This past weekend at WonderCon, DC Comics unveiled many of their plans for Rebirth. Although Ted Kord will be returning to mentor Jaime Reyes, there was no hint that we'll be seeing a Booster Gold comic anytime soon.

At least no obvious hint.

That's Gary Frank's cover to DC Universe: Rebirth, the one-shot book written by Geoff Johns that will be launching the Rebirth event. If you're familiar with Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel frescoes, you'll recognize Superman's pose as he reaches out to touch the hand of god. A contributor to Comics Amino thinks he knows who that god will be.

Who could the character that ties directly to rebirth and is manipulating things behind the scenes be?
...
A being who is apart of the time stream itself and has the knowledge of the past, present and future and can monitor any activity within the time stream.
...
I think Waverider Booster will be the key to everything.

It may be wishful thinking on my part, but I'd like to believe this commentator (who posts under the pseudonym "Booster Gold"!). Part of his argument is based on an exchange between Johns and Booster Gold creator Dan Jurgens at the "DC All Access Live: DC Universe Rebirth" panel at WonderCon.

If you fast-forward to about 34:50 in the video above, Dan Jurgens will be introduced as the writer who will be returning the post-Crisis Superman to Action Comics in June. He will conclude the interview with this exchange with Geoff Johns:

Johns: There's also a character in there that will tie directly to Rebirth, and some of the stuff that you're playing with is long term for the story we're building. It's really exciting.

Jurgens: Right, exactly. You'll certainly see more of that right in the first issue as we see someone manipulating things behind the scenes putting everything in its place, and it's building to quite a big conclusion.

Last week Johns told Booster Gold fans that big things are coming and we're going to be happy, and now Jurgens is teasing some time-manipulating puppet-master responsible for restoring portions of the post-Crisis DC Universe. Is the reason we haven't seen Waverider since Convergence because he's been busy fixing the DCnU?

So, Booster Gold in Rebirth? Who knows. It could all just be a coincidence or wishful thinking. After all, DC teased that Booster would play a significant role in both Infinite Crisis and Futures End, and neither of those came to pass. However, I'd rather stay positive and hope for the best. Isn't that what a rebirth is all about?

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Newsarama.com got the first look at the upcoming Convergence: Booster Gold #1. And the revelations just keep coming.

New 52 has no idea who Rip Hunter is. That seems to make it pretty clear that there are no Time Masters in the New 52 continuity. One more reason to hope it doesn't survive Convergence.

What else will we see when we get our hands on the full issue of Convergence: Booster Gold #1 this Wednesday? I'm pulling for a meeting between New 52 Skeets and post-52 Skeets. (IhopeIhopeIhope!)

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As I mentioned earlier this week, DC Comics is giving readers a recap of important events in the life of the stars of its Convergence mini-series. ComicsAlliance.com has the recap that will be appearing in Convergence: Booster Gold:

find a larger version at ComicsAlliance.com

I'm guessing the reason that all of Booster's pre-52 adventures are ignored is because this mini-series book will focus on time-shenanigans, not straightforward super-adventure, so readers will need to be brought up to speed on DC's time cop. But the pages offer an alternate suggestion for the omissions: Booster Gold doesn't remember them.

As we learned in Booster Gold: Futures End, the Booster Gold whose adventures we've followed since he was introduced to the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths DC Universe still exists outside of time. According to these pages, Booster Gold returned from Flashpoint to Vanishing Point, where the changes in time caused him to forget his past. This explains the Booster we saw in All-Star Western. (That he was wearing the wrong costume can be attributed to artist error [though the truth probably lies closer to editorial retcon].)

These pages also reinforce that "our" Booster never merged with the New 52 Universe. The Booster Gold of the New 52 Universe was "created" on the Earth-Prime of the post-Flashpoint multiverse. His first appearance is in Justice League International #1, and his history deviates significantly from that of "our" Booster Gold. He never befriended Ted Kord or joined the JLI or had his own sidekick named Goldstar, and he's certainly never met anyone named Max Lord or Gladys.

Of course, two pages are hardly enough to answer all the outstanding questions about the multiple Booster Golds and their transition to the New 52 — are there two versions of Rip Hunter? What is NuBooster Gold's history? Will we ever meet the New 52 version of Skeets? — but maybe we'll get a few more answers when Convergence: Booster Gold #1 is released in three weeks.

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A few weeks back, Booster booster Eyzmaster and Waezi2 got together over at Comics In 5 Panels to discuss Justice League : Generation Lost. The premise of the site is to use 5 panels to recap a single series, but it's impossible to talk about the impact of Generation Lost without mentioning the New 52.

Waezi2: Even weirder is that despite Booster Gold being pretty popular the last couple of years before the Nu52, Johns made him... disappear. LITERATELY!

Granted, JLI was apparently not a big success, and Johns has a reputation for using C-List characters as canon-fodder to make them seem important, but when Frankenstein was cancelled, he was at least made part of Justice League Dark(can you believe how cheap DC is today?). So that's actually n52 in a nutshell: "Hey, kids! Sorry that you will never read about Booster Gold again, but it was SO important to make it clear how BIG an impact Superman and Wonder Woman making out has."

Bottom-line: third-stringers has no place in n52.

You can find the whole article at comicsin5panels.blogspot.dk.

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I don't think it's any secret that I don't care for the New 52. I know I'm not alone.

I often hear or read others with long-term DC Comics buying habits express disappointment with the change to the DC Universe. When we malcontents get together, someone invariably invokes sales numbers to prove that most people hate the New 52.

That sounds comforting, but is is true? I looked at the numbers to see for myself.

The naysayers have a point. The New 52 is dying a slow death, kept alive largely through increasingly regular injections of "events."

The graph above charts the sales since the launch of the New 52, and the trend lines make it clear that DC is losing ground to their Marvelous Competition. (Let's not pretend that DC's recent changes are anything other than an attempt to close the gap with Marvel, which is more successful in all ways, but especially in the one that counts: sales revenue).

Those spikes in the graph are the initial reboot and last year's "Villains Month" 3D covers. Those 3D covers really seemed to work. Expect to see them more often if this September's Futures End covers are anywhere near as successful. (Living from event to event? Why does that market strategy seem so familiar?)

But before I celebrate the proof that the New 52 is loosing steam, I should put that in perspective and look at what DC was doing before their re-branding:

Here I've extended my timeline backwards. We have sales data for 32 months of the New 52 universe, so I decided to look backwards the same distance before the relaunch. Frankly, they don't look so bad. (I can't even blame the sales dip for January 2011 on Flashpoint. That month saw a change in Diamonds' distribution practice, and was a low volume month across the board.)

Ah, but when I put the two timelines together, look what happens:

Look at that upswing! And it's probably better than it looks. All of my data comes from ComicChron.com and is based off Diamond Comics Distributors' coded sales charts. That means that my numbers are estimates that do not include digital sales. That probably means that the modern numbers are bigger and better than we can see (at least in months without fancy 3D covers).

It's true that a rising tide floats all boats, and the comics industry is currently experiencing something of a sales renaissance as the economy has rebounded from the Great Recession. However, DC is hitting sales numbers they haven't seen in over a decade. It would be foolish to credit most of that change to anything other than the excitement generated by the launch of the New 52.

Creatively, I still refuse to call the New 52 a success. I can still argue that rebooting to something that I might want to read — such as keeping Wally West as The Flash or reverting Superman to Silver Age godhood — may have produced better, longer lasting gains. What I cannot do is deny that the New 52 gave DC sales momentum unlike any in recent memory. The only question now is when DC will do it again.

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