First off, a note: I had promised a couple of readers after my early reviews of The Life and Times of Savior 28 #1 by J.M. DeMatteis (he of Giffen and… and substantial Booster Gold love fame) and Mike Cavallaro that I would mention on the blog once it had actually been released, as I had an early copy but could not find any release date on the IDW website. The comic, which I think may be the best new superhero book of the year, was released on Wednesday, along with another great indie-superhero book you should check out, Super Human Resources #1 from Ape Entertainment. In the archives, you’ll see I’ve done interviews pertaining to both of these…you should buy them.

Because I’ve had so many questions, and the comments thread is not really a place where the Blog@ contributors are encouraged to go into lengthy diatribes, I’ve decided to address a few of the GOLD EXCHANGE feedback comments from this month in a second article. Thanks to everyone for engaging in the conversation and for some great questions–some of you who asked them early on may have noticed that I wove your feedback into the fabric of the conversation. I’m not going to keep doing that now, as Dan Jurgens shouldn’t be forced to take questions from me all week long, but keep asking if you’re interested and I’ll credit you and use some of your questions on next month’s Exchange.

PyroTwilight: So Rex Hunter is now living despite his apparent death as a child thanks to having been tortured by Rip and turned into chronal energy? I’m a bit lost on that.

I’m not certain, but I imagine that it has something to do with where he physically was (Vanishing Point), and with the fact that they were obviously using whatever device it was that Black Beetle was using to stabilize time around the changed events, so that killing Jason didn’t screw with all of history. Also, you sometimes have to take a leap of faith and understand that the science of resurrecting the (apparently) dead is somewhat unclear to humankind at this point, and so it won’t always make perfect logical sense. I see what happened to Rex Hunter as being fairly similar in nature to what happened to another of Jurgens’ most famous creations–a scientist called Hank Henshaw.

Jack Soo: If this is a regular feature now, this kicks major azz. Thanks to everyone, especially Mr. Dan Jurgens! I’m unsure about the price hike & adding Blue Beetle to this title. I’d rather DC launch a smaller paged “DC Spotlight”/”Teen Titans Spotlight” than shoehorn New Beetle into this title. My question is will this change take away any pages from Booster’s story? I also want to say the colors on Booster & Michelle’s hair looks much better. At one point they were looking more strawberry blonde/orange than blonde. I know that’s the improvement of color in the last 20 years, but I thought the coloring has improved. Thank you.

Jack (great name! I hope we see him at some point…), this is not only a regular feature, but has been for quite some time over at Comic Related, another site where I’m the News Administrator. You can check out my column history (which goes back farther than I’ve been working for Blog@) here. Every month now, what happens is that I release the Q&A-format interview, essentially unedited, here to Blog@ as quickly as I can after it’s finished and then I polish it for a day or so to bring it to Comic Related as a news-and-review feature. Hi-Fi’s coloring has been one of the things Dan and I have spent a lot of time praising; the reality of it is, it’s easy to overlook the colorist when everything else on a book is strong, too, and that’s just one more thing–but with so many metal and laser effects in this book, and having to differentiate between a lot of people who look a lot alike (fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, time-based duplicates), big kudos go to Hi-Fi for making it easy (and to Dan and Norm as well, of course).

As far as the backup feature–I’m cautiously optimistic. Blue Beetle is a character who has about 10,000 diehard fans, and Booster Gold is a book where those fans would probably feel fairly at home if they gave us a chance. I suspect we’ll lose around 1,000 people who just aren’t willing to pay the extra buck, but I’m hoping that’s offset by 4,000 or more BB fans jumping on board. As a former Manhunter reader, I can promise you that if they added a Manhunter backup story to a book, I’d buy it for four bucks. And no–according to DC’s initial release and from what I understand from Dan (who hasn’t said anything on the record about the backup features at all yet–see next month’s column), it will not diminish Booster’s page count. I suspect that it’ll be 22 pages of Booster as usual and than something like 8 pages of Blue Beetle–that makes sense based on some of what they’ve done before and based on the price difference.

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