Booster Gold #6

[history79]

Comments

[cainofdreaming]

... If you're just dangling this in front of me so you can pull it away when I reach for it I'm so going to fill your slippers with hairballs, DC.

[scorntx]

... this was from over a decade ago.

And it was a "Ted Kord definitely really had to die, and not just because Dan Didio thinks he sucks, and here's a dystopic alternate future showing what would've happened if Ted Kord, who nobody actually likes, hadn't died, so stop moaning already." sort of moment.

(Though they did have a whole thing hinting that after all this time-travel Ted had somehow gotten better from dying, being incinerated, brought back as a zombie and destroyed again.
Only they never got around to fully showing that Ted weren't dead before Flashpoint came along.)

[cainofdreaming]

Yeah, I kinda remembered it maybe half an hour after I posted that. Guess I suppressed the whole thing.

[mrwalker]

I read Rip's lines with Arthur Darvill's voice...

Also the writers seem to have forgotten the grotesque arm fracture Ted suffered shortly before his death.

[crimsonmoonmist]

Nu-uh. Not buying it.

... Maybe everything will come crashing down, but then Booster and Ted'll still somehow subvert fate and come out on top with him still alive anyway, though? Then again, I doubt DC'll pass up a chance to kick one of its heroes where it hurts. Especially since this seems to want to go for the "Booster is irresponsible" angle.

[chalicother]

This was made a decade ago

[lbd_nytetrayn]

I thought the old DC logo on the cover gave that away.

Guess not.

[janegray]

I'm still so goddamn annoyed that they turned Max evil.

[miss_abnormal]

Oh, me too.

Maxwell Lord went through one of the most severe retcons I've seen in DC and I'm saddened that DC has decided to stick to this decision instead of acknowledging that, at this point in Rebirth, the character of Maxwell Lord is barely recognizable. I'm not particularly hoping for DC to one day try to deal with his character's history, but if there was any possibility, I wish someone would write a redemption for Max (not a second retcon or a "he was possessed/mind controlled/a clone/etc the whole time!" because those would be the easy way out) in a mature and interesting manner that acknowledges Max's history with the JLI and the fact that he had developed back then into a genuinely good man (to an extent).

[zachbeacon]

That's the thing. Max has always been shady but every time we've seen him do something outright evil we later find out he's mind controlled or possessed or something. I've been waiting for a similar reveal ever since he killed Ted but they seem dead set on sticking with this stupid retcon.

[miss_abnormal]

Oh, yeah. Max has been shady since his character debut. Hell, part of his debut is him letting a man blow himself up and readers finding out he previously planned to kill his boss. But I think that Max also went through a character development during the Giffen/DeMatteis JLI era that ended with him actually changing and becoming a good man, albeit definitely with what people used to call a "used car salesman" personality.

However, I think that after Giffen and DeMatteis left, other writers just didn't know what to do with Max, so they just went back and forth with him being a good guy or a bad guy in story arcs that were never completed back in the '90s. And then DC needed a villain for Countdown to Infinite Crisis and they chose him because he was maybe a bad robot guy in the '90s and people probably wouldn't remember the character all that much in the 2000s (even though by this time the two new mini series, I Can't Believe It's Not The Justice League, had been/was currently being published).

I didn't read comics back when Countdown to Infinite Crisis was published (I started reading in December 2009/January 2010, when Blackest Night was in full swing), but after learning so much about the JLI and its characters, it bothered me (and still does) about how Max was handled. I also thought that DC would eventually reveal that he was mind controlled and whatnot, but obviously that option is pretty much out of the window. I also hoped that with the Rebirth stuff, DC would reveal, I don't know, that Max changed because of some space-time reboot thing. Hell, I thought that Max was going to go through a redemption arc in the Generation Lost series.

And I guess, if there's even an inch of a possibility that DC will change their minds about him, there will still be a well-written redemption arc for Max.

Although if DC reveals that Evil Max is a clone or alternate universe counterpart and that the Good-ish Max was trapped somewhere or whatever, I'll honestly just go with it at this point.

[janegray]

Thing is, I liked Max because he was shady. He represented the idea that you don't need to be a great guy to do the right thing. Shades of grey are real, people who are not particularly heroic still have lines they won't cross, and still can be counted on to raise up when something really bad happens.

Making him a mass-murdering lunatic who'd shoot his own friends reinforces the stereotype that comics are childish black&white tripe. "He likes money and has a strong sense of self-preservation, so he MUST be evil!" Ugh.

[miss_abnormal]

Oh, absolutely.

One of the things that I loved about the way Max was written during the original JLI era was how he didn't just turn into a super good guy the moment he "destroyed" Metron's computer. J'onn assured everyone that there was good in Max, but the series showed him constantly stumbling when it came to morality and ethics, especially when Max first got his psychic powers. And I loved that the series' narrative called Max out on the creepy use of his powers, and then even Max himself realized that he was being creepy and stopped.

I loved his nuanced character development and that he was flawed and bettered himself and was still flawed--but he got better in a way that, as you said, "people who are not particularly heroic still have lines they won't cross, and still can be counted on to rise up when something really bad happens".

I think superhero comics have a bad history of turning characters full-on evil if they did something shady or one bad thing once in their life (or, constantly reverting characters to villainy), even if said characters had been written as learning from their mistakes and becoming better people. Like, Jason Todd was sort-of-but-not-really-all-that-much of a punk when he was a kid, so that meant that he should be evil when he was resurrected. Cassandra Cain was trained to be an assassin, so she must be evil. (Now that I think about it, the mid-2000s really a bunch of DC characters suddenly turning evil).

[zachbeacon]

I forget, did we ever find out who Black Beetle really was? IIRC they seemed to be going for a multiple choice origin but I don't remember if any of them stuck.