawn of the 21st century, this method began to fall out of favor in mainstream American superhero comics. Old-fashioned, abstract thought balloons were gradually replaced by the more "realistic" approach of putting the same internal dialog in square boxes, as though characters are narrating their behaviors after the fact.
Since this transition happened incrementally over time, it passed largely without comment. Which made me wonder, "When was the last time that Booster Gold used a thought balloon?"
The answer to this question is Superman #124, cover-dated June 1997.
So far as I've been able to tell, Booster Gold never thought again.
It just so happens that this issue also marks the last appearance of Booster's clunky late-90s armor, so it also represents something of bookend to his 1990s adventures. If loosing thought balloons is the price we had to pay to get Booster Gold back in tights, I think I can live with that.
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