If you pay any attention to the statistics on the Boosterrific.com homepage, you might have noticed that last last week, the Boosterrific Database registered the 1,000th comic book to include Booster Gold. In fact, it now says 1,001.

However, that's not because Booster has appeared in anything new. It's merely because I finally got around to adding a few reprint collections with very minor Booster Gold appearances. Specifically, those are 2009's Justice League America, Special and 2013's Necessary Evil: The Villains of the DC Universe, both with appearances so small I hesitate to call them even cameos.

I'll be adding another reprint collection later this week, when DC vs. Vampires: All-Out War Part 2 comes out, and another next week for DCEASED: The Deluxe Edition. If anyone spots Booster in any other books in the near future (or ever), let me know.

UPDATE: Booster Gold makes a one-panel cameo appearance in this week's Action Comics #1057!

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Wednesday, I recalled my opinion about the short-lived Booster Gold / Harley Quinn romance. More important than my feelings about this topic, though, are the feelings of Booster Gold's creator, Dan Jurgens, who revealed them in an exclusive interview with Russ Burlingame, as quoted in The Gold Exchange: The Boosterrific Deluxe Edition pages 603-4:

Burlingame: [In an earlier interview, writer Tom King] did seem to suggest that, had he known he was doing The Gift at the same time you were doing Booster Shot over in Action Comics, he likely would have gone a different way with it, since it was so strange to see [Booster] doing two opposing things at the same time.

Jurgens: Yeah. At the same time, I do think characters have to have a little bit of elasticity to them, and it was kind of a fine line in terms of how it might have worked. I also thought that in a book like Heroes in Crisis, it was nice to have Booster included, and I thought it became a good mix of characters that way. I thought that Booster and Harley made a really interesting pairing that was interesting to read, and they played off each other very well, I thought.

Burlingame: I didn't think about it until now; I probably should have tried to talk to the Harley Quinn creators who had Booster as her boyfriend for a minute there.

Jurgens: Which I think the internet reacted to quite badly, is that right? Or at least a good portion of it?

Burlingame: I think it was less about Booster and more about the feeling that they had just set up Harley to have this amazing relationship with Poison Ivy, and they were killing her off. And then probably part of that was jettisoning a same-sex relationship for a heterosexual one.

Jurgens: Right. I think... could Booster and Harley work? Yes. Could you possibly attract fans who are interested in that relationship? Probably also yes. I don't think there's a right and wrong. I think that if you write it well, you can get people invested in it.

Burlingame: That one just didn't have time to be written well, because the blowback was so instantaneous, and DC didn't seem to see it coming.

Jurgens: Yeah, I think that's right.

Jurgens is such a nice guy. If he doesn't have a problem pairing Booster and Harley, I shouldn't have one either. I can live with that.

Thanks to Russ for asking the question and giving permission to reprint it here.

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Whether or not I'm a fan of CW's programming, I have to admit that Donald Faison's portrayal of Booster Gold on DC's Legends of Tomorrow season 7 finale has certainly raised the profile of the character and introduced him to a whole bunch of people who have never actually set their hands on a DC comic. That's an objectively good thing.

So it is a worthwhile experience to read how the show's executive producer Phil Klemmer finally got around to adding Booster to his long-running show.

Here he speaks to Chancellor Agard for ew.com:

EW: Arrowverse boss Greg Berlanti has reportedly been working on a Booster Gold movie for years. How did the character wind up on Legends?

Klemmer: As you might expect, through the side door you'd least expect it [to]. I just remember [co-showrunner Keto Shimizu] and I were on a call with Kim Roberto at DC, and we were just talking about fun characters. I think somebody threw it out there, of course never [imagining] in a million years would we get Booster Gold. And then it felt like 15 minutes later, DC called us back and was just like, "Hey, Booster's yours." And just you have a moment of being like, "Okay, this is clearly a prank of some sort, because..." We were all giddy and in disbelief and then it just became a quest of finding an actor who was worthy of the character.

EW: Why was Booster Gold on your mind to begin with? Were you just looking for a DC character to bring in at the end of the season? How did Booster end up fitting the needs of the story?

Klemmer: It's always the tonal fit and just knowing, I don't know, there's just something so lovable and unexpected. You just knew that he was going to work as kind of a bit of the merry prankster, a bit of a BS artist.

Klemmer was also quizzed by Joshua Lapin-Bertone at DCComics.com:

DC: How familiar were you with Booster before this?

Klemmer: I just knew about him from the early days of Legends, when I would hear of various projects, whether they were TV shows or movies, in the same halls where I was working. And obviously dealing with Rip Hunter in early seasons as well. I just assumed that he was going to have his own project. I never imagined that he would come into our world.

DC: For building this version of Booster, did you draw upon any particular stories? Or did you build him from the ground up?

Klemmer: The creation of a character really takes place over the course of that first season, and then seasons to come. It's going to really be a correspondence between us as writers and Donald as a performer. We definitely wanted someone who is a little off center, and like, a little bit mischievous. But we also just wanted a charisma bomb.

And we round out our media tour with Klemmer's conversation with Damian Holbrook of TVInsider.com:

TV: Is the plan to keep Donald on the board?

Klemmer: For sure. We're not gonna let Booster get away. I'm really excited to write him—he's the kind of character you wish you could be. You could get away with murder and be so charming that you never really have to suffer the consequences. He's the antithesis of a writer. Writers are deeply neurotic and self-loathing self-doubting, etcetera. I think that's why we writers are drawn to those characters—because those are our secret alter egos.

Season 8 has not yet been announced. Will there be another season of Legends of Tomorrow? If I were a betting man, I'd bet yes (especially if Michael "Booster" Carter is on the field). Legends of Tomorrow is one of the few CW shows that has improved its ratings season-over-season, so I think we should prepare to see more of Klemmer and Faison's Gold come fall.

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I was having a particularly bad week — which makes me no different than 90% of the global population this unendurable 2020 — when I received a pleasantly unexpected email from Cort Carpenter with a new batch of Boosterrific sketches from his Booster Gold sketchbook.

Reilly Brown

Adam Gorham

Steve Lieber

Mike Norton

Dave Stokes

... and another by Dave Stokes

And one by Cort himself!

Good timing, Cort. It's hard to feel down while looking at that many smiling faces.

You can see these and many, many more at Cort's online Booster Gold sketchbook on imgur.com.

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If you look at the top of this page, you might see something like this:

It has been 69 Days since Booster Gold last appeared in a DCnU comic book.

I thought that would be self-explanatory, but as Ithildyn recently noted in a recent post on Batman, Last Knight on Earth, it does open the question of what appearances count, especially in the wake of Flashpoint now that DC is expressly disinterested in even attempting to maintain a strict continuity of events between series. Therefore, let me explain my methodology.

First of all, the DCnU, or DC New Universe continuity, is what I call the "real" sequence of events of the DC Universe in the New 52 era. It's the history shared by all characters of the familiar universe, from Adam Strange to Zatanna. In comics, the "shared universe" concept is what allows the heroes established in various titles to cross over and team-up and form a Justice League. Establishing the shared timeline of the DCnU has been complicated by Convergence, Rebirth, and Doomsday Clock, but without it, there can be no "event" stories to begin with.

Obviously, not every story published by DC Comics takes place in DCnU continuity — nor would we want them all to. In years past, there have been many "imaginary" stories, sometimes called Elseworlds and sometimes Hypertime. Although they may involve "a" Booster Gold, that character isn't "the" Booster Gold. The events of those stories have no effect on the development of our hero, so those tales of alternate realities don't count against the appearance counter.

Another thing I don't count are appearances of Booster Gold within the DCnU that aren't clearly Michael Jon Carter himself. For example, even if Batman: Last Knight on Earth involved the mainstream DC timeline, the Booster Gold we get a brief glimpse of may only be a figment of Batman's guilty imagination. If that's the case, it doesn't really count as a Booster Gold appearance, does it? I put these sort of stories in my "out-of-continuity" category and the appearance counter remains unaffected.

Accurately tracking DCnU history may be an impossible task when it changes every few months, but it's still the core of what Boosterrific.com is all about. The appearance counter is a quick and easy way for Booster Gold fans to recognize gaps in Booster Gold's ongoing character development.

I hope that answers your question, Ithildyn. In short, it counts the stories I say it counts and ignores the ones I say it ignores.

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