It apparently proved to be the wrong time, as the book lasted only eight issues. (By way of contrast, Jurgens' last Booster Gold series, which launched in 2007, lasted 47 issues, until it was canceled as part of the New 52 initiative.) That means DC must have decided to axe Blue and Gold around the time the first issue or two were being released.
This makes the last issue particularly interesting. The two characters are sitting around talking to their friend and partner Terri Collins (Originally Trixie, from the first, 1986 Booster Gold series). The subject is the new endeavor that they've been trying to get off the ground, a crowd-funded personal superhero service for people who need help but can't get Superman or Batman's attention, but it sounds pretty clear they're talking about something else.
"They believe in your mission and contributed," Terri tells Beetle of all their fans. "But to sustain an expensive operation like this, we need the kind of money they don't have."
"A great idea like ours should have worldwide support!" Booster laments. "So where is it?"
"Sometimes, great ideas die because they're ahead of their time or people don't understand how to manage them," Beetle says. "We gave it our best shot, Booster."
So, what went wrong? Honestly, having just read the book's entire run in a surprisingly hard to find trade paperback (more on that later), I don't really have any good theories.
Jurgens' plotting isn't exactly original, and I personally found at least one aspect of it pretty irritating, but he obviously gets the characters just fine, indulges in the expected nostalgia service to fans and presents a perfectly decent superhero comic, of the very same sort he did with the previously mentioned 21st century Booster Gold comic.
While Ryan Sook's art isn't necessarily to my liking (its sense of realism gives off uncanny valley vibes to me), he's a talented and well-liked artist. He doesn't draw all of the book, of course (He handles five issues, and parts of a sixth), but all of the guest artists are great ones (Cully Hamner, Phil Hester, Paul Pelletier and a strategically deployed Kevin Maguire plus Jurgens himself).
And it plays nice enough with the DCU, featuring an appearance by the then-current Justice League in the first issue (That would be the Brian Michael Bendis one, which I never read any of; maybe a League prominently featuring Naomi and Black Adam isn't the sales-booster that other Leagues have been?), appearances by Batman and Guy Gardner (both in the present as well as in flashback), guest-star Jamie Reyes (in an issue with a nice cover) and connectivity to ongoing continuity. (Although I must confess I have no idea how it is that Blue Beetle came back to life after his death in 2005's Countdown to Infinite Crisis; was he resurrected via time travel shenanigans in the pages of Booster Gold and I simply forgot about it, or just rebooted back to the land of the living through DC's series of continuity reboots between the New 52 and Dark Nights: Death Metal...?)
So, I guess I'm just going to assume it was a matter of timing, and that the market and the fans just weren't ready for a nostalgia-driven, comedy-infused superhero book featuring a pair of characters best known for a decades-old run on the Justice League franchise. At least, not on an ongoing basis.
Jurgens kicks the book off with a Justice League adjacent story, which is more than appropriate given the fact that most readers most associate the leads with their time on the League...as well as the fact that a Justice League appearance is usually a pretty good way to ensure a certain number of eyeballs (It certainly got me to check out 1997's Resurrection Man #1!).
The League has been defeated and are currently being held captive aboard a huge alien spaceship, which is about to leave Earth orbit with them. A live-streaming Booster Gold intervenes (seen by viewers on "Instaslam Live," one of the many, many mentions of off-brand, DCU answers to real-world social media that pepper the book), but his suit's powers prove no match for the ship's defenses.
With Booster on the ropes, Skeets recruits Ted Kord to help, and before long his beetle-shaped ship makes the scene. Together, the heroes are able to infiltrate the ship, and Skeets and Beetle manage to hack its computers, saving the League.
Afterwards, Booster is confident the League will offer them membership (Not a crazy assumption, given this line-up has Hippolyta, Naomi and Black Adam), but when Booster is out of earshot, they instead offer membership to Beetle only, not accepting the pair as a package deal. Beetle declines, later telling Booster they didn't want either of them.
As for that actively irritating bit, Jurgens includes little narration boxes in many of the panels featuring Booster's social media followers commenting on the action, adding another, very busy narrative thread to that of the art and dialogue for readers, and it makes for panels so dense that I honestly stopped reading these at some point, as they come and go throughout the book.
(To make them somewhat more interesting, two of the commenters appear to be Bibbo Bibbowski, whose handle is "b-bo" and who spells Superman the same way he pronounces it for some reason, and Guy Gardner, whose handles is "gg." Two other frequent commenters, each a young, female superfan of one of the leads, will appear in person later in the book.)
After a bit of status quo readjusting—Ted is fired from Kord Industries, cutting off his access to their tech and, more importantly, their funding—the pair turn to crowd-funding for their new venture. This is a social media-driven, store-front superhero business they call "Blue and Gold Restoration" (which really sounds like they fix houses), one that promises easy access to their customers and help in areas often overlooked by League-level heroes, from rescuing cats from trees to investigating haunted houses to dealing with alien abduction.
This may sound a bit familiar, as it's not too far removed from their venture with other JLI alum in Formerly Known as The Justice League and "I Can't Believe It's Not The Justice League", and reminiscent both of Marvel's original Heroes for Hire concept (which Jurgens has a reporter at a press conference mention) or even what Fire and Ice were up to in their recent miniseries, which actually followed the cancellation of Blue and Gold).
If that concept seems intriguing to you, don't get too excited. It's mostly confined to the background of the goings-on, a goal our heroes work towards as they are constantly interrupted by fallout from their defeat of the alien ship in the first issue. An alien princess named Omnizon has come to Earth to claim it as a possession of her home planet, as they planted the high-tech equivalent of a "flag" on it and claimed it as their own 70,000 years ago, well before any modern governments had formed or there were any superheroes around to oppose them.
This conflict will fill most of the first six-issues, which, honestly, wouldn't have been a bad miniseries, setting up a new status quo for the two heroes, and giving them a point from which Jurgens and other creators could launch further miniseries or anthology shorts, or have them guest-star in other books.
Joining our heroes are a Kord-invented, female-voiced floating robot personal assistant named "Buggles" that gives him his own Skeets (and gives Skeets someone else to talk to), and Rip Hunter, who Jurgens established an important, if secret, connection to Booster during the character's second ongoing. (In fact, Rip basically saves the title characters from Omnizon and her people, rather undercutting their efficacy as superheroes.)
Probably the highlight of these half-dozen coulda-been-a-miniseries issues is issue #4, "Spllittin' Image," which provides the most direct shot of nostalgia. Sook handles the "present day" art, depicting Booster and Beetle during a live televison interview about Blue and Gold Restoration.
When the subject rolls around to how they first became friends, they each tell their own version of the same story, in which they battle Blackguard shortly after Booster joined the Justice League. Kevin Maguire, the artist most associated with what we now refer to as the JLI era, draws the seven pages or so that depict Beetle's version of the story (which also includes Guy, Batman and a group shot of the team), while Jurgens himself draws those devoted to Booster's version (with the same guest-stars).
Ultimately, Guy Gardner crashes the interview ("Time to set the record STRAIGHT", the social media account belonging to "gg" says just before Guy appears), and tells the real version, in which Batman sends him in to rescue Blue Beetle and Booster both from Blackguard (Maguire and Jurgens split the art duties on Guy's version of the story).
As for the last two issues, these read more-or-less like Jurgens starting a new arc and then wrapping it up more quickly than expected, establishing the characters' new status quo in a way that is more sustainable than their trouble securing funding from their fans and/or having DC continue to publish their book would suggest.
Guest artists Pelletier and Hester split art duties on issue #7, while Sook pencils the entirety of #8. New Blue Beetle Jamie Reyes (the Blue Beetle with the most recent solo titles and a live-action movie) comes to visit Blue and Gold and is attacked off-panel by a mystery villain who turns out to be The Black Beetle, a time-travelling villain from Jurgens' most-recent Booster Gold series with a mysterious connection to our heroes. That connection is revealed as he's defeated and, after some hang-out time, the title characters meet with Terry and discuss their failure.
At the last minute, the DC hero with the biggest back account swoops in to save Blue and Gold Restoration with a pretty massive donation, allowing our heroes' free superhero services to apparently carry on beyond the pages of this book ("Definitely Not... ...The END!" a last-panel tag reads, although I don't know that we've seen the heroes since, have we...? As with a similar tag in the last panel of Gail Simone and Adriana Melo's Plastic Man, that seems to have been an aspirational promise of future adventures, rather than a promise from the publisher).
Of course, in the real world, there was no benevolent billionaire to continue to fund Jurgens, Sook and company's work, and thus Blue and Gold didn't last beyond that issue.
As to why I am reading this trade in 2025, after having passed on both the serially-published comics and the trade's initial release (So, um, as a fan of the characters who didn't buy any of their comics, I suppose I'm part of the reason the book didn't make it), well, I was reminded of its existence after reading Fire & Ice: Welcome to Smallville last October.
I was surprised to find out that the consortium of libraries that the library I work at shares materials with (which is based in Cleveland and is comprised of over 40 library systems all over northeast Ohio) didn't have any copies of the trade at all.
So instead, I turned to my hometown library. They didn't have a copy either, but the consortium they belong to had a single copy, at Way Public Library in Perrysburg, about two hours away. I reserved it last fall, and it just now became available.
So Blue and Gold apparently didn't prove too terribly popular with Ohio libraries either, I guess...
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