Booster Gold #2

Booster Gold #2

Cover Date: March 1986

Creative Team: Dan Jurgens (Writer and Pencils)/Mike DeCarlo (Inks)/Augustin Mas (Letterer)/Tom Ziuko (Colors)/Janice Race (Editor)

Last Time: Booster Gold debuted! Also, a shadowy figure managed to get a hold of Booster's fingerprints to try and find out who the new hero really is!

More importantly, after fighting off Blackguard, Booster was unceremoniously knocked out by a new villainous named Mindancer.

 

Summary

 

Booster Gold slowly gets up after being leveled by Mindancer, and she escapes with the guidance system Booster had brought back to STAR Labs at the end of last issue. Making things worse, he’s surrounded by the press, who question if he has what it takes to be a hero. Given the publication history of Booster Gold, that's a fair question to ask.

At Goldstar, Inc., Dirk is not happy about the media coverage of Booster getting his ass kicked.

In Centennial Park, which is essentially the Metropolis version of Central Park, Mindancer enters a secret underground base where her employer, the Director, thanks her from bringing back the guidance system, and then hires her to go after Blackguard and bring him back to base for punishment.

Goldstar Inc! Booster is still a bit touchy about his public humiliation, and Skeets and the office cat don’t like each other. I feel like that might be the most interesting subplot I've seen thus far. Robot vs. Cat: The Final Confrontation!

Anyway, Dirk starts yelling at Booster about how this loss is going to hurt their bottom line, because the public loves a winner. It’s also revealed that not even Dirk knows Booster’s origin. After a bit of abuse, Booster points out that he can fire Dirk, and so the man should shut up before storming off. Dirk realizes that “deep down, Booster cares.”

Booster and Skeets retire to their apartment, and discuss what the history files say about this. It turns out that Blackguard is only a minor villain, but Mindancer is dangerous. Booster is frustrated, because he didn’t realize that the media could be real jerks, and then thinks about how neither of them can go back home.

Somewhere else, a woman interrogates a man about something called “The 1000”.

Outside the prison, Booster is shooting a commercial for cereal. At a prison? I guess the nominal reason is that the commercial opens with a shot of Booster handing off a criminal to the police, although I’m pretty sure that most criminals usually get a trial before getting sent to prison. Also, I’m not an ad man, but I’m not sure that I’d want to associate my delicious morning cereal with the brutality of the American penal system. Anyway, Booster botches the commercial because he’s not a very good actor. Booster gets yelled at some more, and then Dirk introduces Booster to that guy from Blaze Comics, who has made the journey out to the prison to meet Booster and his manager. Aren’t these sorts of meetings exactly why Goldstar, Inc. has an office? So they don’t have to do business near a prison?

Of course, the real reason for the commercial being near the prison is so that Booster can immediately get involved in a rematch with Blackguard and Mindancer. Dirk worries that, the way this is going, he’ll “have to go back to representing pro wrestlers.” I don’t know, a comic book starring mid-80s Ric Flair would probably be pretty awesome.

Time for an update on the shadowy man from the last issue. He hasn’t found anything based on Booster’s fingerprints, so he orders his associate to move to plan B.

At the office, Trixie deals with a bunch of minor problems.

Booster has Skeets deal with Mindancer while Booster fights Blackguard again, and since he was already able to beat Blackguard once, he’s able to handle the villain again, eventually knocking Blackguard out completely.

Mindancer is another issue, though, as although she can’t use her powers on Skeets, who’s a robot, she can feed off the psychic powers of others, and tries to manipulate a guard to start wildly firing his gun. Booster is forced to let Mindancer go. But then Blackguard manages to surprise Skeets from behind, blowing the robot to pieces. To be continued!

Continuity!

-The woman in this issue, as will be revealed soon enough, is the Silver Age Rose & Thorn, who hadn't appeared in many stories recently, so it's not clear if Jurgens actually expected readers to make that connection. I'm not sure how many would have, seeing as Thorn had made about one appearance in the decade leading up to this issue.

-Dirk calls Booster "Boosteroo" for the first time in this issue. I feel like that might be the most important thing that happens in this comic.

Review 

Not the strongest issue, although I suppose it is interesting to see a hero suffer a decisive defeat in only his second appearance. Part of the problem is that Booster is going up against some pretty generic villains who don't exactly do much to grab anyone's interest. Blackguard is just a generic bad guy, and Mindancer isn't a whole lot better.

The main problem I have, I guess is Jurgens trying to wring pathos out of both Booster's failure to stop Mindancer as well as his revelation that he can't go home. The problem is that Booster isn't really a great character to get that sort of emotional mileage out of, especially since his whole raison d'etre is "Hero who wants to make money." Yeah, I guess saying that he does have a heart of gold or something like that does humanize the character, but it also erodes the central premise of the book if he's not really in it for the material rewards. 

Also, the big fight scene in this issue is kind of dumb, if only because Booster just happens to be at the prison at the exact moment that Mindancer shows up to free Blackguard, which is pretty contrived, because, as I said before, he was only there to film a cereal commercial.

Then again, it's still early in the series, and this comic is more about setting up the pieces that resolving anything, which is fine, as it's still only the second issue.