Tarnished Gold

Had an unusually rough night, what with a completely unexpected allergy attack and a bad dream about a bad, bad man with a chainsaw. So as long as I’m up early, I think I got time for one quick review, don’t I?

Booster Gold #20

Booster begs Rip Hunter to send him on a sightseeing tour of 1952, mainly because he’s a big fan of “Happy Days.” Unfortunately, he gets sent to Nevada, 1952, where there aren’t any sock hops, where’s there’s not even a real Las Vegas yet, where there’s not much but a secret rocket test site and a bunch of paranoid government agents who really, really don’t trust super-people. In fact, the federales include Jess Bright, Evan Hughs, and Karin Grace — Task Force X, better known as the original Suicide Squad. And their leader this time out is none other than Sgt. Frank Rock himself. And they want Booster to go undercover with them to infiltrate the rocket site to help them investigate a shady Russian scientist. The investigation soon turns out they intend to launch the rocket into space — and that makes it one of Booster’s prevent-someone-from-messing-with-history missions. In the end, Booster prevents the origin of, believe it or not, the Fantastic Four, and finally gets to go to a ’50s malt shop and make like the Fonz.

Verdict: I think I gotta give it the thumbs down. There are just too many weird errors for me to tolerate. Obviously, Sgt. Rock was never a member of the Suicide Squad, and I can’t think of any good reason to shoehorn him into the job instead of Rick Flagg, except that they just wanted to use Sgt. Rock. On top of that, one of the squad members was named Hugh Evans, not Evan Hughs. Yes, these are just silly continuity errors, but this entire series is about time-travel and comic-book continuity — in this kind of series, clumsy continuity errors matter. And finally — no, I just do not buy for one second that a guy born in the 25th century is going to be a fan of a ’70s nostalgia series about the 1950s. I mean, there’s silly, and then there’s much, much too silly to make proper sense…