Elsewhere

I wrote about Jason Little's Borb on PopMatters a couple weeks ago, which was a challenging, engaging, significant book. It's never easy to discuss real-world problems in a funny, charming way that still gets at the heart of the matter, but Borb makes it seem effortless, almost natural. This week, my new 1987 And All That went up on Comics Should Be Good, reviewing issues #13-22 of Booster Gold. I'd never spent nearly that much time with Booster Gold before, and never spent any time with him as the star of his own book, so it was interesting to discover just how full of himself and pigheaded he can be. I'm not a major Booster Gold fan or anything now, but I did seriously appreciate Dan Jurgens' ability to make such a pain-in-the-ass character work as the protagonist of his own superhero comic.

Something I Failed to Mention
I didn't touch on Booster Gold's sister Michelle at all in the CSBG column, even though I took the time to break down the supporting cast. I actually failed to include Rip Hunter, too, come to think of it, but in both cases I excluded them because they were more like temporary additions to the cast than full-time members of it. Michelle, though, ends up dying, and her death marks the only time in the ten issues I read that Booster completely, 100% owns up to his mistakes. He maybe even overcompensates, blaming himself entirely for Michelle dying when, at worst, he is only partly at fault. He makes a few bad decisions while trying to rescue her from other-dimensional kidnappers, and it could be argued that if he'd been smarter about that situation, his sister would've survived. But I also think it could be argued that if she had lived, he'd have died, or at least been stuck in enemy territory, so while I understand his guilt, I don't agree that he's wholly responsible. Anyway, Michelle's funeral is like the last thing that happens in the last issue I reviewed, so it served as a nice little cap, Booster facing his own flaws and inexperience head-on in a way he'd steadfastly refused to do before. As such, I probably should've brought it up, and only didn't because I write those columns in the order the ideas come to me, and sometimes that leads to stuff getting left out because it doesn't pop into my head until after the piece feels complete.