Booster Gold #6

Booster Gold #6
Cover Date: July 1986
Creative Team: Dan Jurgens (Writer and Pencils)/Mike De Carlo (Inks)/Augustin Mas (Letterer)/Nansi Hoolahan (Colors)/Al Gold (Editor)

Last time: An damaged alien craft approached Earth, looking for help!

Summary

A boy named Jason Redfern finds a tiny alien that crashed to Earth last issue. He takes him home, but there’s a language barrier, and Jason has no idea what the alien is trying to say, other than the alien keeps projecting a Superman symbol.

But Jason has no idea how to get in touch with Superman, so he finds the next best guy…Booster Gold!

At the stately offices of Goldstar, Inc., the boy meets with Trixie, and heroically sets up an appointment! Upstairs, Skeets is trying to educate Booster about basic Earth history, and Booster forgets that Ford came between Nixon and Carter. Also, he greets Dirk by asking “what’s down?” Booster isn’t great with this whole “blending in” thing. Anyway, the Booster Gold comic is in production, and they have a draft of the Booster Gold movie script! Good times!

Booster then meets with Jason in his purported HQ, which is really just a big room dressed up to look like some sort of futuristic control room for appearance's sake. Jason tells him that they have to meet Superman, and Booster is amenable to that idea, because he really wants to meet Superman too. So he calls the press and “dares” Superman to meet him at a nearby dam the following morning on a matter of supreme importance. Booster never learned the difference between "good" and "bad" attention.

The next day, Booster, Jason, who is newly decked out in a spacesuit because Booster is reasonably sure they’ll all end up in space, and Skeets head out to the dam, and wait for Superman. Big Blue shows up, and immediately makes it known that he does not like Booster and Booster’s shameless approach to making money off of super-heroics. Also, he can see that most of Booster’s powers are mechanical in nature, and recognizes the Legion flight ring on Booster’s hand as future technology, meaning that he knows that Booster is probably from there.

Booster walks away dejected as Skeets decides to tell Superman the exciting origin of Booster Gold!

See, Michael Jon Carter was the best quarterback in all of college football in 2462, but the Future!NCAA still had rules against paying athletes, meaning that Booster was just a poor college student. And then he got caught betting on games, and was blackballed from football and made a pariah. His family, who had already suffered when Booster’s father became a compulsive gambler, were disappointed in him too, so he left them as well.

Eventually, he became a night watchmen at the Space Museum, where Skeets was working as a security guard. He was fascinated by the displays honoring 20^th century heroes, and eventually got the idea that by becoming such a hero, he could re-enter high society. Skeets pointed out that Michael Jon Carter’s reputation was already too terrible to make that work, so Michael came up with a good backup plan, stealing a punch of devices to give him powers, knocking out Skeets, and then powering up the still-functional time machine on display in the museum to go back in time to 1986 to become Booster Gold.

Superman is not impressed with this tale of match-fixing and super-theft, and Booster interrupts to point out that telling Superman his origin was a bad idea, because Superman has both the means and desire to take them back to Booster’s own time for punishment. They argue about that for a bit before another alien shows up, zaps them all, and then abducts them. To be continued!

Continuity!

-It's not quite clear whether Superman recognizes the Legion Flight Ring on Booster's hand, probably because of the slightly unsettled state of Superman's continuity. at the time.

-The Space Museum was a mainstay of Silver Age stories dealing with characters set in the future of the DC Universe.

Review

Booster finally has an origin! Which is good! But he's also essentially the future equivalent of Pete Rose, and that's a lot less good.

Let's be honest, Booster's origin is kind of stupid if you think about it, which you probably shouldn't do, because none of it really makes any sense. It's the year 2462, but college football works almost exactly as it does today in terms of the rules of amateurism, which is pretty amazing when you consider that, per the established continuity at this point, there's a civilization-destroying nuclear world war scheduled for the middle part of the 21st century.

Also, that they store a working time machine in a museum that anyone with access can take for a spin with only minimal training. But, then again, it's Booster Gold, it's not the deepest book in the world, even if that is occasionally frustrating.

That said, I will grant you that making your character have that unsympathetic an origin is a ballsy move to make, especially since Booster seems only intermittently interested in being a legitimate hero instead of just making as much money as possible. I'm not sure the Jurgens really pushes just how much of an asshole Booster can be that often, but he was probably concerned with the fact that making the main character of a comic an unrepentant jerk would have turned a lot of readers off. I would have enjoyed it, though.

Unfortunately, getting this origin on the table requires a bit of clunky exposition, as Skeets decides that it would be a great idea to tell a guy as clean-cut as Superman all of the details of Booster's past in an attempt to make Superman more comfortable about the idea of teaming with Booster.

Still, the main point of this issue was to have a team-up with Superman, and to finally explain Booster's origin, and I guess it succeeded at that.