Another remind of what got you into comics in the first place.
The search for Batman gets positively labyrinthine as Rip Hunter, Booster Gold and their skeleton crew of "time masters" have adventures across a wider variety of epochs.
The Good
This book is just good, clean fun. Even when I wasn't quite familiar with all the characters and their place in continuity (more on that below) I was still enjoying this romp through DC's chronological cosmology. Jurgens is a great nuts and bolts artist whose every line is always in service of telling the story without any flashy distractions. Maybe what I enjoyed the most about this was the strange relationships and interactions that time travel creates - - how Rip Hunter is Booster Gold's son (I guess?), how the Hyperborean-era wizard covets the heroes' present and even how Despero keeps the likes of the Ultra Humanite and Per Degaton on task.
The Bad
As I said with the previous issue -- this title could really use a recap page or some of those mini "Who's Who" captions DC's been using lately to quickly bring readers up to speed on the characters. I'm a seasoned veteran of DC's continuity and even I was having a hard time remembering who Claw, Starfire and then the Wave Riders are. The reveal on the last page would have had a lot more "oomph" if I had a little more set-up.
The Verdict - 4/5
I enjoyed this book for the same reasons I enjoyed this week's issue of Detective Comics. Jurgens isn't trying to reinvent the wheel, here, but he's crafted a comic here that delivers that kind of simple escapism that brings me back to what I enjoyed about reading comics in the first place as a boy. This book really ought to be titled Booster Gold, because it's directly continuing everything you enjoyed about Jurgens' run on that book.
9 Comments