Don't cry for Booster Gold

You’ve probably already heard about what happened to Booster Gold last week. In an attempt to save countless innocent lives in downtown Metropolis (and/or his own flailing reputation), Booster pushed his power suit to its absolute limit, lifting a nuclear sub high into the air where it detonated.

When his rival Supernova flew up to rescue him, all he found was a skeleton.

According to DC’s Dan Didio, dead really does mean dead this time. Booster Gold is really, permanently dead, he told Newsarama.com last week.

I don’t buy it. Maybe I’m just experiencing the first stage of grief over a beloved B-List character, but I don’t think Booster Gold’s really dead, and, if he is, I don’t expect him to remain dead very long.

For starters, he died in the fifteenth issue of a 52-part story, and there are plenty of unknowns swirling around him within that huge story, including how he has apparently damaged the time stream and who exactly the guy calling himself Supernova is (Popular speculation: He’s another version of Booster Gold).

But assuming Didio’s being straight up and that really was the end of Booster Gold we saw last week, Booster’s eventual return isn’t just likely, it’s inevitable.

For starters, he’s a fictional character in a fictional universe, the laws of which are constantly being written and revised by scores of writers. As Grant Morrison pointed out in the brilliant climax of his Animal Man run, the killing and un-killing of people in the DCU is a piece of cake, even if the resurrection scenarios aren’t always the most believable (“Why can’t you just say…I don’t know…say it was all a dream or something?” Animal Man pleads with Morrison when he asks him to bring his family back to life. Morrison responds, “Are you joking? That old cop-out went out with the ark,” before he eventually does just that).

Secondly, DC seems to have a major problem with killing characters off. Though the current crop of writers and editors seem downright eager to kill characters these days, the very same writers and editors are constantly resurrecting characters that other writers have already killed off. It’s not just those of Hal Jordan and Oliver Queen’s popularity. The most minor villains, from Major Force to Copperhead, can die and return to life without so much as an explanation (My favorite totally haphazard resurrection was that of minor Robin rogue Lynx, who died in “War Games,” only to return to life in a recent issue of Robinand die all over again).

And as for Booster Gold, perhaps no death in comics history has looked so easily reversible. When it comes to our suspension of disbelie as readers, there are degrees of how much we’re willing to buy. Some resurrections are fairly easily accomplished, such as Firestorm’s in Identity Crisis, Zauriel’s in “World War III,” or any of Red Tornado’s several dozen deaths over the decades. Others are more difficult, but they merely require more plot contortions on the writer’s part, like Jordan’s in Green Lantern: Rebirth or Queen’s in Green Arrow: Quiver. And of late, DC has even shown a willingness for extremely lazy resurrections, of which Jason Todd’s takes the cake—he simply came back to life, and if you want to know why, well, it was a continuity error (Um, caused by Superboy-Prime. Punching the walls of the multiverse. Swear to God).

Booster Gold was a time traveler; he was born in the 25th century and traveled back to the 20th with advanced technology to try to become a superhero and make a killing on self-marketing (lottery fraud might have proved safer). So, if he died last week, is he really dead? After all, if time’s linear, he still hasn’t been born yet. He’s traveled back and forth from the present to the future before, and there was some speculation that the Booster Gold who said he was leaving the 21st Century at the end of The OMAC Project wasn’t the same one who returned in the pages of 52.

With access to time travel technology, it’s very easy to avoid one’s own death, at least in DC Comics. Parallax pulled that trick in “Emerald Knights” (I never understood while he only pulled that trick once), and Bary Allen, one of the few DC superheroes to stay dead more or less permanently so far, has repeatedly returned for adventures set long after his death through the magic of time travel.

While some resurrections are so complicated they need a whole story arc (Hourman I, Green Arrow I) or miniseries (Jordan, Donna Troy) to explain, a time traveler’s death can be done in a sentence or two.

In fact, it’s been done. In Brad Meltzer’s Identity Crisis #2, Merlyn notices the recently deceased Chronos over at the next table.

“Don’t ask,” the Monocle responds. “He says he’s the one from twenty-seven seconds pre-his-own-death.”

“I hate time travelers,” Merlyn says. But love ‘em or hate ‘em, you can never really kill ‘em.