I’m working on my next issue review, but in the meantime, I figured this will be a good thing to drop here. Especially since my brain’s a little deep-fried from the accounting job I found myself doing today, wherein I was told I would be doing some light bookkeeping and envelope-stuffing and instead ended up scrambling through the backlog of an entire absentee accounting department for a multi-million dollar company I’d never worked for before. No pressure, right?
But anyway, here's something I wrote to someone else who was asking about Booster's reading list, since his narrative arc is long and awesome; there's a queer lean to my commentary, but definitely not without any foundation under it. If you don't care for that kind of thing, just note down the book names instead, I even bolded them for you.
Like I’ll mention in a later post, this is a write-up that’s mostly got a Watsonian lean, rather than Doylist one. If you’re unfamiliar with those terms, it just means that I’ll mention this side of the fourth wall, but the reading list is written from a more in-universe perspective. And these really are just the basics; there are a bunch of incidental single issues worth looking for, too.
But without further ado, my reading/rec list!
Booster Gold Vol. 1 <- Written in the mid-eighties by a young writer, and you can definitely tell, but that second part is actually quite a bit of the charm. The book starts out with you wanting to smack Booster and coo at him at the same time, and oh my god, he definitely acts like a twenty-year-old who’s probably in over his head but happens to be a pretty okay bullshit artist. He gains a fortune, participates in the capitalistic consumption of the eighties, flirts shamelessly, but he also has his vulnerable moments and it’s pretty telling that it takes him most of a year to even tell anyone his given name (absent Skeets, who already knows it), even when they’re close to him. He goes into the future, almost gets executed a few times, brings his sister into the past, loses her (ostensibly), has madcap adventures, gets wrapped up in tentacle bondage enough times to make you side-eye his creator, and by the end, he loses everything he gained and ends up living with the–
Justice League International/Justice League America <- Probably the most famous period in Booster’s history. Where he meets Blue Beetle (Ted Kord) and pretty obviously becomes absolutely fucking infatuated with the man. (No joke. Like– people noticed this even back when this book was running, there’s definitely a reason that ship is so enduring. Probably because it’s built out of so much material. LOL!) Another period of madcap adventures, but the thing most people forget while they reminisce is that Booster’s a pretty normal, earnest hero through this time; it’s actually usually Ted scheming and getting them into trouble. There are pranks, actual battles, attempts to not be broke, lots of sitcom, tons of subtext and not-even-subtext, and probably the best Justice League cast ever. There is a lot of cringe, and a lot of the humor then would not fly now (and shouldn’t), but it’s still absolutely worth reading.
It starts more silly, but it gets more serious after Dan Jurgens takes over (and the writing’s not quite as solid, though it’s definitely not bad). There’s the death of Superman arc, where Doomsday wrecks the team, a period of very cringe 90s writing/art, the Overmaster arc where Booster gets fucked up bad, which then leads into–
Extreme Justice, which is basically THE NINETIES personified. The Justice League splits up (again) into several groups, and Booster and Ted both go along with Captain Atom and basically live in caves and get into various kinds of shit. LOL! Notable for the fact that poor Booster’s trapped in his armor for life support after the Devastator took him apart during a big chunk of this time, so the man’s suffering. He’s also pretty burningly and obviously jealous of Ted hanging out with someone else while he’s stuck living the Robocop lifestyle. However, he does eventually get his arm back (and his heart and lungs fixed), which leads to a brief period as a tentacle monster. So it’s not only his creator, apparently. 🤣 And then he gets a new suit which is definitely not as bad as the previous, though still isn’t great.
That’s the last steady book Booster’s in for years, though he has a scattering of appearances. Nate’s team breaks up, he dates Firehawk for awhile (notably the single only relationship he’s even had since coming to the past, to that point), he and Ted run a company together for awhile, but mostly seem to be drifting apart. Booster’s a bit of a mess through here, bratty and trying to gain some fame again – when this hadn’t been a concern while he was with one of the teams – and you can speculate a lot about what’s going wrong for him in greater context, 'cause it makes for meaty storytelling. But his next regular book is–
Formerly Known as the Justice League/I Can’t Believe It’s Not the Justice League which– oh boy. Okay, this is only quasi-canon. It’s the same writers as the old JLI/JLA run, but if you ask me, they’re nowhere near as good. Instead of the sitcom vibe of before, the characters themselves are intentionally pushed to their most extremes, to the point of parody, and it makes for something that’s definitely funny, but in the way that Seinfeld is funny: No one comes across well. Everyone’s acting like an asshole, with the exception of Mary, Sue and Ralph. (And actually, Max is pretty cool, which doesn’t help with shit that happens later.) Mary’s treated creepily by the writers and in narrative, too. It does have its moments, and it makes good canon-fodder (with some modifications), but it’s really up to you whether you wanna read it. It very much isn’t more than quasi-canon and parts have been retconned or ignored. But for some tonal whiplash–
Identity Crisis is hugely controversial. It’s very much not a Booster book, but if you want to understand the context of everything that comes later, you kinda got to at least know the basics of this storyline. It shakes the hero community down to its bones and it’s also the catalyst for a lot of things. The upshot is that Sue Dibny’s dead by the end of it, Ralph is emotionally destroyed and Batman goes into paranoia overdrive. It’s also where you start to think people have it in for the JLI, because out of all the teams, they’re absolutely the incarnation that loses and suffers the worst, I think. Identity Crisis and its fallout lead to:
Countdown to Infinite Crisis, which will shatter your heart. Ted gets on the trail of a major conspiracy. He tries to enlist the help of the major heroes to solve it and gets continually ignored or brushed off, supposedly because he used to play practical jokes. (-throws hands in the air-) Booster’s in pretty dire straits – like actually homeless and swiping Ted’s debit card for three hundred bucks to hopefully get to Miami and sign an endorsement deal and maybe, you know, stop being homeless, but he ends up dropping the deal and coming back to help Ted, which results in him getting flash-fried by an exploding computer and needing CPR on Ted’s front lawn. Ted goes on to chase the mystery while Booster’s in the hospital; the last time they see each other, Booster tries to get up and go with him and can’t. Ted leaves and it’s pretty much all horribly wrenching from there on. Not that it wasn’t before. Ted’s shot dead at the end.
Infinite Crisis/The OMAC Project <- Booster checks himself out, probably AMA knowing him. He and Diana meet up; she’s the only other hero aside Booster who took Ted seriously and tried to help him. They’re both worried. This is where Booster finds out Ted was murdered in probably one of the cruelest ways you can do it, tries to take a shot at Batman, and then proceeds to go meet up with the remnants of the JLI to try to find who killed the man he loved Ted Kord. By the end of it, they’re all fucked up, another member of the JLI is dead and Booster goes back to the future– but comes back with the information to take down Brother Eye, a repaired/replaced Skeets and knowledge of where Jaime Reyes (Blue Beetle III) is and his place in all this. Thanks to that, they defeat Brother Eye. This storyline’s pretty messy, but also pretty important.
From here is one of the best books DC actually ever did: 52. Booster starts off in full self-destruct mode, fame-chasing and wearing endorsements on his costume and otherwise acting way worse than he did when he was twenty. Given this is only a couple months after Ted was brutally murdered, though, anyone with two braincells and even a rudimentary understanding of psychology can gather what’s happening here. Nonetheless, Booster’s always been treated pretty badly by the broader hero community, so he’s not winning himself any favor. And Skeets is acting super weird, which is a Problem, since Booster’s relying on Skeets to tell him where trouble is so he can stop it. His hero work’s legit; his glory-hounding is just painful. His absolute lowest point in his hero career is when he hires a badguy to stop, which of course comes back to kick him in the teeth. But worried about his robot sidekick, he ends up getting tangled up with Rip Hunter again and involved in– well, you know, this one’s good enough to just say: Read it. It’s good stuff. By the end, Booster’s absolutely found his feet as a hero again, though, even if his absolute devotion to a dead man is still very much woven into him. The end of 52 sets up–
Booster Gold, Vol. 2, which is another really excellent book. Part time-travel shenanigans, part comedy-of-errors, part 'jfc, how badly are we gonna traumatize or retraumatize this man’, it can also be described as: Michael Carter loves Ted Kord and will destroy all creation for that love, and when that doesn’t work out, he’ll spend the rest of the book regularly traveling back to the past to see the man, actively mourning the man in the day-to-day, occasionally sobbing on Ted’s grave and otherwise reminding everyone how incredibly Not Over This he is. That being said, there’s a lot of funny, the return of his twin sister, the revelation that Rip’s his son from the future, plenty of JLI tie-in, and towards the end, it runs concurrently with–
Justice League: Generation Lost! Tonally speaking, the issues that run parallel between this and Vol. 2 will give you such whiplash you’ll be wearing a neck brace. Generation Lost, though, is a deadly serious book and it’s basically just Booster, Fire, a resurrected Ice, Nate and Jaime Reyes trying to track down Max Lord and being the only ones who remember him. Notable for Lopresti drawing Booster (one of my favorite artists for him) in several issues, Booster actually leading his teammates not-badly, Max Lord being super creepy towards him in the first issue, it’s a good book if taken with a grain of salt. Ignore Tora’s revised backstory, which is stupid. Be prepared to grow a fair bit of resentment towards the wider hero community for being assholes. If you want even more of people treating Booster like shit, he’s in a few issues of Power Girl that also tie into this. By the end of Generation Lost (and given what’s been happening in his book, etc. etc.) I’m a little amazed he’s functional and has not actually thrown himself off any cliffs without his flight ring.
His second volume ends with Flashpoint, cutting off what was a truly good book because DC decided to do the New52. Sadly, Booster hasn’t been handled genuinely well since then: The closest we get is a short run in Action Comics. He’s written horribly by Tom King enough times to instill in me a burning resentment for King, treated like kind of a one-note joke and now he’s lost in the Absolute Universe for the foreseeable future, though I will say that I have some hope for him to finally get some good writing there, 'cause those books have been on fire.
ANYWAY! There are incidentals beyond this list. Luckily, there’s also Boosterrific, which has legit every appearance he’s ever made and is a good resource to dig up the more obscure stuff. If it’s out there, Walter’s definitely seen it and documented it.
But if you want the essential reading list as it stands, at least in my opinion, there ya go above! Whew!
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(Seriously not kidding about the whole tentacle thing, though.)
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