One hero stands above all others as the metric by which heroism should be judged. Obviously I'm talking about...

No matter what generation you're from, Superman is the paragon of all that is altruistic and moral in the DC Universe. He was raised with a strong code of ethics and strives to use his tremendous power to make the world a better place. He never cheats, yet he always wins. It takes a Man of Steel to live up to his ideals.

It's only natural that a more flawed, human hero, Booster Gold, looks worse standing in Superman's shadow. Booster is jealous of Superman's power and fame, but he also resents the fact that he can't meet the standard that Superman's sets. Comparisons between the two heroes provide a lot of drama throughout Booster Gold Volume 1.

The late 1980s were largely defined by the deconstruction of super-hero mythos. (Alan Moore's Swamp Thing and Grant Morrison's Animal Man were contemporaries of the original Booster Gold.) In hindsight, it's natural to ask whether Dan Jurgens was, like his fellow writers at DC Comics, intentionally using anti-hero Booster Gold to tear down what made Superman tick in order to investigate what it meant to be a super man in the DC Universe?

I was aware of it but I don't think I would, at that time, have phrased it that way.

I simply wanted to do something different. Superman was the pinnacle-- the absolute king of heroes. Booster could never aspire to that so he had to take a very different approach. He never wanted to be iconic-- at least not in the way Superman was. He wanted notoriety, but knew he could never have that level of unquestioning trust from the public that Superman enjoyed.

In general, I think handled Superman fairly well. I did, however, write him a little more staid so Booster's differences would stand out.

When Jurgens would get his chance to write for the Man of Tomorrow, he turned in some of the best Superman stories of all time. So I think we can forgive him if his early Superman appearances seem a little stiff.

Thanks to Dan Jurgens for, well, everything.

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