If you don't remember life before the Internet, you may not realize how much harder it was back then for young people to find a community who shared your interests outside of mainstream pop culture.

I distinctly recall being teased quite mercilessly in high school for admitting in front of the class that my ideal Saturday night was staying home and watching Tom Baker Doctor Who reruns on PBS. (I can't say much has changed.)

Which is why, once I'd found friends who liked to quote Star Wars and watch Japanese cartoons, we especially cherished the things that brought us together. Such as comic books.

Especially when those comic books had something really cool in them.

Like that time Batman punched out Guy Garner in Justice League #5.

Like Blue Beetle, we talked about that forever. Which is why, despite having very little Booster Gold content — he's present but off panel — this is one of my very favorite pages of all time.

(Seriously. Why isn't this a movie yet, Warner Bros?)

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This series is intended to address all of Booster Gold's comics in the order of their publication, yet so far, I've only covered issues of Booster Gold Volume 1. I've skipped spotlighting issues of New Teen Titans, The Outsiders, and the earliest issues of Justice League because Booster doesn't appear on a full page's worth of panels.

Now, at last, we come to Booster's first significant appearance outside of his own title. It also happens to be my single favorite Booster Gold comic story of all time and the number one entry in my list of the Twelve Best Booster Gold Stories Ever. If you read the title to this post, you already know I'm talking about Justice League #4.

I can (and have) looked at this book all day. But if I could look at only one page of panels from Justice League #4, it would be the only page one with a smiling Batman.

I like how Batman's smile dawns after the line break, but I especially love that Booster's head turn in the final panel builds tension while leading to the single panel on the second page of this two-page spread, where artist Kevin Maguire gives us this:

Yeah, Justice League #4 is a Boosterrific comic, even if I do say so myself.

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I was looking through DC's December solicitations at ComicsBeat.com this weekend when I spotted the 1:25 retailer incentive variant cover by Jeff Spokes for Human Target #10 featuring the Justice League International:

That's the only revealed cover coming in December with Booster on it. And I might consider buying it... if I can't get the regular edition with stunning Greg Smallwood art showcasing G'Nort for 1/5 the price. (Sorry, DC, but I'm not made of money. Have you seen how much comic books cost these days?)

The solicitations don't make it clear if Booster is inside any of the books, but Dan Jurgens will be handling some art on the Dark Crisis follow-up, Big Bang #1, so maybe there. We'll find out when the book comes to your Local Comic Shop on December 13.

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You know, for someone who says I don't like Tom King's work, I somehow dedicate a lot of space on this blog to him. What can I say? The guy's just kind of hard to ignore, especially when he tweets things like this:

That's the book cover under the dust jacket of the Human Target Volume 1 hardcover coming our way September 27. Yeah, we've seen that art before — it was created by Greg Smallwood for the interior of Human Target #1. But it's still Boosterrific no matter how many times we see it.

While I'm on the topic, this would seem to be a great time to mention that Russ Burlingame has an exclusive interview with Tom King in The Gold Exchange: The Boosterrific Deluxe Edition. With Russ's permission, I'm quoting starting from page 594 here:

Burlingame: You said earlier that you write Booster "wrong." That feels like a healthy way of internalizing audience feedback, just to crack the joke and say "I know 30% of everyone reading this are going to bitch, and that's fine."

King: I mean, I say "right" and "wrong," but I wouldn't change the way that I write. I just wrote Booster for Human Target, and I loved how those pages turned out. Yeah, my Booster's a little goofier and a little sillier, and I know it's not going to please everyone, but it's my job to make the best product I can, and that's the best product I see.

If I'm just trying to write the way everyone wants me to write, then I'll write crappy. I know it's going to turn out worse if I try to do it the other way.

My general opinion is that there are a lot of superheroes who are super-competent and super good in the DC Universe, and it's nice to have one who's not that way. It's what makes him interesting and funny. It's nice to have a guy who can make jokes, and that when you read him, it can make you laugh. That's what I like about Booster; he's not like all the other superheroes.

To me, it's the difference between what Iron Man was up until Robert Downey, Jr. and what he is now. He was just a generic, boring guy, and yeah, he had alcoholism, but that was basically it. And then Robert Downey, Jr. came along, and it was like, "What if we made this guy so arrogant it was funny?" And then we're like, "Oh, yeah. Now he's a [effing] great character."

Burlingame: In Human Target, it isn't just Booster, but the entire Justice League International. Do you approach Booster a little differently as part of that unit?

King: I knew I was taking the Keith Giffen/JLI version as opposed to the Dan Jurgens, more heroic version. I wanted to make sure I had it down, so I talked to Dan about it and he was like, "Well, Booster is a guy who doesn't mind making money off being a superhero," so I wanted to make a thing where he was making money off being a superhero, so I put Booster's Bagels in there.

I just started to put captions back in my writing. I haven't used captions since The Vision, so that's like seven years without captions. The whole point of Human Target is, he goes through each JLI member and kind of cuts to the core of them at some point and says why they're awesome, or what's at their heart. So it gave me a chance, using Chance's voice, to say what I love about the character.

So Booster is Booster. And "Yeah, Booster's a joke, but aren't they all? At least this one's funny" is I think his great Booster line.

We can agree on that, at least. Booster Gold *is* funny.

Thanks for the interview (and the book), Russ!

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Tales of the Human Target #1 (of 1) will be available tomorrow at your Local Comic Shop. According to the solicitation text:

Chance teams up with fan-favorite members of the JLI in four connecting mysteries that lead them to that fateful day when one them will kill the Human Target.

Taken literally, that means that the Big Bad of the series is one of the JLI characters featured in the issue, either Fire, Ice, Guy Gardner, or Booster Gold. DC played this same "one of these heroes is a murderer!" with Tom King's Heroes in Crisis in 2018 and have done nothing but bend over backwards to undo it ever since. Glad to see they've learned a lesson from that debacle.

(To be fair to King, he doesn't write the solicitation text. He just, you know, makes heroes into murderers.)

As usual, the stars of a Tom King project are the amazing visual artists DC teams with him. In this case, it's Kevin Maguire and Alex Sinclair on the Booster story, but you can see Greg Smallwood also gets a chance to draw Gold in the issue preview at AIPTComics.com.

As if that wasn't enough great art, keep in mind that a piece of Booster appears on the David Marquez open order variant Cover B.

Yeah, I'm certainly not going to complain about that.

Buy this issue and make Skeets happy.

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