Dan Jurgens — Unfair Fight
Booster Gold #8, June 2008
Continuing our celebration of the 80th 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.
