Booster Gold #22

Booster Gold #22
"Tortured Options"
Cover Date: November 1987
Creative Team: Dan Jurgens (Writer and Pencils)/Ty Templeton (Inks)/Steve Haynie (Letterer)/Gene D'Angelo (Colors)/Barbara Randall (Editor)

Summary

The head alien from Booster Gold reiterates Booster's dilemma from the end of last issue, Booster can either save his sister, or else save Minneapolis from a giant monster. Booster tries to threaten the man for a bit, but he’s stuck, and he knows it. I mean, Booster loves his sister, but letting Minneapolis get destroyed would look pretty bad. So he sends Skeets to find Michelle while he heads back to the Metrodome to fight the Destructor Agent.

He arrives back on Earth just in time for the Destructor Agent to rip the roof off of the Metrodome, which makes the monster roughly as powerful as a large pile of snow, I guess. Booster tries to fight the beast, but he’s made out of some sort of putty, meaning that he’s all give, and Booster can’t seem to do much damage.

Back in Dimension X, Skeets frees Michelle, and they both try and figure out how to get out of there.

Booster is still fighting the monster when the new look Justice League International shows up! Their current roster is:

-Mister Miracle, the greatest escape artist in the universe!

-Martian Manhunter, now being repositioned as the one constant of the Justice League!

-Captain Atom, hard alien metal shell cover crispy candy center!

-Rocket Red 7, avowed Communist!

-Guy Gardner, currently in Panglossian mode thanks to a concussion!

-Black Canary, wearing the worst costume of the era!

-Blue Beetle, I still don’t see the appeal of Blue Beetle. There's a good reason why the highpoint of Ted Kord's career was being comic relief in a comedy book.

With their powers combined…they make no progress. Guy, whose brain no longer works so well, wonders if the rampaging monster wouldn’t be a great addition to their team.

In Dimension X, the aliens are not happy that Booster has found his friends, but they’re almost ready to transport their main army in, so things should work out for them.

Also, this series is almost over, so it’s time to start the big wrap-up story arc! To kick things off, a shadowy figure hacks into the Booster Gold International computer system, and transfer all of the money into a Swiss bank account.

Minneapolis! The Justice League finally comes up with a solid plan, as Captain Atom bores a hole into the alien monster with his powers, and then Booster flies inside the alien before the hole closes, Booster then expands his forcefield until the alien explodes.  The team then turns to rescuing Booster’s sister.

Speaking of which, she’s getting her ass kicked by the aliens, since they drained most of her energy last issue. Booster barges in and saves her, but the alien leader has some bad news for him. This was all a diversion to allow the aliens to assemble their real army in a room with an even bigger portal that will teleport the army, as a whole, to the Earth in an instant.

Booster realizes that he can’t fight an entire army, but his forcefield is enough, for the moment, to allow him to find the army, and start looking for some way to destroy the teleporter. He eventually finds some energy conduit that he figures is probably vital to the proper operation of the device, and just blows it to bits, because he doesn’t have time to figure out anything else.

That works, but it also starts a chain reaction that causes the alien base to start self-destructing.  He quickly heads back with Skeets and Michelle to the gate they had used before, but the gate is set to ‘receive’ rather than ‘send’, Booster will need to protect the gate with his forcefield while Michelle tries to operate the alien controls to make it work right. And she manages to figure it out! And the gate is ready! And then a severed power cable falls down from the roof and Michelle gets blown up! The entire base then goes up in an explosion, and Booster and Skeets are blown through the portal back to Minneapolis. And, to make it absolutely clear to Booster that his sister is really, really dead, he finds a tattered piece of her Goldstar suit by his side.

At Michelle’s funeral, it’s kind of sparse crowd, as Booster only has four guys in his supporting cast, and the Justice League, there as a courtesy, never actually met her. Mac Garrison never met Michelle either, and so doesn't really give a shit either, hanging out only for a few minutes before going back to work, pissing off Dirk and Trixie in the process.

Trixie asks if Booster blames himself, and, well, given that Booster was the one who brought her back to this time, commissioned the Goldstar suit in the first place, and was the one who ultimately couldn’t quite save her, he does. Trixie wonders what is happening to Booster, especially since she just saw him in Metropolis at the same time he was supposed to be in another dimension.

Booster then asks Dr. Fate to teleport the tombstone into  some other dimension as, after all, a tombstone for a woman who died over four centuries before she was born doesn’t belong in the normal universe. Booster then broods. The end!

 

Continuity!

-This version of the Justice League is from between Justice League International #7 (When Rocket Red #7 joins) and Justice League International #8 (When Rocket Red #7 reveals himself as a Manhunter spy AND a robot AND gets blown into tiny pieces. )

-Trixie is referring to Action Comics #594, which came out the same month, where Booster Gold seemingly calls a press conference to denounce Superman’s “crimes against humanity”, referring to a running subplot where Superman had attacked a country named Qurac. He then kidnapped a woman in order to draw Superman out and fought him for a bit before he and Superman fought to an inconclusive battle before the real Booster Gold showed up, setting up the events next issue.

Review

You can tell that Jurgens knew his comic was doomed at this point given that Michelle died before she even did anything. Hell, I don't think she ever even managed to use her Goldstar suit in a single fight.

Anyway, I'm not sure that Jurgens is successful at the tonal whiplash at the end of the book. For the first two-thirds of the story, you've got a pretty light story involving invaders from "Dimension X" and the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League, who were always more of a sitcom than anything else, and then Michelle suddenly dies and there's a rather somber funeral scene. Oddly enough, it's the sort of thing that Keith Giffen did in just about every other story he ever wrote...also Adam Warren, come to think of it.

Here, though, I think Michelle is a bit too much of cipher for this to work. She hasn't really done much of anything, and while she is Booster's sister, they've had literally three conversations in this entire series, including their scene in this issue. From a theoretical perspective, you could see how this would bother Booster but, there's no visceral feeling here. Michelle is just too much of a non-entity to have her death mean much of anything for the audience.

Had this comic lasted a few more issues, this probably would have felt a bit more meaningful. The fact that next month's crossover with Superman got shoehorned in at the end didn't really help, either, especially since it's deeply confusing unless you've actually read Action Comics #594. The Justice League showing up worked a bit better, because Booster is a member of that team, so it's a bit more organic, and because the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League was one of the highpoints of this era, making other stories better just by their presence.

In a better world, Dan Jurgens would have had a bit more time to build Michelle up as a character before killing her off for emotional impact. Unfortunately, he didn't get it, and the story suffers for it.