Booster Gold #6

[history79]

Comments

[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).