Broken Frontier

Ted Kord lives! But for how much longer when the team’s path takes them past Parallax and Extant in the time stream?

Writers Geoff Johns and Jeff Katz manage to go back and slip a "Zero Hour" issue in without ever even breaking stride in the current story arc. As usual, there is zippy dialogue, insightful character moments, and a new looming threat.

With their mission accomplished, the collected Blue Beetles and Booster Gold travel back to Rip Hunter’s hide-out in the future Blue Beetle’s Time Sphere. Unfortunately the time stream is not as vast as some might think as the Time Sphere runs into Parallax and Extant still in the middle of the old Zero Hour crisis. The team barely escapes from the villainous duo but the Time Sphere is shattered and they are bounced forward to the 25th century – to a day that changed Booster’s life forever. Will he try to interfere in time again? If he does will that mean losing his friendship with Ted forever? Rip Hunter brought Booster onto the team to repair the fabric of time. Will the hero instead unravel it?

The writing duo on this series continues to prove that there is room in the comic book field for nice, balanced, superhero stories. While there is plenty of drama and great character moments, Johns and Katz take time out to insert refreshing doses of comedy and plenty of action and adventure. They also show more than a bit of cheekiness in exploring the flexibility a series based on time travel gives them. Many DC fans may remember the 1990’s mini-series Zero Hour which DC used to reboot their entire continuity yet again. The story itself has its fans and its detractors but one aspect of the mini-series was that nearly every character being published by DC at that time was given a special zero issue in which what was then to be the character’s "official" back-story was outlined. Fourteen years later Johns and Katz decide to give Booster Gold a zero issue. The nice thing here is that they manage to set up details of their version of Booster’s back-story while at the same time advancing the plot of the current story arc.

The art provided by Dan Jurgens and Norm Rapmund is also as tight as ever. In particular Jurgens and Rapmund do a perfect job with facial expressions and body language. There are wonderful reaction shots from the various characters that look as though they stepped right off of a movie storyboard.

Booster Gold is not a title that will make the world rethink the way it looks at comic books nor is it a gut-wrenching, visceral, epic story. What this title is, is fun – unashamedly, openly, fun with a mix of everything that has made comic books great since the first four-color printing process in the Golden Age: Humor, heart, characters, and incredible action.