Booster Gold 43

Ah, I’m about to read my first Booster Gold comic. Let’s read the portents. Keith Giffen? He’s done some good stuff, some bad. JM DeMatteis? Never liked his writing. All bathetic poetics or studiedly unfunny zaniness. Chris Batista? Rich Perrotta? Never heard of them, but the cover isn’t the abomination that you see on many other comics. Mmmmm – this one could go either way.

(fifteen minutes later)

Look, I can’t even really be bothered to slag this comic off, much less praise it. It sits there in a limbo of okayness, not really eliciting a reaction one way or another. Except for one thing: if this comic was a person, I’d want to give them a good kick up the arse. It’s like one of those self-satisfied people you see wandering around wearing a condescending smirk, convinced of their own superiority. The truth though is this – it’s just another dumb comic book.

Here’s the plotline, such as it is: our hero lands in the future, suffering from a form of leprosy, and encounters the Legion of Superheroes. They fight for the first third of the issue, after which Booster Gold is interrogated, and then cured of his disease by Braniac 5. He returns home, to find that his entire adventure has been staged for him by Rip Hunter. THE END.

Now, I know this the concluding fragment of a much larger storyline, but that’s not a huge amount to fill up an entire comic with. Throughout, there’s supposedly witty banter, with Booster Gold in a near-perpetual strop, and the Legion reacting to his story with various stages of disbelief. You can tell that the creators want this to be clever and amusing, but it just comes across as being annoying. Not only does the disease Booster Gold contracted make him look like a heavily acned teenager, he has all the emotional maturity of one as well. Someone give him a girlfriend/boyfriend to distract him, please. Or tell him to go off and have a good wank, at the very least.

This is illustrated a little better than it deserves to be by Batista and Perrotta. They use crisp, uncomplicated page layouts that communicate events occurring very clearly. Closer inspection reveals weaknesses, though. Scenes involving a multitude of characters tend to turn into ill-composed clutter, and the situation isn’t helped by the fact that all the male character’s faces are interchangeable – lean and lantern-jawed, with slightly-turned-up noses.

There’s nothing terribly wrong with this comic, apart from being overly pleased with itself, but there’s nothing to lift it out of the ordinary either. This is Giffen and DeMatteis’s final issue (as they self-referentially note in the final pages of the storyline), so perhaps things will take a turn for the better from here on. For newcomers like myself though, there’s little incentive to start reading the series with this particular issue.