'Who needs the Justice League? DC’s fan-favourite duo, Blue Beetle and Booster Gold, are on their own—and online, as these underdogs embrace social media and start a superhero business! Desperate to regain the spotlight, Booster Gold looks to attract the public’s (and Justice League’s) attention the same way any washed-up, second-rate hero would—social media.
'The not-so-tech-savvy hero from the 25th century enlists the help of his best friend, Blue Beetle, who possesses both the money and the brains to help his old pal navigate the scary world of internet influencers. Watch out, evildoers, our heroes are live and online! But little do they know, an alien assassin seeking revenge places Blue and Gold in her cross-hairs, and The Omnizon never misses!'
I really like Booster Gold, he's become one of my favourite heroes over the years thanks to books such as 52 and his own solo series; but I often feel like DC doesn't quite know what to do with the character from book to book. Sometimes you get him being the stereotypical show-boating fame seeker from the future who only puts his brand first, and other times he's 'the greatest hero you've never heard of' protecting the timeline from threats that could destroy the entire universe and is going through awful trials that forge him into a true hero. And there just never feels like there's any consistency. Booster has become a hero you just have to take as he comes, and hope that he lines up with your preferred version of him.
Blue and Gold falls into the fist category, with Booster being a fame hungry dick looking to make a name for himself. Using social media, and streaming his adventures online using Skeets, Booster is trying to get big and famous enough to get invited back onto the Justice League (something that does happen for him and Ted in Dark Crisis). The book opens with him trying to come to the rescue of the League, who've been taken captive inside a spaceship that's about to leave Earth.
Despite his valiant efforts, Booster just isn't good enough to get inside the ship and save his fellow heroes. Luckily, Skeets recognises this and flies off for help in the form of Ted Kord, the Blue Beetle. Bringing Blue and Gold back together, the two heroes manage to break the League free and actually save the day. And they even impress the League in the process. Well, one of them does. When the League extends an offer to join to Ted, but not Booster, Ted turns them down, and instead sticks with his best friend.
Now the two of them set off to try and build their hero brand, appealing to the public to help fund their new hero enterprise. Whilst they do get some eager backers who want to help them focus on the smaller, weirder cases that the big heroes don't deal with, their public brand and finances become the least of their problems as they become targeted by the alien princess whose plans their spoilt when they saved the League; and a shadowy figure from Boosters past begins to pull strings from behind the scenes.
Blue and Gold is a book that has a much lighter tone that a lot of the other books in DC's catalogue, and doesn't ever really seem to take itself too seriously. And whilst this is enjoyable to a certain extent, and does bring to mind a lot of the older books that the two characters appeared in, it does prevent the book from feeling like more than just fluff for the most part. My favourite Booster stories have been the ones where they incorporated darker elements, where the character was challenged as a person and not just as a hero, where he had to grow. This book doesn't really have anything like that, and whilst the characters do end up in a different place to where they started it doesn't really feel like they change much as people.
But I guess that's the kind of story that Dan Jurgens is trying to tell here. Instead of telling a story where Booster and Ted change, or become 'better' people it's everyone else who changes. People begin by seeing the two of them, and Booster especially, as a bit of a joke, and it's this that changes. Booster and Ted stay the same, but they prove that they can still be decent people and good heroes even if they're a bit different from what most people would expect a hero to be; and by the end they've earned the respect of those who looked down on them at the beginning.
I think that if you're a fan of the old Justice League International days you'll find a lot here to enjoy, as it captures a lot of the same fun energy that that book had in spades. It has some silliness, some tough moments, some big challenges, and the sense that it's all one big fun adventure rather than a life or death struggle.
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