Last week, Booster booster Ariel complained about Booster's short haircut worn at the end of his run in the 1980s. He doesn't care for it. To each their own.

Personally, I happen to find it fetching, in no small part because that's the style Booster wore on one of my favorite covers: Booster Gold #18 (1987)!

Maybe I'm just old school, but I love it when the image on the cover of a comic foretells what'll be happening inside its pages. Booster Gold lying defeated in the gutter? An unknown gunman with our hero in his sights? How will our hero ever get out of this? Open the book and find out!

Dan Jurgens and Jerry Ordway really know how to put together a cover, don't they? In Western culture, our eyes are trained to wander to the bottom right of a page. Jurgens is clearly aware of this visual scanning tendency and redirects our eyes back up through the body of the trenchcoated killer, down the barrel of the gun straight to Booster's heart. Powerful stuff!

(Who did that color? Was it issue colorist Gene D'Angelo? The warm red and gold really pop against that receding, cool green background. It's simple but effective use of complementary color theory.)

In addition to the beautiful artwork, I have to admit in the spirit of full disclosure that part of my admiration is likely due to the story within. It's one of my favorites. In fact, I recently declared it one of the 12 Best Booster Gold Stories Ever. I'll explain why on Monday.

See you next week!

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Whatever you think of writer Tom King's interpretation of Booster Gold in recent issues of Batman, I think we can all agree that we like the way Tony Daniel draws our hero. His take on bearded Booster Gold is already the talk of the Internet. (You know, the part that talks about super hero hairstyles.)

What do you think of Booster's beard? Would you like to see it stick around for future adventures? Or do you want your clean-shaven baby-faced Booster back?

This week's poll question: Should Booster Gold keep his beard from BATMAN 46? Please visit the Boosterrific Polls page to view results for this week's poll.

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Booster Gold skipped a digital issue of Smallville Season 11, but he's back for issue #48, and Skeet's is spilling his secrets!

Booster Gold is a bottle blond? Heavens, no! Presumably, this is a sly reference to the actor who played Booster on Smallville, Eric Martsolf. Martsolf is not a natural blond. He has brown hair. The real Booster Gold has blond hair!

Also in this comic, Booster retells his origin for Smallville fans. In Smallville continuity, there isn't any mention of Booster's signature force field, and his Booster Shots, er, "wrist blasters," are made from 22nd-century technology.

You can download a copy of the issue from ComiXology.com for just 99¢, or you can wait until the issue is collected in Smallville Season 11 #14 at your Local Comic Shop on June 12.

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Jon Erik Christianson of Boston University's Quad magazine recently investigated the relative personality traits of comic book characters as categorized by their hair color in "The ComiQuad: "Roots of Superhero Hair Color."

Unfortunately, most of the blonde characters also seem to fall under blonde stereotypes. Of the six men listed above, all except The Flash are known for being some of the most arrogant and vain superheroes.

Can you guess which Corporate Crusader was included in the list of blondes? In the real world, this would be libelous pseudo-scientific stereotyping by an individual's ethnicity. However, there's probably some validity in the deconstruction of colorfully costumed comic book heroes who typically thrive or die based on the quality of their graphic designers.

Hairless Skeets probably qualifies as bald under Christianson's classification system, and therefore evil. Poor, doomed, domed Skeets.

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