During my weekly visit to my Local Comic Shop, the store's newest employee waved me over. "You're the Booster Gold guy, aren't you?" she asked. I confirmed that I was. "Tell me," she said, "what did you think about Booster Gold dating Harley Quinn?"

I assume it was this week's Harley Quinn 30th Anniversary Special that prompted her question. (Booster's not in that, by the way. DC doesn't like to put Booster in anniversary issues, presumably because they don't want him stealing the spotlight. They didn't even give him his own anniversary comic when he turned 30, you know. Not that I'm jealous. I'm sure they'll do right by our boy when he turns 40 in 4 years, right? Right?)

Anyway, in answer to the original question, what I said back in 2020 was

On the one hand, if Booster and Harley were real people and not comic book characters, they'd deserve the same chance at happiness as everyone else. Regardless of the fact that she was trying to kill him as recently as a year ago, the pair would still have the right to seek happy, fulfilling romantic relationships regardless of their past history or public opinion. Whatever anyone outside the relationship (read: me) thinks about the suitability of the pairing of a jock from the future and a psychopath's gun moll should be irrelevant to that relationship.

On the other hand, neither Harley nor Booster is a real person. They are comic book characters who have become widely recognized by fans for being in decades-long relationships with other members of their same sex. Booster's relationship with BFF and fellow hero Blue Beetle has always been intimate but canonically platonic, yet the dastardly damsels Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy have chosen a more physical relationship. (As is the norm in American popular entertainment, the good guys have to play it straight while the femme fatales enjoy "forbidden" love.) Is it a coincidence that these two standard-bearers of non-traditional relationships were chosen to enter into a gender-conforming heterosexual relationship by publishers, editors, writers, and artists who should be aware of the characters' metatextual associations? I find that hard to believe.

That still pretty much sums up my feelings, especially in the wake of the aforementioned 30th Anniversary Special, which goes way out of its way to lean into the Harley/Ivy romantic/sexual relationship.

That said, my opinion about the issue really isn't that important. But I can think of someone's whose is. (Hint: his initials are "DJ.") I'll have more to say about that in a future post.

Comments (2) | Add a Comment | Tags: boostle harley quinn heroes in crisis romance sexual politics

The preview online at AIPTComics.com makes it clear that Booster Gold is in this week's DC Vs. Vampires: All-Out War #3.

And that's all I'm going to say about that.

Comments (2) | Add a Comment | Tags: aiptcomics.com dc vs vampires new releases previews

To borrow another quote from Tom King's interview with Russ Burlingame exclusive to The Gold Exchange The Boosterrific Edition book:

Booster puts up a lot of shields — he's got forcefields; it's a good metaphor — but he puts up a lot of shields around himself, and some of those shields hide a lot of depth.

I couldn't agree more with that. If there's anything that Booster Gold is known for, it's his over-the-top confidence, but that confidence is often just an act, a projection of how Booster *wants* people to see him.

Rarely is the difference between Booster's private and public persona more visible than in my favorite page from Booster Gold volume 1 #9, the scene in which Michael Jon "Booster" Carter officially becomes Booster Gold.

Golly, I miss thought balloons in comics.

That "At least it's... different!" really sums up another key aspect of Booster's personality: his determination to make the best of every situation (even when he's responsible for making the current situation so bad).

He might be a time traveler, but Booster Gold is always looking forward.

Comments (0) | Add a Comment | Tags: balloons favorite pages gold exchange interviews origins ronald reagan russ burlingame tom king

Today's completely trivial statistic: 36 years after the first appearance of Booster Gold (on October 29), there are still 28 different days of the year that have not yet seen a Booster Gold comic released.

This includes Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, as well as September 11, and, ironically, my birthday. As it happens, September 14 is not one of those days.

There has been exactly one Booster Gold comic released on the 14th day of September, and that occurred one year ago today, in 2021, when Booster Gold appeared in these four panels of Justice League #67 drawn by Phil Hester:

pages 3 and 4

pages 7 and 8

pages 16

pages 19

It's a hallmark of issue writer Brian Michael Bendis to give everyone something to say in his crowd shots, so it's a shame that Booster doesn't have any lines. Oh, well.

Maybe Booster will get a speaking part in his next book released on September 14. Here's looking at you, 2027!

Comments (0) | Add a Comment | Tags: brian micheal bendis justice league phil hester statistics

You know, for someone who says I don't like Tom King's work, I somehow dedicate a lot of space on this blog to him. What can I say? The guy's just kind of hard to ignore, especially when he tweets things like this:

That's the book cover under the dust jacket of the Human Target Volume 1 hardcover coming our way September 27. Yeah, we've seen that art before — it was created by Greg Smallwood for the interior of Human Target #1. But it's still Boosterrific no matter how many times we see it.

While I'm on the topic, this would seem to be a great time to mention that Russ Burlingame has an exclusive interview with Tom King in The Gold Exchange: The Boosterrific Deluxe Edition. With Russ's permission, I'm quoting starting from page 594 here:

Burlingame: You said earlier that you write Booster "wrong." That feels like a healthy way of internalizing audience feedback, just to crack the joke and say "I know 30% of everyone reading this are going to bitch, and that's fine."

King: I mean, I say "right" and "wrong," but I wouldn't change the way that I write. I just wrote Booster for Human Target, and I loved how those pages turned out. Yeah, my Booster's a little goofier and a little sillier, and I know it's not going to please everyone, but it's my job to make the best product I can, and that's the best product I see.

If I'm just trying to write the way everyone wants me to write, then I'll write crappy. I know it's going to turn out worse if I try to do it the other way.

My general opinion is that there are a lot of superheroes who are super-competent and super good in the DC Universe, and it's nice to have one who's not that way. It's what makes him interesting and funny. It's nice to have a guy who can make jokes, and that when you read him, it can make you laugh. That's what I like about Booster; he's not like all the other superheroes.

To me, it's the difference between what Iron Man was up until Robert Downey, Jr. and what he is now. He was just a generic, boring guy, and yeah, he had alcoholism, but that was basically it. And then Robert Downey, Jr. came along, and it was like, "What if we made this guy so arrogant it was funny?" And then we're like, "Oh, yeah. Now he's a [effing] great character."

Burlingame: In Human Target, it isn't just Booster, but the entire Justice League International. Do you approach Booster a little differently as part of that unit?

King: I knew I was taking the Keith Giffen/JLI version as opposed to the Dan Jurgens, more heroic version. I wanted to make sure I had it down, so I talked to Dan about it and he was like, "Well, Booster is a guy who doesn't mind making money off being a superhero," so I wanted to make a thing where he was making money off being a superhero, so I put Booster's Bagels in there.

I just started to put captions back in my writing. I haven't used captions since The Vision, so that's like seven years without captions. The whole point of Human Target is, he goes through each JLI member and kind of cuts to the core of them at some point and says why they're awesome, or what's at their heart. So it gave me a chance, using Chance's voice, to say what I love about the character.

So Booster is Booster. And "Yeah, Booster's a joke, but aren't they all? At least this one's funny" is I think his great Booster line.

We can agree on that, at least. Booster Gold *is* funny.

Thanks for the interview (and the book), Russ!

Comments (1) | Add a Comment | Tags: dan jurgens gold exchange human target interviews justice league international keith giffen russ burlingame tom king twitter.com