Every day, I get a new email notifying me that someone on the Internet is talking about James Gunn's announced Booster Gold show. They don't have any new details, mind you, because there aren't any new details.

But I appreciate their enthusiasm. From their breathless clickbait, you'd think the character had never been on TV before. How soon everyone forgets Smallville.

To be fair to them, it has been over a decade since the CW cancelled that show after ten seasons. In fact, it's been exactly 10 years to the day since Booster's last appearance in the Smallville Season 11 comic book. Issue #15, to be specific.

At the time, Booster had been teleported to the 31st century to help the Legion of Super-Heroes save Metropolis. And Booster delivered as only he could.

I'm excited for a new Booster Gold television series, too. I'm looking forward to a new generation of audiences seeing a real hero in action again.

(While I'm on the topic of Smallville comics, I must admit that looking into this issue I realized that I had somehow failed to catalog Booster's cameo in Smallville Season 11 Special #5 and the reprint collections Smallville Season 11 Volume 8: Chaos and Smallville Season 11 Volume 9: Continuity. I think I've got all the Smallville appearances now, but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.)

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I'm sure I'm not the only one who saw the Mess Hall in the Justice League Hall of Justice in last week's Superman: Kal-El's Return Special #1 and thought, "That looks just like Warriors!"

If you don't remember Warriors, it was a bar filled with memorabilia from Guy Gardner's crime-fighting career. (Warriors is not to be confused with Planet Krypton, the superhero-themed restaurant found on multiple Earths.)

Booster Gold visited Warriors on several occasions, most notably on December 5, 1995, when Guy Gardner threw the DCU's largest Christmas party in the pages of Guy Gardner: Warrior #39.

As you can see, almost everyone who was anyone in 1995 made this party, including Booster in his Extreme Justice-era Mark IV power armor. It's no tuxedo, but it *was* keeping Booster alive at the time, so come as you are, I guess.

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Grant Morrison became a fan favorite writer by tweaking threadbare superhero genre tropes to breathe new life into the JLA, Superman, and Batman mythos.

But before Damian Wayne or All-Star Superman or "Mageddon," Grant honed a talent for thinking outside the four-color corner box with often bizarre deconstructionist experimental comics like The Invisibles, Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth, and The Doom Patrol. That last one was especially fitting, as the Doom Patrol had billed itself as "The World's Strangest Heroes" since it's earliest appearances in 1964.

Booster Gold would find out just how strange they were in Doom Patrol #29, released on this day in 1989. The Justice League International confronted Morrison's brand of psychedelic madness head-on after Mister Nobody and his Brotherhood of Dada displayed a stolen painting that eats people (and also happens to contain the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, "Extinction") under the Eiffel Tower and... well, see for yourself:

art by Richard Case, John Nyberg, Danny Vozzo, John E. Workman

Just another regular day on the job for Morrison's Doom Patrol.

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If anyone ever asks you what superhero comics were like in the 1990s, just show them this panel:

Shoulder pads, pouches, and armored cowls, oh my!

It probably won't surprise you to learn that panel is from Bloodbath #1, released on this date in 1993.

"Bloodlines" was the DC's annual crossover event series for 1993, and as you can see, Booster was trapped in his ungainly (and unsightly) post-Doomsday football armor at the time, which partially explains why he played such a small role in the proceedings.

Don't worry, Booster. There will be better (and better looking) days ahead.

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Today's completely trivial statistic: 36 years after the first appearance of Booster Gold (on October 29), there are still 28 different days of the year that have not yet seen a Booster Gold comic released.

This includes Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, as well as September 11, and, ironically, my birthday. As it happens, September 14 is not one of those days.

There has been exactly one Booster Gold comic released on the 14th day of September, and that occurred one year ago today, in 2021, when Booster Gold appeared in these four panels of Justice League #67 drawn by Phil Hester:

pages 3 and 4

pages 7 and 8

pages 16

pages 19

It's a hallmark of issue writer Brian Michael Bendis to give everyone something to say in his crowd shots, so it's a shame that Booster doesn't have any lines. Oh, well.

Maybe Booster will get a speaking part in his next book released on September 14. Here's looking at you, 2027!

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