Good news, Booster boosters! Booster Gold does appear in a DC Comic this week. Can you guess which one?

Hint: it's not the concluding issue of the DC Universe-spanning Titans Beast World event mini-series. Nor, despite having shown up in recent issues of the regular series, is he in the Batman/Superman: World's Finest 2024 Annual.

Nope, Booster Gold's appearance is in the one-shot DC Power 2024, a anthology of ten stories that, as the cover blurb explains, celebrates "Black excellence across the DCU" timed to coincide with the start of Black History Month.

To be fair to white-bread Booster, he isn't exactly crashing the Black Power party. In the entire issue, he's only seen in the above one-panel flashback to Bloodwynd's first appearance in Justice League America #61, which did, indeed, prominently feature Booster Gold. So at least it's an historically accurate cameo appearance.

As I've said many times before, I love DC's current strategy of holiday-themed anthologies because they give us readers the opportunity revisit the oft-overlooked, lesser known characters of the DC Universe like Bloodwynd. And, this time, to a much lesser extent, Booster Gold. Hooray!

Despite Booster only having a very small cameo appearance, consider buying this issue and making Skeets happy.

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DC's late 1988 event was Invasion!, and in the early days of the alien assault on Earth, Booster Gold played an important role... as the Justice League International member assigned to monitor duty.

Booster has a brief supporting role answering a telephone call from Wally West in Flash #21. Since that's just a one page appearance, we'll skip to Booster's larger supporting role in Justice League International #22, where our hero confronts the invading enemies directly.

JLI #22 is divided evenly into two stories: a surprise alien ambush on the League's New York Embassy, and the League's first battle against a fleet of alien warships over the South Pacific Ocean. The first story is mostly comedy, so of course that's the one that features Booster Gold.

It doesn't go well for our hero, especially on page 5.

Poor Booster. He should have been on his toes. As everyone who has ever read a Justice League comic knows, there's nothing more dangerous than being assigned to monitor duty.

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Booster Gold appears in only two panels in Justice League International #20, so we'll skip ahead to Justice League International #21 where Booster Gold has about the greatest three consecutive panel sequence you'll ever read in a DC comic.

And can we just take an extra moment to admire Ty Templeton's pencils on what is very obviously a layout (with an iconic Darkseid closeup) by the late, great Keith Giffen? Amazing work, guys.

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Thanks to the unique combination of Keith Giffen's plotting and layouts, J.M. DeMatteis's vaudevillian dialogue, and Kevin Maguire's rendering of body language and facial expressions, almost every page in Justice League International #19 is a standalone delight.

From Ice Maiden falling for Guy Gardner to Green Flame hitting on Lobo to Oberon saying goodbye to Black Canary to Superman rejecting Batman: pick a page at random, and it's probably a winner.

But the best page, my favorite page, is the one where Booster Gold and Blue Beetle get a door slammed in their faces.

If you ask me, turkeys are much more intimidating than beetles.

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As Booster booster Rob Snow alerted me, after months of Booster Gold references, we actually get to see our hero on panel in this weeks' Fire & Ice: Welcome to Smallville #5!

Is it just me, or is it starting to feel like none of the New 52 continuity applies anymore? I feel like I opened a comic book to find Bobby Ewing taking a shower. (If you don't get that reference, kids, you're on the wrong website. Your homework is to go watch something from back when television was good, specifically the 1985 Dallas season 9 episode, "Blast from the Past.")

The events of this series have some really weird, life-threatening things happening, things that it would seem would not go unnoticed by a particular Man of Steel. Things like several gristly murders and much destruction of property. Makes me wonder why the story's setting is Smallville and not a suburb of Gotham, where these sorts of things wouldn't attract so much attention amidst the psycho clowns and sewer-dwelling crocodile-men.

The solicitation text for next month's mini-series final issue teases "the fate of Smallville itself hangs in the balance!" After reading issue 5, I can believe it.

Buy this issue and make Skeets happy.

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