Booster Gold #5

Booster Gold #5
Cover Date: June 1986
Creative Team: Dan Jurgens (Writer and Pencils)/Mike De Carlo (Inks)/Augustin Mas (Letterer)/Nansi Hoolahan (Colors)/Janice Race (Editor)

Summary
 

Mister Twister, a new villain, is holding the attendees of a hockey game hostage! If he doesn’t get three million dollars by 11:52, he’s going to blow up everything. Why 11:52? Because Mister Twister is trying to stand out from the crowd! I applaud his efforts, not enough super-villains go out and there and try and promote themselves like this.

Outside, Metropolis PD is on the scene, but is hesitant to move in because Mister Twister has a deadman’s switch on the bomb. Booster arrives and offers his services, which doesn’t go over well with the police, especially since he isn’t Superman.

Booster and Skeets then sneak into the stadium anyway, only to get caught immediately by Mister Twister. The cops may have had a point.

Trixie’s aunt’s house! Trixie is working out in a leotard when Dirk shows up to tell her that Booster has gotten involved with the hostage situation.

At the rink, Mister Twister orders the hockey players to beat Booster to death or else he’ll waste the entirety of section 12. Booster, with his forcefield, is able to fake getting punched out before he manages to shoot the building’s power transformer with a laser, knocking out the lights. But that just riles Mister Twister more, and he sets off the bomb, forcing Booster to fly the bomb out of the arena and into the sky, where it explodes. Amazingly, Booster doesn’t get killed five issues into his eponymous comic book, and survives the blast, getting away just in time. Skeets, for his part, knocks out Mister Twister with a simple stun blast.

At Trixie’s house, Dirk tells Trixie how good this is going to be for business. Trixie asks if there isn’t something more to life that just material possessions, and wonders if Booster is really happy, because he seems lonely, also, that they still don’t know anything about who he really is or where he’s come from. Dirk doesn't care.

Flying through the streets, Booster tells Skeets about how he’s slowly adjusting to this time period, and Skeets reminds him that he really isn’t, pointing out, as an example, that Booster has mainly been listening to music from the ‘60s, which doesn’t quite befit a normal person who was born in 1966.  They also discuss Booster’s tax issues, which are mainly the result of Booster not having any real identification under which to file his tax return.

Skeets also reveals to the reader that Booster’s real name is “Michael”, before they elliptically talk about how they can’t go home again, while Booster stares at holo-sphere showing pictures of some people. Could Booster Gold be from...THE FUTURE?

The next morning, Trixie and Dirk burst into Booster’s apartment to tell him that the tax case has been dropped thanks to the news of Booster’s latest good deeds, which have inspired the judge to rule that Booster clearly just made an innocent error in not paying his taxes. Well, that's not what Booster said earlier, but sure! So, that's settled. Forever. Booster fought the law and the law...decided to give up.

Senator Ballard, when he hears of this, vows revenge, because Booster somehow destroyed his future.

In better news, the Boostermobile is finally finished! The Boostermobile, of course, being a sportscar that Booster has had made for promotional purposes. He decides to take it out for a test drive, and it quickly becomes clear that he doesn’t really know how to drive, even jumping an open drawbridge at one point just because he can. Eventually, the guy who supplied the Boostermobile, who had been sitting in the passenger seat, faints.

In space, a damaged alien craft flies to Metropolis, the only place in the universe where the alien pilot can get the help he needs. To be continued!

Continuity!

-Since this comic takes place in 1986, and Booster is supposed to be pretending to by a guy from 1966, it's safe to say he's somewhere around 20 years old.

Review 

Senator Ballard sucks at being a villain. I mean, even if this isn't the end of his schemes, for him to spend four issues gathering information on Booster and then unleashing his masterstroke, and then said masterstroke is easily dismissed, offscreen, in less than one issue, then it's kind of hard to care about the character as a credible antagonist.

There's really no good theory for how this makes much story sense. If you really want Ballard to be even mildly threatening to Booster in the future, maybe it would have been smarter to make his attack more than a minor inconvenience. 

And, even if you ignored that problem, there's also the fact that Booster really shouldn't be able to deal with his problem that easily. He's a guy running a multi-million dollar operation, running around in a super-powered suit and he has no documentation. And that just kind of gets ignored as the tax judge just decides "Well, he seems like a good dude, I'm going to let this one go." 

Not to beat this point to death, but neither Booster, nor really any of the other supporting characters in his comic actually did anything to handle this crisis. Granted, it was implied that it was because Booster saved the arena full of people that the case got dismissed, but it's not like Booster did that on purpose or anything. Just kind of a dud.

As for the rest of the issue, Booster fights another filler villain and he still is angsting about his mysterious origin. 

Hell, I'm pretty sure that the most important thing that happens in this issue is Booster getting a new car, with the joke being that it's wholly unnecessary because he can fly. That was mildly interesting.