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Former Justice League member Booster Gold wants to recreate one of the most famous moments in DC Universe history for a terrible reason.
WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for Blue & Gold #2, on sale now from DC Comics.
While Booster Gold may be a superhero worthy of joining the Justice League, he’s also a fame-obsessed opportunist. When Dan Jurgens created him, Booster was more concerned with negotiating movie deals and trading on his celebrity than with actually helping people. Even as recently as the mid-2000s, Booster would stage superheroic fights with paid villains in order to increase his profile. Over the years, however, Booster grew and prioritized doing good over the fame and glamour of superhero life, even policing the timestream in complete anonymity as the “greatest hero nobody ever heard of.”
Despite this, Booster still does hang on to some traits of his classic fame-obsessed goals. And in Dan Jurgens, Ryan Sook and Rob Leigh’s Blue and Gold #2, Booster tells his best -friend and fellow former Justice Leaguer that he wants to fake his death to raise his superhero profile.
Throughout most of the book so far, Booster has been attempting to build a following for himseld and Ted. That includes actively engaging with their fans on social media and even live-streaming their exploits and battles with criminals. As the comic makes sure to point out, Booster’s methods are unorthodox and, some might say, unlike other heroes in the DCU, such as Batman or Wonder Woman.
But, as Booster himself points out, Booster relies on his super-heroics to make a living. Those other heroes don’t have to rely on their heroic activities as their primary source of money, and Booster’s cultivation of a following keeps food on his plate, not unlike most modern social media stars.
At one point, Booster posits the idea of staging his death and subsequent heroic return to boost his profile, with the art harkening back to Jurgens’ work on the Man of Steel’s death in “the Death of Superman,” which raised his already high profile dramatically.
Although it’s a ghastly idea, Booster does have a point from a marketing standpoint. If anything would raise a hero’s profile and generate significant buzz in-universe, it would be a glorious battle against a deadly, monstrous threat coupled with a moment of “ultimate sacrifice.” This might even also be a meta-commentary about the nature of superhero comics and the comics industry and the way that high-profile deaths can thrust comic characters into the spotlight. Superhero deaths function similarly in the real world, with high-profile character deaths having earned coverage outside of the comics media landscape.
This is a self-aware moment of meta-commentary for Booster, one underscored by his robot companion Skeets saying that his death would likely set an all-time streaming record. However, Blue Beetle is quick to dismiss the idea and return to the task at hand. Even if faking his death seems like an extreme, Booster’s willingness to entertain the idea proves that there’s nothing he woun’t consider doing in persuit of fame.
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