Dan Jurgens – Page 2 – Greg Goldstein's Comic Art Gallery

Dan Jurgens — Unfair Fight

April 28, 2020 Greg Goldstein Original Art and The Artists

Booster Gold #8, June 2008

Continuing our celebration of the 80^th anniversary of the Justice Society of America, with each new post featuring a different classic JSA character.

Today’s riddle: What do comic art collectors miss the most that comic book editors and publishers miss the least?:

A: Word balloons on the art board themselves.

Digital lettering is an amazing boon for comic book production, and a disappointment for many art collectors, myself included.

If you work in the editorial department, of course, no one misses the endless FedEx packages trafficking from penciller to letterer to inker, and back. Ugh.

But… the art boards themselves feel less complete without them. These are, after all, comic book pages. Comic books are pictures AND words.

Modern comic book original pages are analogous to silent films. If the visuals communicate well enough, you can interpret the storytelling without words. (And there shouldn’t be too much of that anyway. But I digress.)

Which finally gets us to this page by the great Dan Jurgens and Norm Rapmund. Superman is about to break the neck of fellow hero Wildcat, while Maxwell Lord looks on gleefully.

Pretty easy to figure out that Superman is either under some sort of mind control — or he’s not Superman at all. (Spoiler alert, it’s the former, and Wildcat survives.)

This is a great splash from a great art team on a great series. As mentioned in a previous post, I’m definitely a fan of this run of Booster Gold, which ended perhaps a bit prematurely because of “The New 52” reboot in 2010.

*First appearance of Wildcat in Sensation Comics #1(January 1942), plus earliest appearances in the Silver Age in Brave and Bold and The Spectre.*

Dan Jurgens / Norm Rapmund — No Joke

November 9, 2019 Greg Goldstein Original Art and The Artists

Booster Gold #21, August 2009

Part five of a multi-part series celebrating Batman’s 80^th birthday.

Booster Gold goes back in time to save Barbara Gordon (Batgirl) from being crippled as depicted in Alan Moore’s classic Killing Joke. Of course it doesn’t work, and of course, this being a Booster Gold comic, things go from bad to worse. Batman (at this point in the timeline, Dick Grayson) is none too happy.

Jurgens wrote much of this Booster Gold series, and he plays to his own specific artistic skills and interests. I enjoy the storytelling here, as well as the expression on Booster’s face, a combination of dismay and disappointment as he explains his failure to Batman. And extending Batman’s “ears” into the upper panel is a clever and splashy touch.

The New 52 reboot ended this series a few years later, which was unfortunate. It combined action and wit (and mind-bending time paradoxes) avoiding outright camp or satire while providing a joyful and thoughtful ride through the DC time stream.