Once a week, Brian Cronin asks Twitter for silly superhero suggestions for random artists to draw for his "Line it is Drawn" column at CBR.com. Last week, the topic was

That delightful exchange got the world this drawing, from artist Caanan Grall:

Brilliant! I think this is a masterful expression of everything I want in a comic book.

Thanks to Eskana for pointing this out.

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At the San Diego Comic-Con 2022 DC Dark Crisis panel last Thursday, Dark Crisis writer Joshua Williamson announced that the mini-series is being retitled starting with issue #4. That new title is Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Quoteth gamesradar.com:

"We've kept the real name a secret from the start because we didn't want to give away what was happening in the middle of the story, with the return of the Infinite Earths," says writer Joshua Williamson.

Despite my expectations, I'm enjoying Dark Crisis, but I have to feel that I've been reading comic books too long when my first thought is "this renaming reveal is exactly what DC did halfway through Countdown to Final Crisis" and my second thought is "doesn't Williamson realize that he brought back the infinite earths last year in Infinite Frontier?"

Apparently, we get an infinite number of infinite earths now. Continuity? Pfft.

But let's not get distracted by details. The important new news is that Booster Gold (and Skeets!) will be on the cover to Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths #5, available October 4!

The blew up Titans Tower on the cover of issue #2 (mere months after it was blown up and rebuilt in the pages of Teen Titans Academy), and it looks like the Hall of Justice get similar treatment for issue #5. What's next? Wayne Tower? The Flash Museum? It must be hard to get building insurance if you own a signature piece of property on any earth in the DCU. (It makes more and more sense to have your headquarters in an out-of-the-way place like a cave in Happy Harbor, Rhode Island.)

According to BleedingCool.com, the issue is going to have at least 5 covers, including 1:25 by Ariel Colon, 1:50 by Mikel Janin, and 1:100 foil by Daniel Sampere and Alejandro Sanchez (which I suspect will be identical to the default Cover A but shiny!).

From what I've seen so far, it looks like Booster (and Skeets!) will only be on the Ivan Reis and Danny Miki standard variant (Cover B) pictured above. Be sure to tell your Local Comic Shop that's the one you want so they can order it for you!

A somewhat harder to collect Booster Gold cover will be the 1:25 variant of Human Target #8, due on October 25:

That one can't be direct ordered, so the only way to guarantee you get one is to pay your LCS to also order you 25 copies of the regular cover. Cover price $4.99 times 26 copies equals $129.74 before tax. That's an expensive comic! Maybe your LCS will cut you a deal for buying in volume?

You can see all of DC's October solicitations at CBR.com.

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For years and years, artists believed that the best way to show what a comic strip character was thinking was to put their internal dialog in fluffy, bubbly word balloons. According to comics historian Brian Cronin, credit for that innovation belongs to Rudolph Dirks' Katzenjammer Kids newspaper comic strip in the early years of the 20th century.

However, at the dawn of the 21st century, this method began to fall out of favor in mainstream American superhero comics. Old-fashioned, abstract thought balloons were gradually replaced by the more "realistic" approach of putting the same internal dialog in square boxes, as though characters are narrating their behaviors after the fact.

Since this transition happened incrementally over time, it passed largely without comment. Which made me wonder, "When was the last time that Booster Gold used a thought balloon?"

The answer to this question is Superman #124, cover-dated June 1997.

So far as I've been able to tell, Booster Gold never thought again.

It just so happens that this issue also marks the last appearance of Booster's clunky late-90s armor, so it also represents something of bookend to his 1990s adventures. If loosing thought balloons is the price we had to pay to get Booster Gold back in tights, I think I can live with that.

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With the death of the Justice League, Dark Crisis is finally upon us, and over at CBR.com, D.R. Bickham has interviewed Dark Crisis's chief architect Joshua Williamson about what the DC Universe should expect in the months to come.

But all we really care about here at Boosterrific.com is how Dark Crisis will affect Booster Gold. Thankfully, Williamson had answers for that as well:

CBR: Who is your favorite member of the "Not Really" Justice League introduced in Dark Crisis #1?

Williamson: The "Not Really" Justice League? That's pretty funny. I really like Dr. Light and Frankenstein. Obviously, I like Damian Wayne a lot because of my history with that character, and I like getting to write him in this context. Booster Gold and Blue Beetle are cool. I like all these characters, and that's a part of why they're here.

CBR: What kind of role will this unofficial Justice League play in Dark Crisis?

Williamson: Every character you see in Dark Crisis #1 plays an important role throughout the series. There are no throw-away characters. Dr. Light has some especially big moments. It is called Dark Crisis, after all.

CBR: I assume this means we can expect a big Booster Gold / Blue Beetle moment at some point in Dark Crisis as well?

Williamson: Yes, of course. I love Blue and Gold, and I'm happy that they are both a part of Dark Crisis. They have a couple of great moments, especially later in the series.

Hey, we could all do worse than "a couple of great moments." I look forward to them.

Thanks to Booster booster Rob Snow for making sure we saw this.

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Here's an interesting footnote in the adventures of Booster Gold.

George Morrow at CBR.com recently referenced a 2006 Comicon.com Pulse article in which Jennifer M. Contino interviewed comedian Patton Oswalt, writer of JLA: Welcome to the Working Week, about his "upcoming" contribution to the Justice League Unlimited comic book:

THE PULSE: Out of all the superhero cartoons that have come and gone, what do you like the best about JLU?

OSWALT: The wide-ranging aspect. Also, they don’t just focus on the Big 5. I also like what they do with the villains. I wish they’d just do an Injustice Society cartoon. Wow!

THE PULSE: That would be cool. What is your JLU story about? How did you get involved with doing a story for that imprint?

OSWALT: Well, I tried out to be the monthly writer, but they thought a lot of my story pitches blew. But there was one they liked, which involves Booster Gold and The Atomic Knight. So that’s the one I’m doing.

THE PULSE: Out of the zillions of heroes in the JLU universe, how did you settle on Booster Gold and the Atomic Knight?

OSWALT: I thought of the kind of story I’d like to tell first, and then went through my old Who’s Who and figured out who’d be the best characters to tell that story emotionally. We’ll see.

As we all know by now, we didn't see. Justice League Unlimited was cancelled in 2008, never having included any story crossing Booster Gold with the Atomic Knights. But Oswalt is very correct that it would make a great pairing.

Every Booster booster knows that Booster Gold arrived in our "present day" on August 20, 1985, a date our hero selected in part because it occurred before a nuclear conflict of the late 20th century (Booster Gold #14). But what you may not have realized is that the nuclear war of Booster's future history was better known as The Great Disaster of the DC Universe, and according to the heroic Atomic Knights, it happened in October 1986 ("Rise of the Atomic Knights", Strange Adventures #117).

Given that the goal of the Atomic Knights was to rebuild society after the disaster, a crossover story between them and future rags-to-riches success story Booster Gold would be a good story set-up!

In hindsight we know definitively there was no nuclear disaster in the DCU in 1986. Superman discovered that the original stories of the Atomic Knights were all fictional simulations (in DC Comics Presents #57, 1983), and the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths Atomic Knights would go on to aid the city of Bludhaven after a scaled-down nuclear event in Crisis Aftermath: Battle for Bludhaven — a mini-series drawn by Dan Jurgens!

Will we ever get to read Oswalt's story? Only time will tell.

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