Earlier this week, ComicBook.com spoke with veteran creator Dan Jurgens about the thirtieth anniversary of Booster Gold #1, the 1985 comic book which featured the first appearance of the DC Universe’s favorite superhero pitchman.
Videos by ComicBook.com
It was a broad-ranging conversation that we’ll be printing in full later this week, but along the way, we spoke about the enduring mysteries of Booster Gold Volume 2: Who is Booster Gold’s wife/Rip Hunter’s mother, and who the heck is the Black Beetle?
Consistently since the end of Booster Gold Volume 2, which concluded when Flashpoint rebooted the DC Universe, Jurgens has declined to answer the questions, which drove readers crazy throughout the series’ run.
For the uninitiated: During the second volume of Booster Gold, which launched out of the events of 52, Rip Hunter was revealed to be Booster Gold’s son…but the identity of his mother remained secret. She was referenced often during the next fifty or so issues of Booster Gold, Time Master: Vanishing Point and other titles featuring the characters, but never named, and few hints were even given. Even earlier than that, the Black Beetle was introduced and became essentially the series-long big bad…even though Jurgens had originally intended to reveal his identity about two years before the series eventually ended.
Jurgens’s official reason when he doesn’t just reveal the secrets? Well, one never knows when a story like that might be resolved.
And if you think that seems strange, given the rebooted universe and truncated continuity of the post-Flashpoint DC Universe, Jurgens says he’s been in comics long enough to know you never say never.
“I’ve been around long enough where edicts have been issued that say universes die, no more time travel, but oh wait now we can…and I just think characters live on in a way,” Jurgens said. “Certainly with Convergence, what we did is we sort of tweaked Booster Gold’s origin and we also showed what happened to Booster Gold from the pre-Flashpoint universe….I always look at it and say there’s going to be a chance one day, someday somehow, to give those answers. And that doesn’t mean [both answers] would be in the same story, but things live on.”
That’s not to say he doesn’t spill a few Booster Gold-related secrets in our full interview, which will run over the weekend.
And keep your eyes peeled over the next week or so for two installments of our Out of Time column, in which Jurgens will talk about the time-and-universe-hopping heroes of Batman Beyond and Superman: Lois and Clark.
Rip Hunter will be featured in DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, due to premiere on The CW in early 2016.
