Thoughts on Booster Gold and Geoff Johns

So slugboy lent me the first new Booster Gold collection 52 Pickup over the weekend. I finished it up and have a few thoughts - with spoilers for those who haven't read it yet:

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As I mentioned to slugboy via e-mail, it started out pretty good. For a while, Johns tricked me into thinking that maybe the writer of "Stars and STRIPE" had returned to give us a nice, fun action-adventure time travel comic book - without his usual injection of "pointless angst" to mess with the fun. Booster flits around time righting things that others have set wrong - kind of a superhero "Quantum Leap" or maybe "Peabody and Sherman" given his team-up with Rip Hunter. And for the first part of the book things are actually great - Johns has Booster be both creative and relatively "grown-up" about his predicament as the guy who no one can know is really a hero.

And then Johns has Rip Hunter torture one of his enemies for information. There we go - that's the Geoff Johns I was expecting. Let's inject some pointless angst into this nice action-adventure comic, shall we?

After that, I started to lose interest in the story. I started looking at everything with a cynical eye, suspecting that every plot turn is just another way for Johns to set up his characters for failure. I have no faith that the "happy ending" at the end of the book is anything but Johns setting up a more extended version of the "lesson" that Rip Hunter taught Booster Gold about the impossibility of changing history. I'm also fairly certain that "Future Beetle" will turn out to be a villain who has manipulated Booster into setting up something bad that will enable the Future Beetle to take over the universe or something. And I haven't poked around the Internets for spoilers, so as far as I know this may already have happened in the monthly title.

So that's that - if slugboy snags the next collection from Half-Price Books I'll probably read it, but this didn't do anything to convince me that I needed to start picking up the monthly series myself. And it unfortunately reminded me of why I have a negative reaction whenever people start talking about Geoff Johns - he's a decent writer, but his incessant need to throw his characters into pointlessly angsty situations just drives me batty.

One final observation - the premise of the series has a definite piece of "fridge logic" that jumped out at me about a day after I finished the book. Booster has to be an ineffectual superhero because Rip tells him that if anyone knows that he's actually responsible for saving the world, his enemies will be able to hunt him down in the timestream and kill him as a baby to stop him. Fair enough. But then Booster continues to fight time-travelling baddies as Booster Gold. And he's effective at it. Which means that the guys who he most needs to fool into thinking he's an ineffectual doofus are the ones who know that it's just an act. It would have made more sense if Rip had had Booster use his doofus-hero identity as his "secret identity" and then use the persona of Supernova when he's battling baddies in the time stream. Not a huge deal, but it is a bit weird when you stop to think about it.

Comics pros can do fanboy speculation too

Well that was a long hiatus. I had intended to do more writing here, but life just kind of overtook things. I'm going to try to get into the habit of posting at least once a week, if only to save my poor friends from the deluge of e-mail about random thoughts that they've been getting from me lately...

Anyway, over here at MTV's splashpage, we see evidence that comic book creators are fanboys too. Various DC comics folks are asked to suggest villains for the next Batman movie. There are a few interesting ideas in there. If Tim Sale's art weren't already enough to get me to buy his books, this quote alone probably would be making me reconsider:

“[Catwoman]’s such a powerful and sexual and strong woman, and I like that. But god, I hope not as Frank Miller’s version of her as a prostitute. That’s the worst part of ‘Year One.’ That’s just Frank trying to be outrageous. It didn’t ring remotely true to me.”

Personally, I have a few ideas about who shouldn't be in the next movie, but they involve some spoilers for "The Dark Knight"...

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There seems to be a lot of support for Catwoman in the next movie. I'm not so sure that's a great idea. The Catwoman/Batman dynamic is at its core a love story. Introducing a new love interest so soon after the death of Rachel Dawes in "The Dark Knight" just doesn't seem right - to have him move on so soon would make the events of "The Dark Knight" seem kind of shallow.

What's more, the current Batman incarnation seems to almost be as much about Gotham as it is about Batman or his villains. Gotham is a major character here - moreso than in any of the previous films. Catwoman isn't the kind of villain that would really make an impact on Gotham, so either the focus would have to change away from Gotham to a much more personal story, or she'd have to be paired with another villain and we'd end up with two different stories working simultaneously. This could work and it could be wonderful. It could also fall flat on its face and become a confusing mess.

Logically, the end of "The Dark Knight" leaves a power vacuum in Gotham among the criminals. It would make sense if the next movie had someone moving in to fill that vacuum. Unfortunately, among the list of flashy Batman villains, few of them are actually credible mob bosses. They either need to be sane, or at least insane in a way that doesn't impair their ability to organize and control a mob racket. Penguin fits the bill, but he's a bit of a joke character. I could see it working pretty well, but you definitely have to write him differently than he has been written in the comics or the animated series. Scarface and the Ventriloquist would work quite nicely - he's not sane, but his particular insanity makes for a good mob boss. Again, though, you have to worry about threading that needle to make sure he doesn't come across as a joke.

I think Poison Ivy could work in this context fairly well - again, given a rewrite to make her fit the setting a bit better. You'd need to eliminate her superpowers and make her more of a poisoner than a supervillain, but it could work.

One character that I don't see mentioned much is Talia - the daughter of Ra's al Ghul. I think she could be a great character to bring in to close out a "trilogy". She's a great character, you can easily make the story not one of romance but of revenge, and you can continue the story of the redemption of Gotham with her pretty easily. You'd definitely want to include another character with her, but unlike with Catwoman it would be relatively easy to have just about anyone working as her underling (the way Scarecrow was working for Ra's in the first movie).

Overall, I think there's a lot of potential for this franchise right now. I'd just be very leery of them introducing Catwoman into the story at this point - no matter what the other fans are saying right now.