Reviewing a Comic I Already Know I Love

Also, the new edition is like a month old already

DC has released a new collection of one of my all-time favorite comics: the 2007-2011 Booster Gold vol. 2. It's a pretty cool book that promises something exciting coming next, but it's still a little wonky.

The new book -- you can get it here, and I should get a tiny commission -- collects the first sixteen issues of Booster Gold vol. 2, the bulk of which were written by Geoff Johns and Jeff Katz, with art by Dan Jurgens, Norm Rapmund, and Hi-Fi on colors. One additional story was written by Chuck Dixon with art by Jurgens, Rapmund, and Hi-Fi, and another was written by Rick Remender and featured art by Pat Oliffe, Jerry Ordway, and Hi-Fi.

Most (not all) of these issues had a "commentary track"-style interview that I did with Katz and Jurgens at Comic Related, a now-defunct site where I worked before ComicBook.com. All of those commentaries (plus others) are collected in my book The Gold Exchange, which you can get here.

With Booster Gold: The Complete 2007 Series Book One now in stores, I'm super tempted to make tiny little ebooks or paperbacks (or both) that are JUST supplements to these volumes and break up The Gold Exchange into particular runs of issues.

(That's a little inside baseball and not really pertinent to a "review," but it just felt like something that I could and might do, and so I figured I would mention it. Believe it nor not, since I never crowdfunded it and only sold it once it was completely done, The Gold Exchange is my top seller on Amazon the last time I looked at my books.)

The review part of the review:

Booster Gold: The Complete 2007 Series Book One is a fine addition to your library, particularly if you are precious about your now-out-of-print hardcovers. The interiors are largely similar to the contents of the original printings of Booster Gold 2007, with a notable exception that has both good and bad aspects to it:

In between single issues of the comic, both collected editions would share the cover for the original book. The first two issues had variant covers, and so one side of the page would feature the standard cover, with the variant on the back. On every other issue, where there were no variant covers, the back of the page varied between the first and second collected editions.

In Booster Gold: 52 Pick-Up (the first original collection), dynamic images from within the issue were framed inside playing cards. That works for a number of reasons: Booster's "original sin" was gambling, while the first issue began with him taking down the Royal Flush Gang. Also, Booster Gold #3 (so -- the first issue without a variant cover) features a cover where Booster is in the Old West, playing poker with Jonah Hex.

In Booster Gold: Blue & Gold, the second original collection, they got rid of the "card pages" and instead just used the same image each time: a piece of the cover from Booster Gold #0, framed in a "circuitry" frame that was styled to the cover logo.

In The Complete 2007 Series Book One, this is improved upon: they retain the cards as a framing device, choosing a dynamic image of one of the lead characters to frame in each one. My only quibble is that a number of them are shots that appear fuzzy, small, and in low resolution because, while the pose might be dynamic, it was taken from a small panel on the page and then blown up to suit the card frames.

This seems like sheer laziness on DC's part: surely there are high-resolution digital files somewhere. After all, they have to provide them to Amazon for the books to be available on ComiXology, right?

Looking a second time, they are mostly not as bad as I remembered, but there absolutely are at least a couple that should not have passed quality control, and it's a baffling decision because the choice was made to unify the collection and improve the overall reading experience. With that context, it's even weirder that some of the pages look amateur.

The collection features the cover to Booster Gold #1 as its front cover and the cover to Booster Gold #0 as its back cover. That's playing it pretty safe, since those are two of the most commonly-reused images from the whole run...but while it was used heavily throughout the Blue and Gold collection, the #0 cover did not appear on the back cover of the original collection (or any other that I can recall). This, along with the use of the cards in place of the "circuitry pages," could suggest DC is putting a little more thought into these collections than is immediately evident.

The biggest benefit to having The Complete 2007 Series Book One, though, is the reprints of Booster Gold #13 and 14. Those are the issues by Remender, Oliffe, and Ordway, and unless I'm missing something, this is the first time those have been reprinted at all. My recollection is that Remender had been led to believe he might be taking over the title, so he planted seeds to pay off later. that never happened, because Dan Jurgens was given both the writing and art jobs starting with Booster Gold #15, and so it's likely that they originally felt Remender's issues would have complicated the otherwise-straightforward narrative that they created between the Dixon/Jurgens and Jurgens solo stories. It is, however, nice to have them finally collected.

Those issues alone make it worth buying, especially if you weren't reading the series at the time and have only read (or re-read) it in collections. It isn't the best Booster Gold story ever told, but it's an interesting glimpse into what it was like having a very different voice on the book. One of its hallmarks during most of its run would be its consistency of tone and sense of direction, so any issue that breaks away from that is, if nothing else, a valuable artifact.

It's a little funky that the front cover lacks credit for Dixon, Remender, Oliffe, or Ordway. I suppose at some point you have to make a cutoff, though, and they only worked on a few issues. The back cover does list the primary creatives with "...and many more" attached, though.

The collection itself feels strange. It jumps right into the issues, and feels like it would benefit from an introduction of some kind. That MIGHT be a kind of optical illusion -- the thickness of this much-larger collection makes it feel like it should have some kind of introduction or table of contents or whatever. But even then, DC seemed to intuitively know this in the past. The original trades didn't have a proper foreword either, but they did have a recap page, as well as Booster Gold's origin page from 52, which immediately preceded the volume.

The inclusion of the Remender issues, paired with the apparent desire to keep the page count and cover price down as low as they could, also means that any backmatter originally published in the collections -- which included alternate covers and early sketches of Booster from Jurgens's notebook (remember -- Jurgens created the character!) -- are all but missing here. That's particularly a loss because there were some really cool images in a "rejected cover gallery" at the end of Blue and Gold.

Still, as noted above, I wouldn't go as far as to say it isn't a worthwhile collection. Bringing the Remender story in is good, as is bringing some of these stories back into print for the first time in years. Before the announcement of the upcoming Booster Gold [HBO] Max series, none of the 2007 collections were in print. Even after the announcement, it was just 52 Pick-Up that was rushed back into stores.

The biggest thing here is that Booster Gold ran for 49 total issues before it was wiped out by the annihilation wave that was The New 52 reboot in 2011. Jurgens wrote, drew, or both most issues of the series -- although the Justice League International writing team of J.M. DeMatteis and Keith Giffen teamed with a number of fan-favorite artists to make about a year's worth of the book while Jurgens was off working on Time Masters: Vanishing Point, a story that tied into the events of The Return of Bruce Wayne and set up Flashpoint.

(Fun fact: That story is also widely credited with being a big influence on the development of DC's Legends of Tomorrow, the TV show covered in my next book!)

Booster Gold: The Complete 2007 Series Book One carries a $29.99 price sticker, which is pretty reasonable considering it weighs in at over 300 pages of comics, some of which are ordinarily pretty difficult to find. The value proposition is definitely there, and given that this is one of DC's most consistently entertaining comics of the last 20 years, it's definitely worth picking up if you have a friend who needs a Booster Gold primer ahead of that casting announcement we've all been waiting for. You can get it at a variety of online retailers, and it's likely in stock at your local Barnes & Noble as long as they have a decent comics section.