It's a big month at Boosterrific.com for Doomsday fans! (Or fans of Dead Superman. Either way.)

We all know that Booster Gold was on multiple covers of Death of Superman 30th Anniversary Special #1 a few weeks back. (And, as it happens, he'll be on the cover of a few more when the second printings arrive after Christmas.)

Whether or not the 30th Anniversary Special was the inspiration, Booster booster J got to reading other Doomsday stories and discovered the following Booster appearance was missing from the Boosterrific.com database:

That's from Superman's nightmare sequence at the beginning of Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey #1. I'm sure I've seen that before, but somehow I failed to track it. Oops. (I wonder if I decided once upon a time that it didn't count because it's not really Booster Gold? Oh, well. Whatever. Never mind.) Fixed now.

And, as it happens, that's not the only Doomsday-related Booster appearance that's been added to the database this week. The cover to Justice League America #69 showed up in this week's Superman: Kal-El Returns Special #1:

Superman and Doomsday (and Booster Gold) together forever!

Thanks to J for setting me straight.

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We've reached the halfway point of my list of the twelve best Booster Gold comics, and number 6 is arguably the darkest story in the list. As you can see from the cover of Superman #74, Doomsday has arrived.

This story is a tragedy. An alien monster has crashed on Earth and is marching his way towards Metropolis, leaving a trail of unimaginable destruction in its wake, including the broken body of Blue Beetle, as we see in the first panel.

Unfortunately for Mitch and his family, Doomsday's path leads straight through their house. Unfortunately for the Justice League, they are Mitch's only hope.

Dan Jurgens is at his best as a writer when he scales his stories down to a human level. That skill is on display here, as several early pages are devoted to the introduction of Mitch and his family. (Angry teenage Mitch is so very 90s, but that's when this comic was created.) They put a face on the danger, giving the audience a reason to care about Doomsday's rampage and creating a dramatic tension often missing from these sorts of super-heroic fisticuffs. We see the stakes driving the heroes to fight and win. If the heroes fail...

Well, heroes can't fail, can they?

The following page contains 8 consecutive panels of Booster Gold taking a beating unlike any he's seen before or since. It's not just brutal --

The issue makes it clear that Booster's sacrifice is a heroic one. Booster Gold is giving his life so that others may live. That's the definition of a real hero.

And that's why I include it among the The Best Booster Gold Stories Ever.

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For decades, the biggest knock against Booster Gold has been that he's only a hero because he stole his powers. His fans know that's not true.

With or without powers, Booster's always been a hero, as he proved on this day in 1993 in the pages of Justice League Europe #50, when he quite literally jumped into action with nothing but his wits and a sharp-looking pair of tights to protect him.

Justice League Europe #50, art by Ron Randall, Randy Elliott, and Gene D'angelo

This 54-page spectacular is the sixth and final chapter of the "Red Winter" storyline in which Green Lantern's old foe Sonar used his upgraded sound powers to disable the Justice League Europe and stage a successful coup of the former Soviet Bloc counties.

With their comrades down, the remaining active members of the Justice League International spring to the rescue. This includes Booster Gold — despite the fact that the same Doomsday that had recently befallen Superman had also destroyed Booster's 25th-century power suit and gauntlets, leaving him functionally no more powerful than a blind doctor.

Full credit to Booster for having the courage to campaign against a mind-controlling dictator with only his fists. However, it does leave him severely disadvantaged whenever a super-powered melee breaks out, as they often do in these sorts of situations. That means Booster spends most of the story on the sidelines, pointing out the obvious.

A real hero helps out however he can.

Another bit of trivia about this issue: it's the first story in which Booster Gold and his future teammate Godiva appear together. They don't share any dialogue, but they do get some great sound effects.

Ouch. Take care of yourself, Booster. Courage is great, but a man's got to know his limitations.

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In case you missed Booster's cameo appearance in Doomsday Clock #9 the first time around, you're getting a second chance with the second printing in stores today.

Or you could just look at these panels.

According to Chomicchron.com, the first printing of that issue — the ninth in the mini-series — sold 120,079 copies, which is more than any but the first issue of Heroes in Crisis. That means more people have seen Booster blasted by Doctor Manhattan than Booster accused of killing the Flash. I'd say that's a good thing.

Meanwhile, if you are in your Local Comic Shop today, let me recommend everything in DC's Wonder Comics line, especially Mark Russell's Wonder Twins. I wish Bendis paced his stories to let more happen in an individual issue, but Young Justice and Naomi are also pretty good reads. Skeets won't have a problem if you buy any of those issues.

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Dan Jurgens recently spoke to Russ Burlingame about the 25th anniversary of the release of Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey. Booster Gold played no role in that series, yet according to Jurgens, he sort of does.

Burlingame: It feels like, even though this is a very stand-alone book, the Waverider stuff plays into the bigger theme of the Linear Men at that time in the books, which is, "Do something, you jerks."

Jurgens: Right. It's weird, I think I probably didn't realize it at the time, but I look back at this now, and realize that what I was doing, I should say, was assembling a group of characters that I created that would function in that world. I think Jim Starlin did a great job of this. When he was doing Captain Marvel, when he was doing Warlock, he created all these characters. They became very much a part of his writing language, and his visual language. All that stuff existed to the extent that it was Jim Starlin-world. Now we see that times 5,000 on the screen. I think what I was doing was a lot of the same thing, which is I said that I have all these characters that interact and they make sense to me. They don't just have to interact once in November of 1992 and then we never see them again. We can use them to address different ideas and different topics.

They became very much a part of -- this is going to sound real egotistical, and I don't want it to-- it becomes part of like "Jurgensverse," as far as I was approaching Superman a little bit. It made sense to me. Whereas at that time, it might have been [convenience], I look back on it now a little differently. It made sense in a lot of different ways. These are the characters I wanted to continue to explore, and there was no reason they had to interact once and then not interact again.

Burlingame: And a lot of these characters and ideas you would continue to work with all the way up through the mid-2000s with your Booster Gold run.

Jurgens: Also, if you look at Waverider, which was a co-creation with Archie Goodwin, you have all these things that fit together and work. think it's a group of concepts that have been probably under-used by DC. I think there's a lot more than could have been done with it, and fortunately that stuff is still out there, so there's a lot more that can be done with it. I think concepts like the Linear Men, like Vanishing Point, and all that stuff, I think that's the kind of thing that has a place in comics. I think there's some cool things there that can still be exploited, still be used.

There's a lot to unpack in just those few paragraphs, and that's only a tiny snippet of the interview. (By all means, read the whole thing on ComicBook.com.)

The most important thing there, obviously, is that we should be calling Jurgens' oeuvre "The Jurgensverse," and that all the characters in it always were, and always will be, connected. That somewhere in 2019, Trixie Collins could pass Mitchell Anderson in the produce aisle of their local supermarket and give him advice on the best way to pick out a grapefruit, that thought makes me very happy.

It's also worth noting that Jurgens believes that Time Masters and their story-telling conceit of policing history remains an untapped source for future stories in the DCrU. That should be encouraging to fans of Booster (and Jurgens' work), as it means that the possibility still exists to revisit the characters and concepts (and unanswered mysteries) of Booster Gold Volume 2.

Here's to the future!

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