Creative Team Changes Imminent for Booster?

On Monday, in an exclusive interview with CBR, DC honcho Dan DiDio announced that Jaime “Blue Beetle” Reyes will lose his co-feature in Booster Gold and be relocated to another book, but not as a co-feature or as the headliner of his own title. Additionally, DiDio announces that Manhunter will be dropped from Streets of Gotham. That’s a huge disappointment for this Manhunter fan, who has repeatedly written to DC in support of the title and who has bought dozens (literally) of graphic novels to hand out to potential new readers and get them hooked. So, already–not off to a great start…and then he says that there are “creative team changes” imminent for Booster Gold.

Dan Jurgens, who created the character and has drawn virtually every solo Booster story ever told, is currently the writer and artist; he participates in a monthly creator commentary here on Blog@, and also at Comic Related, that looks at Booster Gold shortly after publication. The possibility of Dan’s imminent departure hasn’t come up in any of our interviews, or off-topic e-mail conversations; I can say, though, that in order to replace Jurgens, the team would have to be phenomenal for the book to remain afloat.

I don’t think Booster Gold is as marketable a character as DC apparently does; it seems clear to me that the thing that’s kept the character going this long is that Jurgens has connected with the title’s (and the character’s) core fans. That his art keeps a level of consistency in the title that’s rarely, if ever, matched by a book in mainstream publication is an added bonus. For the title to work without Jurgens…I don’t know. It seems like it would have huge potential to feel a lot like when Aaron Sorkin was dropped from The West Wing, and the show deteriorated into mayhem, which they had to bring Sorkin back to attempt to salvage so that it could go out with dignity rather than be canceled after seven seasons as one of TV’s most respected shows.

As a Booster Gold fan, I actually am not as frustrated as many of my column's readers are with the loss of the Blue Beetle backup. Frankly I always thought second-features for mid-selling or low-selling books were a dicey proposition. Adding an extra buck to a title that was selling somewhere in the vicinity of 50k at $2.99 seemed like a pretty bad idea, unless the backup brought in a TON of extra readers, which didn’t seem to be the case. I’ll miss Jaime in a starring feature, but would be just as happy if he were starring as a backup in Teen Titans or some other title that’s less likely to shed readers for the extra buck.

Certainly I might be overreacting to the announcement–and I’ll of course keep readers posted as information comes into my hands–but the last two times they’ve needed a fill-in penciler, they’ve gone to Patrick Olliffe who, while a perfectly serviceable draftsman, is not right for the title. Rick Remender, whose two-issue fill-in as writer was the undisputed low point of the title’s publishing history, also expressed a desire, during his turn at bat with The Gold Exchange, to return to Booster in a more regular fashion so that he could tell the Chronos-and-Booster story he’d had planned during his time as writer of The All-New Atom. He is, as far as I know, Marvel-exclusive, but just the idea of him as the title’s ongoing writer makes my skin crawl.

Just so he's an equal opportunity disappointer, in the same CBR interview where DiDio talked about this, he also discusses the disappearance of basically every backup we know. Some titles (the lower-selling ones), like Booster Gold, Doom Patrol and Green Arrow, will revert to $2.99 and just be single stories again. Certain other books will get new backups. The Flash family appears hardest-hit, losing both the Wally West backup feature AND the Kid Flash monthly in the shuffle, leaving only Barry Allen, whose last turn as Flash ended in 1985. Way to reach out to younger readers, there, Dan!