Booster Gold #22 (November, 1987)

Michelle Carter, the sister of Booster Gold, was tooling around in the Goldstar super suit when she was blasted out of the sky by aliens. These were invaders from Dimension X, who had tangled several times with the Teen Titans in their early days. The aliens and would-be heroine had only happened upon one another, but the aliens saw an opportunity to drain her suit as a power source to help them transport their armies to Earth. Booster Gold soon set about tracking her down, but while getting the lowdown from Wonder Girl, refused the help Titans to hog any glory for himself. However, once he encountered the aliens, he was faced with the choice of either saving his sister, or 38,000 spectators at a Minneapolis baseball stadium (Google tells me... Twins?)

Booster Gold sent his flying robot companion Skeets to free Michelle, then called on his new teammates in the Justice League International to stop the giant gray horned monster in Minnesota. Booster griped about how long it took for the JLI to arrive, and they countered with basically "what part of International did you not understand?" Plus, y'know, the Titans could have already gotten there, y'feeb. The giant is an artificial construct made out of a doughy, energy-resistant substance, so direct attacks were fairly useless. At one point, the team is saved by Booster's force field, and another time Mister Miracle helps them escape. It's very weird to see Miracle carrying Martian Manhunter to safety, and in fact this whole debacle relies on tying the JLI's hands behind their backs to make the hoary aliens and Booster look better. Green Lantern Guy Gardner's recent brain trauma is used to keep him out of the action entirely, while Captain Atom's quantum powers are unusually limp against Dimension X, conveniently. The Alien Atlas is reduced to strength, eye beams, and flight (when not being held by Aero-Discs?) and generic teamwork lines. As least as leader, J'Onn J'Onzz comes up with the decisive play: Captain Atom burns a small tunnel, Manhunter holds it open with his regular, non-elongated hands, and Booster Gold flies into the cavity. Once inside, Gold expands his force field until the creature bursts into goo sprayed all over town.

It feels like word came down while the issue was being worked on that the title had been cancelled. For reasons, the JLI vacate the story, Booster Gold returns to his sister, and those pesky reasons also meant that Michelle Carter's very life force had also been drained with the independently powered super suit. The siblings have to team-up to stop the alien invaders, but a stray power line hits Goldstar and disintegrates her. Then the JLI attend her cliff side funeral, and Doctor Fate sends her tombstone to a dimension where it will be untouched by time. That was... abrupt. "Tortured Options" was by Dan Jurgens & Ty Templeton. I bought the first issue of this book because an ad promised me a free button with purchase, not realizing that the offer wouldn't be honored at a Circle K. He had an okay costume, and it was nice to get in on the ground floor with a new hero, but I basically hated the guy from jump. Materialistic narcissist showboat is a good mixer for a shared universe or super-team, but I don't want to read a whole book about that guy. I didn't realize it then, because the whole package was so bland an unappealing, but that issue would be the start of my long time disdain for Dan Jurgens. He's done good work, I won't deny, but on average I find reading his stuff to be a tedious chore. This story was a perfect example, strongly recalling his own mostly miserable run on Justice League America, as a bunch of characters he has no feel for make too many utterances in a chaotic fashion that is supposed to have some sense of humor or characterization that is absent. Just overeager placeholder balloons that never got needed revisions. I needed to skim through a few issues around this one to get a better sense of what was going, but planned to read this one cover to cover, and just couldn't. I quit trying partway through page 14, when the JLI exits for some contrived reason, and I couldn't tolerate the lame dialogue anymore.