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ejne7Review: Booster Gold #39.
I'm not going to make out that it takes a *lot* to make me tear up over Booster's grief for Ted, but... wow. I defy the Tin Man to remain dry-eyed over this one.
There's lots I'd like to say about this issue. About its understated acknowledgment that the title has "writer on board" syndrome (Giffen and DeMatteis being just as guilty as Booster of reliving the long-dead JLI glory days, rather than moving on). About what a fine job it does of bringing home to the reader, just as it does to Booster but by rather different means, the absolute certainty that Ted is never coming back (and about how that is no mean feat in comics). About how character notes this serious and deep-seated and painful seem like they should be the antithesis of "BWA HA HA", but somehow fit with these characters' histories perfectly. But I can't even analyse it because my lower lip is wobbling too much. The flowers on Ted's grave until the end of time. Booster asking Rani for the biggest hug in the history of hugs. I held it together til the final page and then just lost it completely. I'd been joking with the guy who works in the comic shop how "this week in Booster Gold, Booster struggles to come to terms with Ted's death JUST FOR A CHANGE", but... twenty minutes later I was actually in tears. Absolutely bravura character writing, and the best closing to a chapter in Booster's history I could have imagined.
Now, I'm off to weep into my sandwiches and not read Generation Lost.
I'm not going to make out that it takes a *lot* to make me tear up over Booster's grief for Ted, but... wow. I defy the Tin Man to remain dry-eyed over this one.
There's lots I'd like to say about this issue. About its understated acknowledgment that the title has "writer on board" syndrome (Giffen and DeMatteis being just as guilty as Booster of reliving the long-dead JLI glory days, rather than moving on). About what a fine job it does of bringing home to the reader, just as it does to Booster but by rather different means, the absolute certainty that Ted is never coming back (and about how that is no mean feat in comics). About how character notes this serious and deep-seated and painful seem like they should be the antithesis of "BWA HA HA", but somehow fit with these characters' histories perfectly. But I can't even analyse it because my lower lip is wobbling too much. The flowers on Ted's grave until the end of time. Booster asking Rani for the biggest hug in the history of hugs. I held it together til the final page and then just lost it completely. I'd been joking with the guy who works in the comic shop how "this week in Booster Gold, Booster struggles to come to terms with Ted's death JUST FOR A CHANGE", but... twenty minutes later I was actually in tears. Absolutely bravura character writing, and the best closing to a chapter in Booster's history I could have imagined.
Now, I'm off to weep into my sandwiches and not read Generation Lost.
no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 08:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 08:50 pm (UTC)I guess the one caveat I'd give (knowing that you are not a Giffen fan), is that the current issues are ... quite... Giffen-y? For me it works really well here, not least because the two writers - who wrote the entire cracktacular run of JLI - have used this latest arc as a sort of fond obituary to that book, almost all of whose characters fell foul of the Nineties grim n' gritty ethic and died in various crass and horrible ways. This issue makes a corking epitaph for what they've been doing: Blue Beetle II embodied JLI's good-hearted insincerity and his (gratuitous) death (in a SRS BZNS company-wide crossover) was a pretty precise token of the failure of those kinds of comics to survive into the Grant Morrison age. For such a funny book, Booster Gold has been hugely preoccupied with Booster's grief over what happened - he's basically spent five years now failing to come to terms with his best friend's death - and in this issue it just kind of reached a climax. Least funny issue ever, and one of the most powerful. But I think it almost had to be these writers who did it, because Ted was in some measure theirs, and they had to acknowledge it and move on as much as Booster did.
OR POSSIBLY I AM OVERTHINKING THE FUNNY PAGES? IDK.
A book I read recently that I think you'd like is Doctor 13: Architecture and Morality. Have I gone on to you about that yet? A clutch of forgotten and abandoned characters battle the one force that can truly obliterate them: the writers of 52. Heh. And I generally loathe anything meta, or that so much as leans against the fourth wall, so for me to like this is really saying something :)
no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 08:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-09 09:06 pm (UTC)