Rants and Retrospection on Planet Rusty

Hey kids, you know what time it is! Time for my nonsensical babbling about the comic book medium!

I wasn’t going to do a review this week, it was a pretty light week and I picked up one book just for the heck of it. No real need to review, I thought, but then I started reading the book and realized that I have to warn people about what I put myself through.

Some things happen in pop culture that are a grave mistake, we put them in our past and try to forget they happened at all. Some examples? Scrappy Doo, Coy and Vance Duke, Cousin Oliver, etc. You see where I’m going with this.

Battlestar Galactica from Dynamite (yeah, I know, another Dynamite book. Bear in mind not a review here, a warning!) held a little promise the first few pages in. Then it happened.

Doctor Zee is in this book.

Yes, that Doctor Zee, I’m not making this up.

I’m sorry, but when it comes to the world of Galactica, Doctor Zee is right up there with Jar Jar Binks! You know I’m right! The only things that were cool about Galactica 1980 were the flying motorcycles and the Halloween two parter with Wolfman Jack. The rest of that show was nothing but horrid, and Doctor Zee was a big part of that. Putting him in a book with a whacked out premise (not gonna go into it here) in the first place made me fling the book across the room. Haven’t done that in a bit.

Let’s purge this from the brain and move on to something else. Let’s talk about something that I wanted to read and was late to the game in reading a few years back, but managed to get a copy finally! This is one friends of mine looked at me in shock for because I didn’t read it the first time around. Better late than never I say!

That’s right folks, issue five of Booster Gold from DC. Let’s bring the others who are late up to speed. This series was Booster Gold, the fame and money hound superhero, teamed with resident time travel master Rip Hunter. Booster has to go back in the past & fix errors in time (like Quantum Leap), but can’t let anyone know what he’s doing so he’s still seen as a giant screw up in the hero community. How about that, secret identity within a secret identity! This issue deals with Booster trying to stop the events of Killing Joke, preventing Barbara Gordon from getting shot by the Joker. Along this ride we see Booster attempt time and time again to save Barbara from the Joker, and Booster learns a hard lesson about what is and isn’t supposed to happen in the course of history.

This was an interesting read seeing as how Geoff Johns is revisiting one of the biggest moments in DC history. You know as well as I do that in a simple issue of Booster he isn’t going to rewrite a history laid out by legend Alan Moore (they just wait for New 52 to make Babs walk again). But we see that the original work is treated with respect as original events line up with the attempts of Booster to change history. We know Barbara gets shot and paralyzed, we see Booster get his butt handed to him with each try. Reading this is almost as gut wrenching as when I read Killing Joke all those years ago with the constant try and fail to save her.

The other thing that really pops to my mind reading this is how Booster evolved. It’s a good example of how a character can be turned around for the better. For years Booster was the butt of jokes in the JLI days. True, there were serious story lines, but in the end it was Booster Gold being a goof with Blue Beetle. This series made me care more about this character and finally start seeing some depth with him that was needed, otherwise it’s a pretty safe bet Booster would have wound up in an obscure comic character limbo.

But The New 52 event came along and his book went away. Yes, Booster did show up in Justice League International as the team lead, but that book has gone away too. But with this reboot we have some open possibilities here, hopefully one of them is to keep Booster Gold on this track. I’m also waiting for Wally West to start showing up, but it’s ok, I have patience! Hopefully this time around I’m not late to the game again.