Booster booster Aaron Hale is currently selling ten pages of the original color guide for Justice League International #25 on eBay.com.

What's a color guide, you ask? Time for a brief history lesson!

Computers and modern printing techniques have changed things, but for most of the history of comics, all hues were printed from a few shades of one of three distinct colors. Below is artist Todd Klein's color chart from the 1980s when he worked at DC Comics. It has codes for each possible color, where "Y" stands for yellow, "B" for blue, and "R" for red. The "2" meant 25% saturation, "3" was 50% saturation, "4" was 75% saturation, and no number was fully saturated, pure color. When JLI #25 was released in 1989, 124 colors were possible.

DC colors on cover stock via KleinLetters.com

Like a kid with a single box of crayons, the colorist filled in the black and white drawings with watercolor paints to match those colors. The less fun part came after the paint dried. That's when the colorist had to go back over their work to provide the printer of the comic with an appropriate code for each color used so that the image could be reproduced. The colored and coded page was called a color guide, and that's what Aaron is selling.

Justice League International #25, page 11, panel 1 as planned

(If all that sounds like a lot to do, keep in mind that it was followed by a much more labor-intensive process called color separation. Using the coded pages of the color guide as their template, the color separator would paint sheets of acetate to be used when photographing the original art for transfer to the four printing plates needed for the CYMK color process. Printing comics was hard work!)

Justice League International #25, page 11, panel 1 as printed

Aaron's auction ends tomorrow, so don't drag your feet. If you'd like to lay your eyes (or your hands) on a bit of Blue and Gold history, hurry over to eBay.com today!

(And if you'd like more information about how comics are made, check out Todd Klein's fine blog at kleinletters.com or Klein's book co-written with Mark Chiarello, The DC Comics Guide to Coloring and Lettering Comics.)

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The Blot dropped by on Twitter to point out another unusual Booster Gold product, something called an "Ooshie."

This is, apparently, the fourth wave of Ooshies pencil toppers, which means that I am very old and out of touch with... whatever is going on here.

Ooshies are generally sold via blind bags, meaning you never know what Ooshie you might be buying and might spend forever hunting one down to find out what they really look like. Luckily for me, I live in the Internet age. Voila!

That image comes via eBay, where you can bid on your very Booster Gold Ooshie here. What a wonderful world.

Thanks, Blot!

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If you were buying DC Comics in the mid-90s, you might remember the company's trend of having a single story conceit linking all their summer annuals. In 1996, the theme was "Legends of the Dead Earth," a series of Elseworlds-style imaginary stories considering how DC's heroes might live on in the far future.

Most of these stories featured legacy heroes, but Justice League America Annual #10 took a different tack. While its story, "The Alliance" by Christopher Priest, did take place in the far future, its central hero and villains were all active Justice League members of the time. Max Lord, Captain Atom, and, yes, Booster Gold all play central roles, as illustrated in original art from the issue that is now being sold on eBay.com for a very reasonable price.

Pencils by Sergio Cariello, Inks by Nick J. Napolitano

Given that the big bad is Maxwell Lord and the Justice League of the future were "volunteers" with altered DNA, this annual might have been more than a little influential in stories that would come along years later in Countdown to Infinite Crisis and Justice League 3000.

It is also the first time Booster wore a costume with an asymmetrically placed star!

For either of those reasons, it might not be a bad issue to own some original art from.

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Today marks the negative 425th birthday of Jon Michael "Booster" Carter, born this day in the year 2442.

If you've got $100 to drop on an action figure, I think I've got a pretty good way to celebrate the occasion.

Perhaps you recall that I first reported on a 12-inch Justice League Action Booster Gold figure from Target back in March? By June, I'd given up hope that we would ever actually see it in stores. I might have been premature.

Earlier this week, I got word that Mattel might finally be releasing the figure in 2018. While researching that claim yesterday, I found this on eBay.com:

I've still never seen one of these in the wild, but if this is the real deal (and there's no reason to suspect that it isn't), there must be others out there somewhere.

Keep your eyes peeled, Booster boosters! And Happy Birthday, Booster!

UPDATE 01/01/2018: The Blot notes that this figure is now available on Amazon.com for $13! Man, 2018 is looking Boosterrific already!

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Via Twitter, Benni Beard called my attention to this custom Booster Gold minifig (with Legion Flight Ring!) now available from bilbobaggins7919 on ebay.com:

It was just back in March that I spotlighted a different custom LEGO-compatible minifig.

There must be a growing demand for block versions of our hero in the wake of the LEGO Batman 3: Beyond Gotham video game and The LEGO Batman Movie. Are you paying attention, LEGO?

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