Booster Gold, Please Interfere With...

Category: Booster Gold
Last article published: 17 August 2017
This is the 16th post under this label

While I liked Booster Gold as the media star with a heart of gold, and enjoyed him as one of the JLI bros, it's really as the time traveling hero that he shined brightest for me. I do love time travel stories, that's a well-known fact, and it was great fun to open up an issue and revisit past DC events I'd gotten off the stands decades before, or see who Booster was going to team up that month from DC's stable of characters, no matter their home time. In fact, it's the series that brought me back to the reading monthlies after an 8-year hiatus.

For fun, I'm going to suggest three events/eras in DC history that I wish Booster had gone to during that run, and you can certainly add more in the comments section. But first, a quick (and possibly incomplete) census of what parts of DC history he DID interact with (including Vanishing Point, recent Rebirth appearances, etc.):

Golden Age Blue Beetle's career
Sinestro was a Green Lantern
Jonah Hex and the Kents
Silver Age Flash and Elongated Man
52
The Killing Joke
Countdown to Infinite Crisis/OMAC Project
DC One Million
Enemy Ace
New Teen Titans vs. Deathstroke and Trigon
Blackest Night
Rise of the Supermen
30th Century/Legion
Batman's disappearance in Final Crisis
Claw the Unconquered / Fantasy Starfire
Bwa-ha-ha Justice League
Invasion! (Starlag)
World War II (with General Glory)
Flashpoint
Future's End
The Last Days of Krypton

So my choices would be...

The War That Time Forgot. Look, I'm not made of stone. World War II soldiers vs. dinosaurs, with Booster Gold in the middle. I sort of want him to be undercover in some outfit (his Easy Company nickname would be "Pretty Boy") trying to save the life of some war comic stars like Rick Flag Sr., or the Losers, or even the Rock himself. I'm not that fussy.

Millennium. This event was a low point for Booster. Not only did it destroy his manager Dirk Davis as a character, but it also had Booster go over to the Manhunters, tainting his reputation (even if he was trying to infiltrate them). The event also coincided with his first book's cancellation. So let's have him go back and engineer it so he can continue to be the "hero no one takes seriously" (his time traveler cover), pushing his younger self to make those bad decisions, and potentially saving Dirk from Manhunterdom with some surgical retconning.

Armageddon 2001. Give it the appropriate date on the cover dress (coming out today, it would be Armageddon 2029, for example) and use the story to explain how Captain Atom didn't become Monarch. Booster sacrificed Hawk to make it happen! Oh geez! But the point of this is to have Waverider's powers go kablooey because of the paradox so Booster can team up with INSERT YOUR FAVORITE ALTERNATE FUTURE VERSIONS OF SUPERHEROES SEEN IN A2001 to save reality from collapse. Team 2001 might include President Superman, Hawk and Dove's daughter, and cult leader Guy Gardner. ORRRRRRRRR it would totally work just as A2001 originally did, with Waverider touching Booster and seeing his future, which is incredibly loopy now because of time travel, and we'd actually see a DC Universe that's beyond whatever the next continuity reset would be (let's call it Ultimate Crisis).

What about you? Are there corners of the DCU you wish Booster would visit, if only to get more comics featuring it?