nervous breakdown every second sunday

Probably wildly unsurprising for you to know I do not like Johns changes to Booster’s origin. (‘It was really Booster’s DAD who made him keep gambling!’ Shut the fuck up Geoffrey) But this panel from Booster Gold v2 #0 has been annoying me recently after I saw someone use it in a post explaining who she is

Because its a retcon. A totally unnecessary retcon.

We KNOW why Michelle became Goldstar. This is explained, clearly and unambiguously by Booster Gold volume #1. In fact the WHY of Michelle becoming Goldstar is her most important character trait.

She wanted to fly!

Jurgens hits this narrative trait HARD. Before the above Icarus beat in BG v1 #20, we see Michelle for the first time as a living breathing person and not a flashback in #15, and in that first moment she’s already in flight.

We meet her hanging out the window of her school bus aircraft, wearing the same blue & purple of Booster’s museum uniform. She flies the gang to safety, and Jurgens continues to connect Michelle with flight.

She immediately questions Booster on when he learned to fly, and then—because she’s got those Carter genes—she brags about how many pilot merits she has. She’s not just a pilot; she’s a fucking good one.

Aside from changing the narrative to remove acknowledgment of Michelle’s defining character trait, this change also downplays the other thing I find most interesting about Michelle: the complexity of her relationship with Booster.

In Booster Gold v1 #21, Booster states that he and Michelle weren’t close the ways twins usually are, and a lot of the interactions we do get between them include them butting heads or otherwise stressing their differences. Michelle & Booster grew up in an unhealthy environment, dealing with addiction and poverty, and replacing Michelle’s major character trait while characterizing Michelle as looking up to Booster doesn’t sit well with me. Rather than giving a complicated family dynamic further fleshing out, this return to the Carter family serves to simply make it seem even sadder that poor Booster lost his sister.

To present her this way to the many, many people who have only read Johns take on Booster feels like Johns doing what Johns does: flattening the women in the Booster Gold mythos to serve the needs of men. Again and again, the changes he makes to the established canon steamroll over who these female characters (Michelle, Trixie, Ted’s mother, Oracle, Black Canary, Fire, on and on) are and replace it with something worse.