Broken Frontier

To protect his secret as a Time Agent Booster must steal from the most heavily protected place on Earth… the Batcave.

Meanwhile, in the co-feature, Blue Beetle must find the secret behind a giant rampaging robot!

DC Comics’ price increase begins and along with it the resurrection of the old idea of a "back-up" feature. From the Golden Age to the Bronze Age comic books regularly had back-up stories oftentimes featuring characters who either never had been popular enough to support a solo ongoing or who were either on the way up or on the way down. In other words, they were characters who were either new and the back-up was a way of testing the popularity and seeing if the character had what it took to make a solo ongoing or else they were older characters who had a solo ongoing but couldn’t sustain it.

Its revival today is a matter of trying to give readers a little more bang for the buck price increase on several of DC’s titles. One thing that has remained true to the past, however, is the fact that the co-feature here – Blue Beetle – is a character that recently lost his solo ongoing despite the support of a dedicated core of fans. Booster Gold, however, is a title with its own struggling numbers. So will two small but dedicated sets of fans be able to save this title? If you didn’t read either before, should you bother to care now?

With Batman’s death, Booster Gold lost the one hero who knew something about his status as a Time Agent. But this also means Batman’s evidence of that status could fall into the wrong hands. This sends Booster on a trip to the Batcave for a little breaking and entering but the last thing he expects to find is… Batman?! And the very last thing he needs to find is a villain from his recent past out to make sure the legacy of the Bat ends before it ever gets started.

Meanwhile in El Paso, Jaime Reyes’s life continues to pile up. The alien scarab that gives him his powers is acting up, his best friends are dating one another… and arguing, and now giant robots are attacking the city!

Dan Jurgens continues his stellar run on Booster Gold. While this story does touch back to an earlier tale during Geoff Johns and Jeff Katz’s run it still manages to be fairly new reader friendly and help to solidify the status of the new Batman. Where the story really shines, though, is Jurgens’s deft mix of humor and emotion. He continues to round out the characters and make them more solid and three dimensional by the issue. There is a sense of forward momentum here as the characters actually learn and change and grow. There are also several wonderfully understated moments that are touching and bring a sense of melancholy and these are then balanced by perfectly timed bits of humor and action. Jurgens knows the craft of creating a story and he knows it well and this issue is a perfect example of it.

Following up in the "Second Feature", Matthew Sturges, writer on Blue Beetle when the title folded, returns here and picks up pretty much right where he left off. Despite this, the 10 page co-feature story is fairly easy to slip into for new readers and the story also contains some great dialogue and a mixture of the humorous and the emotional. Here, though, Sturges plays up the struggle of Jaime and his friends as they deal with the various uncertainties of their lives. The awkwardness of young love mixed with a love/friendship triangle as well as Jaime’s fight to deal with the powers he has been given when he is still trying to grow to adulthood. The whole thing manages to feel like a full issue despite the lower page count and that is very much a tribute to Sturges’s writing.

The art on the main feature is, as usual, provided by Dan Jurgens and he continues to do an excellent job. In particular his work on the new Batman must be singled out as he very definitely draws Dick Grayson’s body language and movements as distinctly different than Bruce Wayne’s. The acrobatic history of the character can clearly be seen in Jurgens’s pencils and that is a touch of detail that not every artist would remember to add.

The Blue Beetle co-feature, on the other hand, gets to shine with the work of Mike Norton. Norton uses a pure, comic book style that does not miss anything from action to faces and, despite the fact that the Blue Beetle feature is separate from the Booster Gold feature, Norton’s style still complements Jurgens’s – makes the comic book feel more like a coherent whole. Having Norm Rapmund provide the inks for both of the features also helps in this.

In the end, Blue Beetle fans may be a bit grumpy that their favorite character has been reduced to a smaller page count but Sturges and Norton prove that they are just as dedicated as before to turning in fulfilling stories. This issue proves that it isn’t the page count that matters it’s what you do with it. Meanwhile, Jurgens continues his quietly wonderful work. If you haven’t tried either title before go ahead and pick this one up. The price may have gone up to $3.99 but in this case the gimmick works. The sum of the whole is equal to or even greater than its parts! Both stories are action packed, fun, and emotional and leave you wanting more.