Monthly Archive: May 2008

I visited my mom’s house for Mother’s Day, which always seems to include watching baseball, as Mom and I are both fans of the game. No, honest, this isn’t another column about sports! It’s about pink.

You see, every year on Mother’s Day, Major League Baseball provides its teams with pink bats, pink ribbons and so forth. It’s all Komen-driven, of course.  The Susan G. Komen Foundation has become the country’s largest breast cancer charity due largely to its habit of painting things pink.

And so we watched not only pink bats, but pink-ringed bases and pink home plates and pink wrist bands and pink caps in the crowd and Jose Reyes even had pink shoelaces for the occasion. It was, as always, very cool.  It would have been even nicer if the Mets announcers had actually noted the real reason for the pink; instead, the disappointingly misogynist Keith Hernandez said it was for Mother’s Day. ‘Cause, uh, Moms like pink, I guess, Keith? Seriously, do you know the difference between "for" Mother’s Day and "on" Mother’s Day at all?

I was surprised to find out that Komen isn’t the only charity focused on pink. Apparently a number of other less reputable places engage in "pink washing," where it’s not as clear where your breast cancer charity money’s actually going. In fact, Breast Cancer Action has a website called Think Before You Pink which reminds folks that "breast cancer is about women’s lives, not a marketing opportunity," and that there are a lot of places riding the bandwagon just to make a profit. (more…)

It’s pretty safe to say that creator Dan Jurgens is responsible for some of the most popular characters and events in the last 20 years of DC Comics.

After striking gold in the mid-‘80s with his work on the original Booster Gold series, featuring the solo adventures of a character he created, Jurgens continued his streak through the ‘90s with his seminal work on the "Death Of Superman" story. It was in this project that he created two of Superman’s most popular villains, Doomsday and Cyborg Superman. No stranger to major, universe-spanning events, Jurgens penciled both Armageddon 2001 and Zero Hour, the latter of which he also wrote. In the late ‘90s he created the Tangent Universe for DC and currently writes the ongoing DC series Tangent Comics: Superman’s Reign.

Last year, Jurgens returned to the character he created, continuing as artist on DC’s ongoing Booster Gold series, but stepping aside as writer. The new series teamed him with superstar scribes Geoff Johns and movie executive Jeff Katz. Issue #9 hits stores this week, and continues the current “Blue & Gold” story arc. This arc recently saw the return of fan-favorite character Ted Kord, The Blue Beetle. And if Jurgens’ cover to this week’s issue is any indication, fans of the Keith Giffen/J.M. DeMatteis series Justice League International won’t be disappointed.

I spoke to Jurgens about his work on Booster Gold, Tangent Comics: Superman’s Reign and his career at DC comics.

COMICMIX: To start with, let’s talk about Booster Gold. What’s it like working with writers Geoff Johns and Jeff Katz on a character that you created so many years ago?

DAN JURGENS: There are times I just sit back and look at it and kind of have one of those “wow” moments. Just because it’s something that I probably didn’t anticipate doing.

CMix: Did you ever imagine when you were creating the character that he would last this long?

DJ: No. If you go back to those days, I hadn’t been in the business for that long. So any concept of what I might be doing, if anything 20-some years later, well it just was not anything that you stopped to consider. Whether it was Booster Gold, Superman or Spider-Man, or anything else. It just isn’t part of your thought process. At least it wasn’t part of mine.

CMix: How has the character changed since you first created him?

DJ: I don’t know that the character has changed a lot. If you go back to Booster’s first appearance, he was always supposed to be a fun, a joking sort of character, and he’ s still essentially that. I think his character’s become better defined. I think that his relationship with Blue Beetle is a really important element of who he is now, and of course that didn’t exist at the beginning. Like I said, I don’t know if his character has changed – and I think that’s part of the success. I think his character has been added to, amended and flushed out some but I think part of the reason we are succeeding is because his character has not changed.

CMix: How much are you involved in creating the story? Do they run ideas by you or are you completely surprised when you read a script for the first time?

DJ: Well, they write the script, send it and I take it from there. But we do talk reasonably often. We talk about ideas that we’d like to do and what we’d not like to do. So we certainly have, I think, a bit of give and take about the book and who Booster is. But that’s not to take anything away from them at all. The stories that are happening right now, certainly Booster’s journey through time, is absolutely due to Mr. Katz and Mr. Johns. (more…)