A review of Booster Gold #0 By Eric Singer (Superman's Pal) March 20, 2008 Rating: 9.5 / 10

Writer: Geoff Johns & Jeff Katz
Penciller: Dan Jurgens
Inker: Norm Rapmund

"We’re five grown men dressed in bright colors inside a clear plastic bubble set against a rainbow background, Jaime. They saw us."

I’ve reviewed a few poor books and lot of mediocre ones here. It’s a crime that I haven’t yet posted a review for an issue of "Booster Gold," the best comic currently being published by DC Comics and actually the best comic they’ve published in quite a while. That’s an oversight I aim to rectify.

When he first appeared, the character of Booster Gold could be taken seriously to a certain extent. He might have been out for the money but he was a decent hero, not a complete incompetent. He was taken in a humorous direction along with his pal Blue Beetle and while it was funny on occasion, he pretty much became a joke. An incompetent hero and an uncaring moron. That changed in "Countdown to Infinite Crisis," a one-shot that forced us to take Booster, Beetle and their one-time mentor Max Lord more seriously. Too bad it took the death of Beetle for Booster to find his inner hero again but he did find it, emerging as the hero of "52" and leading into this series.

The first six issues detail how Booster undertakes a new mission with fellow time-traveller Rip Hunter to bounce around in time, repairing holes in the timeline. This allows us to follow Booster back to familiar events in DC history and have a little bit of fun with them. That’s the thing -- this book is fun. It gives us a Booster who is a determined, competent hero while still cracking jokes and having fun with DC history. It’s the perfect balance. As much fun as Booster is having, the one reason he took the job was for a chance to go back in time and save his friend Ted Kord, the Blue Beetle.

For now, it seems he’s succeeded. In the previous issue, he and a team of alternate-era Blue Beetles saved Ted from Max Lord at the conclusion to "Countdown to Infinite Crisis." I doubt that’s the end of the story but for now, we’re told that time has been ‘patched,’ that the world still thinks Ted is dead so he must remain out of sync with time, making him the perfect candidate to help Booster on his missions outside the timestream.

Time travel could easily become convoluted, and it does so in this issue. While zipping around in Hunter’s time sphere, Booster and the gang run smack dab into "Zero Hour," a previous time-travel story. They battle Extant and Parallax in the void at the end of time before escaping into the 25th century. The brilliance comes from not having the villains follow them the whole issue. Our heroes conclude that the battle of Zero Hour is long since over so the whole thing was just an aside. That’s how time travel should work. In danger one minute, the next minute the danger has long since passed and was fought by somebody else. We don’t need perfectly linear storytelling.

We move on to new events. Since they are in Booster’s home era of the 25th century he’s able to contemplate changing his own past. The question that presents itself is can he erase the bad things from his past without erasing the good, too? Now to escape this era, our heroes are thinking of stealing the time sphere that Booster originally used to travel to the 21st century. I can’t help but think that screwing with his own origin and screwing with Ted’s death are going to come back to bite him in the butt. You can’t just remove events from the timeline, ‘patch’ them over and expect everything to work out.

I can’t believe this is the same Geoff Johns that’s writing what I consider the ridiculously overhyped "Green Lantern" stories, and books like "JSA" that have a lot of promise but rarely ever go anywhere. Maybe it’s Jeff Katz’s contribution that flavors this book, or maybe this is just a different side of Mr. Johns but whatever it is, it works. It works big time. Dan Jurgens, the creator of Booster Gold, supplies the pencil art and it’s a thing of beauty. Norm Rapmund, you’ve got an easy job -- polishing a diamond.

This thing is firing on all cylinders. Keep serving ‘em up, boys.

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