I trust that if you were a loyal Booster Gold fan, you saw him on TV with your other favorite superheroes on Friday night. It was pretty awesome seeing some hero-versus-hero action with Booster Gold and the Blue Beetle. And the fact that they were both vampires? Fantastic.
Morgenstern posted on Apr. 26, 2011 at 4:04 AM
There was an update on the site, and the adjusted ratings are a bit better than the first ones with 2.352 million viewers
Boosterrific [Official Comment] posted on Apr. 26, 2011 at 4:46 AM
Whoo hoo! That's 122,000 more people who may have been introduced to Booster Gold for the first time. That's nearly the total sales volume for the last 12 issues of BOOSTER GOLD alone.
Eyz posted on Apr. 27, 2011 at 4:34 AM
DeMatteis' episode was pretty fun! Loved it! And Jaime and Booster interraction was pretty funny.
I dunno.. You're kinda underestimating Booster's popularity with the sales number of issues, which isn't an accurate factor anymore nowadays.
1) Most people tend to buy trades now. Even I, a huge Booster fan only follow him through TPBs. (issues would be a pain to keep following on a regular basis for me for example)
Like buying a DVD/Bluray set at the end of TV shows' seasons
2) Let's not ignore the internet's impact and role. Deadpool wouldn't have become the superstar he is without it, not with his on-going only. So did Blue & Gold (you know who and what I'm talking about!)
3) And finally, internationally people don't follow superheroes with those same issues but with translated TPBs like these:
http://livre.fnac.com/a2897658/Batman-Batman-silence-Jim-Lee
http://livre.fnac.com/a2571480/Daredevil-100-Marvel-T16-Daredevil-Ed-Brubaker
And they even end up being amongst the best selling comics of the month in France (country of many other local comics)
Personally I only watched this Smallville episode for Booster, I haven't watched any since season ~2 (okay, that's not true, I've seen the Absolute Justice one too)
We could be looking at 2,000,000+ Booster fans here!
Boosterrific [Official Comment] posted on Apr. 27, 2011 at 2:30 PM
True, my information is limited exclusively to the audience in America. I do not know of a way to judge Booster's popularity elsewhere. He could be a huge star, and I not know it. He does seem to have a lot of fans in Western Europe.
Deadpool is a poor example for comparison. The character has been exceedingly popular since his introduction in the early 90s. His current popularity may or may not be based on a wave of internet talk, but he was appearing regularly in books selling nearly 1 million copies back in the 90s, when X-Men and and Liefeld's X-Force were real market forces. He has since had several mini-series and multiple ongoing series. He is a star of a different magnitude, and has been since before the internet was a household word.
I am sure that far more than 2 million people have encountered Booster Gold through comic books in the past 26 years. However, I believe that the audience for SMALLVILLE is not exactly the same as the comic buying audience. It is proven that television and movie appearances do not significantly affect comic sales, so it would appear that television/movie watchers are not comic buyers (other than those who are already buying). Therefore, I expect that many of those who watched the episode were seeing Booster -- who has spent most of his career as a background player in comic books -- for the first time. That's a good thing.
Eyz posted on Apr. 28, 2011 at 4:43 AM
But a lot of us probably turned on in this episode, like we did for the Absolute Justice episode, just to check how our favorite character was treated there.
Anyway, yeah, we're probably both right to some extend!
(as for Deadpool, I don't remember a lot of people following his Gail Simone era nor the Cable & Deadpool on-going, but in the meantime, his popularity re-raised in recent years thanks to tons of silly memes, internet talk and such! which I'm sure had an impact on both Marvel bringing his book back, and surfing on that movement, made him appear all over, be it in comics, games and cartoons!)