This time around I figured I would focus on a personal favorite of mine.  Booster Gold, the greatest hero you’ve never heard of, the corporate crusader, and one half of the greatest buddy pairing in all of comics.  He has been both a punch line, and a tragic hero.  He began his career with a crime, and has perpetuated fraud as a hero all for fame, but also has done genuinely heroic things that nobody ever knew about. He’s a Time Master, he named Doomsday, and he saved 52 entire universes at the same time. Recently he has made his live-action debut in Smallville as the glory seeking hero he is.  And all of that only scratches the surface of why I love Booster Gold, and why you should be reading it.

Booster Gold was created in 1986 by Dan Jurgens and has the honor of being the first new character created post-crisis.  There have been two volumes of his self titled books with volume 1 running 25 issues and volume 2 being currently ongoing and into the 40’s.  He played a major part in the Justice League International where he met his best friend, Ted Kord, aka Blue Beetle II.  Most recently he was the leader of the regrouped JLI in Justice League: Generation Lost, and following the end of that series it is likely he will play a major part in the upcoming ongoing JLI series.  It also seems that he will play a major role in the upcoming Flashpoint event.

Booster Gold, aka Michael Jon Carter, is a time traveling hero originally from the 25th century.  He was originally a star football player and quarterback of Gotham U, where he was almost guaranteed to go pro, until he was caught fixing games.  To be fair, he was fixing games because his mother needed money for an operation, and his estranged father convinced him to go ahead with it because of his gambling debts. Disgraced, he left Gotham for Metropolis where he started work as a janitor at the space museum.  While there he saw the displays for Superman and Batman in the hero wing of the museum, and decided he would try for a second chance at fame and fortune by traveling back in time to the age of heroes to be a hero, and get paid by doing it. He then proceeded to steal several items in the museum so that he would have the power to be the hero he wanted to be.  The items he stole were Brainiac 5’s force field belt, a Legion of Superheroes flight ring, a pair of wrist blasters, a suit that provided super strength, goggles that could see in any light, and a security robot named Skeets, all of which he put into a time sphere and travel back in time to 1986.  Once there, his first act as a hero was to prevent the assassination of President Reagan allowing him to build a fortune and gain enough notoriety to be asked to join the Justice League.

During the Millennium event, he was double crossed by his manager and presumed friend Dirk Davis and as a result lost his fortune, and started living out of the JLI embassy in New York.  His twin sister Michelle had also followed him to the past where she was killed fighting alien invaders, though due to time travel fun, she got better, but her initial death weighed heavy on Michael, and as a result decided to pretty much give up on seriousness and just have fun as a coping mechanism.  This period would be known by some as the Bwa-ha-ha era as that was the signature laugh used by Giffen and Demattais when they were writing Justice League International.  Even though Booster was no longer taking things seriously, and was generally seen as a joke by most people, when things were tough, he did step up to be the hero he had the potential to be. For instance, he acted heroically in the losing battle against Doomsday by doing everything in his power to slow down the monster that he put a name to in the first place.  Of course we know that it was not enough, as Superman would ultimately die, Blue Beetle was put in a coma, and Booster’s power suit was destroyed.  Ted Kord recovered and set to using his inventiveness to build a new power suit for Booster.  This process of constant upgrading to his power suits would continue for years.

All of the joking would be over however when Ted Kord was killed by Max Lord, onetime friend and ally, and former head of the JLI, now leader of Checkmate, a metahuman defense agency designed to protect ordinary people in the event that superheroes turned evil. This event as well as several others culminated in Infinite Crisis, which saw Booster return to the present after going back to his time to gain some perspective. Booster was responsible for bringing Jaime Reyes into the world of super heroics as Blue Beetle III, and was instrumental in locating and disabling the Brother Eye satellite that was creating the Omacs that were hunting heroes at the order of Max Lord.  With the events of Infinite Crisis over, Booster decided to once again try for fame and fortune as a hero, this time with an upgraded version of Skeets, and sponsor patches like they use in NASCAR.

This was still all a façade, as he was not dealing with the death of Ted Kord, and instead putting it off.  Around this time, it comes to light that he had been staging fights with villains that he was paying, and the resulting scandal saw his advertisers flee, and caused his friends and former teammates to lose all respect for him. Around this time a new hero shows up named Supernova, and starts upstaging Booster by being a better hero and not grandstanding.  This gets under Booster’s skin, and he decides he will be better than Supernova, and in the course of trying to one-up Supernova, is apparently killed.  Of course it turns out that Supernova is Booster from the future, and he faked his death to combat Skeets as it had become apparent that Skeets was evil (or rather corrupted).  It is revealed that Skeets was possessed by Mr. Mind who, as a result of the chronal energy put off by Skeets, had metamorphosed into a giant time eating moth and was threatening to destroy the entire multiverse (52 separate universes) until Booster, with help from Rip Hunter, trapped Mr. Mind into a time loop, thus performing the single greatest act of heroism in all of comics.

Having almost single-handedly saving the multiverse, Booster is dismayed to find out that he can never tell anyone about it since as a protector of the timestream, nobody can know how important Booster really is, so now you have the dichotomy of the ultimate glory hound doing the ultimate heroic task, and not being able to take credit for it.  To make up for his new solitary existence, Rip decides to save Michelle seconds before she dies so Michael’s greatest failure is no longer weighing on him, as a result of a failed attempt to save Ted Kord’s life.  Eventually we find out that Booster is actually Rip Hunter’s father, though current Booster doesn’t know, even though future Booster does and is often seen helping current Rip keep current Booster from doing anything too stupid.  Future Booster is also seen being a father to past Rip in Time Masters Vanishing Point which was published recently.

At the end of Blackest Night (an event where dead characters returned in an attempt to destroy all life in the universe)several characters were returned to life including Max Lord (who had his neck broken by Wonder Woman due to his mind control of Superman) Booster, as well as his former JLI teammates, join the manhunt for Max Lord, but are soon the only ones looking when Max pulls off a great feat of telepathy by erasing any memory of him from everyone on Earth, except for the four members of the JLI that were looking for him, Booster Gold, Fire, Ice, and Captain Atom. In their attempt to track down Max and bring him to justice, they recruit Blue Beetle III and a new Rocket Red to their cause, and eventually Power Girl and Batman, and with their help, they get Max to drop the mind wipe allowing everyone on Earth to remember him again. Unfortunately Max Lord escaped and managed to convince people he was misunderstood and was a good guy blaming all of the events and deaths on villains or on dead characters, thus making sure nobody could deny his claim of innocence.  Having essentially lost, the reformed JLI decides to stay together to keep an eye on Max.  The details are currently unknown, but being a heroic time traveler, Booster Gold will be playing a part in the upcoming event Flashpoint, though the level of involvement is unknown.

Booster Gold as he appeared on Smallville

If you are anything like me (then you need to develop more of a life, but that’s beside the point) you are a fan of time travel and the concepts involved such as paradoxes, causality, and all kinds of temporal shenanigans.  If you like the time travel aspect of Dr. Who, and enjoy a super hero book that isn’t afraid to have fun, then you should definitely be reading Booster Gold.

Next time-Zatanna

Previously on Longbox Treasures….
Freedom Fighters
Secret Six