Mahnke and Joe Kelly had the best run on the JLA series.

I read the original Booster Gold (it was easy to snag out of quarter boxes when my comics-buying mania was at its teenage peak), and it was kind of terrible. The core idea of Booster as a sham superhero was fine, but Jurgens tried to play him so straight that he was just boring when he wasn’t being a jerk. He really failed at giving him a good supporting cast, which is why the only pre-Giffen relationship of his that anyone’s bothered to bring back is Skeets (and the current Skeets is largely a creation of 52 moreso than what I recall of the original).

Bear in mind I was also fishing my JLA/JLI/JLE issues out of the same quarter boxes, so I was reading them at basically the same time. The Booster in these books felt so much more human it’s kind of ridiculous. I don’t recall Jurgens going to any great lengths to make the character “more serious” after these goofy runs– he played him more straight, but honored quite a bit of the characterizations that the Giffen-DeMattheis run added.

I’ve read the pre-Giffen-DeMattheis Blue Beetle (out of those same quarter boxes!), and let’s be honest. Yes, he took himself seriously, and his comic book also sucked. It was bad, bland, generic, and derivative in every possible way. I would go so far as to say that the Ted Kord Blue Beetle as created by Steve Ditko was among his worst work. By making him into a character who was metatextually aware of this third-string status, a more human and sympathetic personality emerged, and he was able to stop being Generic Superhero #283. That’s why if you see a reference to Blue Beetle now, it’s completely framed in terms of his run with the Giffen-Demattheis League– those were the only interesting stories he was ever in.

Your Batman argument makes no sense at all. He stopped showing up, IIRC, because Denny O’Neil was at the time not a fan of Batman being on any team book for any reason. He was in less than I think 10 issues of the original run, and apparently it was planned from the start that he would just get the League on its feet and then retreat into the background. For a character of Batman’s status, it really takes more than 10 issues of anything to even have an impact, let alone matter to his overall perception.

The “clown characters” dismissal is interesting. You’re the guy Dan Didio was trying to please with Max Lord’s crazy-ass death rampage in Countdown to Infinite Crisis, weren’t you? Well, good to know that guy exists somewhere, this is my first sighting of you.

I can’t be bothered to rebut your opinion of Kevin Maguire, because you haven’t actually said anything meaningful about his art other than “wah, ugly!” And, you know, if “chooses to express emotion often” doesn’t strike you as something every artist needs to be doing all the time in graphic storytelling, there’s really no meaningful conversation we can have on art. Whatever you want is far, far away from what I do.

Your 52 argument really makes no sense, because that entire storyline was built upon Booster Gold feeling so terrible about Ted’s death that he blamed himself and wanted to be a better hero because of it. The way it was executed was fun in terms of a modern take on the original Booster Gold concept, which the title really failed to explore well, but his personality is nothing like the guy Jurgens wrote. It’s clearly based on the very specific traits he was given in the Giffen-DeMattheis run.

I don’t really know where your “public eye” argument is coming from, but okay, I’ll bite. Actually, regular exposure is very, very important to keeping a character alive in a shared-continuity superhero universe. Characters who disappear from the general consciousness of the readers end up having to be completely rebuilt by the writers who decide to “bring them back”. The longer they’re gone, the more outdated they become and the less worthwhile it is for writers to bother using them over someone more current who could fill the same role. Even a character appearing regularly in a terrible book is more likely to have staunch fans and a backstory that offers easy story hooks for future writers than someone who hasn’t shown up since, say, 1963. It’s just the nature of the beast.

Fictional character do not resemble real life people in this regard – they do not necessarily “want regular gigs”.

I don’t think the popularity argument holds much water at all. Clown characters can be created anew, while Dan Jurgens clearly meant for Booster to be a complex, largely unlikeable character. Rarely does one see such a labor of love as the original Booster Gold series was, really.

Blue Beetle was indeed a very generic hero, at least in the DC version. Still, he too took himself rather seriously in his own book.

Even Batman suffered IMNSHO; suspension of disbelief became that much harder with him in the JLI. You’ll notice that he wasn’t around all that often after a while, btw. Sure it didn’t make the character inviable or anything, but it didn’t help.

You can make an argument that it was bad for Blue Beetle, but he was troubled from the beginning by coming off as a lightweight Spider-Man clone. Your argument would rest on someone being able to do something appreciably better had Blue Beetle not been in the Giffen-DeMattheis Justice League, and that would be a hard position to take. His friendship with Booster Gold was popular enough that it’s still fueling stories now.

Booster Gold… would probably not have his own book now if not for his Giffen-DeMattheis JLA run, so it’s pretty hard to argue he came out of it less valuable than he was before. His solo title suffered from an overdose of melodrama and a poor supporting cast, and it’s hard to imagine anyone bothering to work with the character if the Giffen-DeMattheis JLA run hadn’t given him the memorable relationships his solo title lacked.

Anyway, it should be no surprise that I favor Maguire. He’s arguably not dynamic, but he is able to draw a variety of expressions and genuinely different face structures that superhero art sorely lacks. What he lacked in being able to draw guys punching each other he made up in being able to draw guys talking to each other. Even my husband who isn’t at all a fan of Giffen-DeMattheis era admits that Maguire’s work on the book was extraordinary.

. But since you ask, I didn’t like either the kind of humor involved nor the character assassination involved. Gosh, the damage JLI did to Booster Gold, Blue Beetle and even Batman is astounding.

Did it really damage them?
I mean Beetle and Booster were pretty generic heroes until then.
And is having one title where Batman is silly such a bad thing?
If it was so damaging, how come other writers haven’t tried to change them?

Honorable mentions to Sekowsky, Heck (He and Breeding did some nice stuff together), Perez, Jurgens, and Templeton (always underappreciated).

Don’t forget the inkers, either – Giella, Sachs, Breeding, Dick Giordano (my favorite Dillin inker) and Frank McLaughlin, who always gets overlooked, but did nice work. We need an interview with Mr. McLaughlin sometime.

In his own title, Booster Gold was a self-centered, venal glory hound who no one particularly liked (have you read the letter column of the original title? The letter comparing him to a cockroach is particularly memorable). In JLI, he became a self-centered, venal glory hound who’s become one of DC’s more enuringly popular third-string characters. More characters should have such “damage” inflicted on them.

How about Luke McDonnell on JL Detroit? Who was the other guy drew that run? Chuck Patton? Nice clean style.

In the end though, being as how its probably my favourite story ever, Perez’s stuff on Red Tornado’s origin and the JLA/JSA/Secret Society of Super Villians arc wins it hands down.

If he’s allowed I’ll stick Quitely above all of them though.

I agree with those who say Howard Porter was underrated. His work on The Flash did nothing for me, but he was really good at the epic godlike JLA stuff Morrison threw at him – and as has been said, his Darkseid was great!

He’s great for satire, thought, and apparently JLI (which I flat out hated) still has a legion of fans. But JLI’s whole point is that it is nothing like the JLA.

Maguire is a great artist. Too bad he didn’t get to work on the real JLA. JLI – bleech!

So was it the sense of humour you didn’t like, or the fact it was making fun of superheroes?

Perez’s take was great but Dillin IS the JLA to me. Guess it’s all about when you were 12 years old.

Maguire is a great artist. Too bad he didn’t get to work on the real JLA. JLI – bleech!

For a lot of readers he came out of nowhere and arrived with a bravado first issue to rival Michael Golden on Micronauts #1; for many folks, myself included, his is the definitive Despero -you have to love Hughes for drawing a big pink Martian who is naked (the cape doesn’t count) the entire time he is fighting the JLA. That’s talent.

Of course he was building on Maguire’s genius for faces, so props to him as well.

Porter’s Darkseid in Rock of Ages is one of the best visual interpretations of the character since Kirby, and I agree that he should be lauded for representing Morrison’s scripts so well.

Honorable mention: Jim Starlin’s covers in the early eighties. We get to see Orion punching out the entire team on the cover of #183!