Comics / Comic Reviews / DC Comics

52 Week Fifteen

By Hervé St-Louis
August 20, 2006 - 21:57

This issue, Booster Gold dies. It’s not a spoiler, it says so on the cover. The only question is how. Well, a giant mythical marine creature lands in Midtown Metropolis carrying a nuclear submarine in its paws and it’s up to Booster Gold to save the day, unless Metropolis’ new icon, Super Nova can get the job done first. Is there any hope for Booster Gold and Metropolis? Only one super hero will walk out this fight alive.

Dan Didio had to justify and explain in several interviews why killing Booster Gold was justified. According to the new masters at DC Comics, Booster Gold just didn’t fit in the new order of things. Since Grant Morrison worked on the JLA series, everything has to be iconic at DC Comics. The disease is so pervasive that it was highlighted in the JLA / Avengers’ crossover and has even influenced Marvel to move in the same direction.

All this iconic madness is a code word for marketable and memorable characters. Booster Gold was too similar to a standard Marvel character to hope he could survive long in the new black and white world DC Comics is forging. The mentality at DC Comics being, we have precious few collectors left, we might as well rehash all the material they love so much.

Some fans think that this is a direct attack on everything J.M. Dematteis and Keith Giffen did in their own Justice League series. I beg to differ. While the work by Giffen and Dematteis is taking the brunt of the attacks, it is the time period and an entire decade that is being shown the way out at DC Comics. After the first Crisis, DC Comics became more like Marvel Comics, with the proliferation of unrecognizable and non iconic characters. The big names were shelved in favour of more characters with less baggage and more characterization possibilities. As for the iconic characters, they went through hell, according to some fans and became edgier.

DC Comics has decided to differentiate its product from Marvel Comics by going to the roots. While this is justifiable, instead of forging away at new material, they rehash the same old stories but spin them for a new audience. Writer Geoff Johns is an expert at that.

But comic books and their universes are cyclical in nature. What DC Comics’ current crop of writers thinks was bad writing and insulting was another generation’s coming of age. Many fans enjoyed these stories by less than perfect characters and all the mess they created. Before the late 1980s and 1990s, DC Comics’ universe had never been that comprehensible and intertwined. While 52's writers want to capitalize on that, they also want to throw part of the formula that made the big universe work.

One ingredient are characters that can be changed and modified. That’s why there were so many second stringers in the 1980s Justice League. No one could touch the important characters. DC Comics thinks it can get a strong universe and enjoyable senior characters with real personalities. The upcoming JLA series by Brad Meltzer, as master in team intrigue and characterization is sure to be nothing but that. He’s not known as a cosmic epic writer.

While I don’t mind the strengthening of DC Comic’s brand formula, iconic heroes and villains, I don’t feel like reading just that. Especially as Marvel is moving in that same inbreeding territory with its own series. The Young Avengers is an example of that. Everybody is a derivative character based on a few seminal ones.  I’m not interested in reading about the ever expanding Bat-family or the third generation extended Superman family, through Steel and his niece. While what happens to them is interesting, it ties them up directly with Lex Luthor, hence Superman.

Booster Gold had evolved into the Blue and Gold team with Blue Beetle. But Blue Beetle was a legacy character. There will always be a Blue Beetle. The current may be dead, but another showed up even before the former turned to dust. I doubt there will be another Booster Gold. This is house cleaning the old fashion way. Make the reader care for a character, show him through good time and bad times. Put him on a cover for a few issues and then, just kill him. That’s a classic.

If there is any legacy, it’s in Super Nova whom I don’t think is an alternate Booster Gold from the future or five seconds before he died. It’s DC Comics showing its readers how third string characters not attached to any established family or legacy will be introduced from now on. They have to be iconic in the hopes that they too can one day establish their own lines. In nature, one calls this is called survival through breeding. I shouldn’t be surprised that DC Comics has stumbled on this in order to survive.

About the artwork. It’s good and crispy. It tells the story right while been the type of clean artwork one won’t see often in a Marvel comic book. It’s too polished and not gritty enough.

8/10

Past review:

52 Week Fourteen

Last Updated: November 29, 2025 - 16:51