It's been almost exactly a year since we last got a peek into Cort Carpenter's Booster Gold sketchbook, so I'd say we're overdue. Fortunately for all of us, Cort just sent me a bunch of new artist commissions!

Darren Calvert

Max Dunbar

Rick Leonardi

Brent Schoonover

Those are just the headshots! I've got more, but I don't want anyone to overdose on too much Gold. I'll share the rest in the near future.

Thanks, Cort! Keep up the good work.

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As Rob Snow recently pointed out to me, January's Flash: One Minute War Special has a Very Special Guest Star:

"Chapter Four: Future"; written by Jeremy Adams; art by George Kambadais, Matt Herms, Rob Leigh

Gold Beetle's sidekick robot used to be called Skeets (presumably *our* Skeets), but here is renamed Beets. I guess it makes sense that if Gold Beetle combines the legacy of both Booster Gold and Blue Beetle then her robot companion should be an amalgam of Skeets and Buggles (introduced in Blue and Gold #3, half a year after Gold Beetle's debut in Future State: Suicide Squad #1).

We're still waiting on an adventure teaming Gold Beetle up with her ancestors, but I'm sure we're getting closer every day.

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DC solicitations are out for August, and by my current count, Booster boosters can expect to see our hero make an appearance in at least 10 upcoming books (including reprints). That's a lot!

As we've already covered, Booster will be in August's Tales of the Human Target one-shot as well as several Dark Crisis issues.

And while we knew that Booster would be on the cover of the first issue of DC vs. Vampires: All-Out War, we are just now learning that he'll be on the 1:25 variant edition of the second issue by James Stokoe:

If you didn't know, "1:25 variant" means that for every 25 copies of the book your Local Comic Shop orders with the standard or regular variant covers, they'll get exactly one of those. The general rule of thumb in comic collecting is that you should generally expect to "pay the ratio" for these sorts of incentive variant covers: you pay approximately $25 for 1 copy at your LCS. In today's market, that's like, 5 gallons of gas!

These 1:25 covers will obviously be in limited supply, so if you want this (or any incentive variant — so named because the publisher is using it to create an incentive to buyers to purchase more copies than they might be otherwise initially inclined to order), I recommend you negotiate with your LCS ahead of time to try and strike a deal that will be worthwhile to both of you.

On the other hand, the collected edition of Blue and Gold is due on September 27 for a comparatively meager $19.99. And while I'm sure you already have all the individual issues, won't it be nice to have them all bound under one cover?

You can find all the August solicitations at GamesRadar.com. Spend wisely, Booster boosters.

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Booster Gold tells us he's from the future, and we believe him because that's the kind of nice, trusting fans we are. But if he was really from the future, he should be able to prove it, right? He could accurately predict an earthquake or tell us who wins next year's World Series or, at the very least, give us a hint about what the popular toy will be far enough in advance of Christmas that we can get one before it sells out.

That said, maybe Booster *has* told us about the future, and we didn't understand. After all, sometimes you don't know what you're looking for until you've already passed it.

Here are five instances from DC Comics where, in retrospect, future-boy Booster Gold prophesized coming events:

1. The True Value of Toilet Paper
Justice League America #89 (1994)

It seems like a frivolous joke, but if COVID has taught us nothing else, it's that toilet paper is really the first thing to go.

2. Air Rage
Justice League International #9 (1988)

When I first read this as a kid, I assumed it was one of those adult references that went over my head. Now that I know better, it's funny because it's true.

3. Legends of Tomorrow
Justice League Spectacular #1 (1992)

What, you were thinking George Clooney? St. Elsewhere is *still* great television.

4. The Rise of Non-Fungible Tokens
Booster Gold #1 (1986)

Internet salesmen want you to think that NFTs are new, but they have definitely been around for a while.

5. Being a Real Man
Justice League #4 (1987)

In hindsight, this one seems weirdly specific.

The future is a very strange place indeed.

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As all Booster boosters know by now, DC has announced a new Blue Beetle/Booster Gold mini-series coming in July 2021. What you may not know is just how long it has taken to get to this blessed event. On Twitter, Dan Jurgens wrote:

To be clear, this is the third, maybe even fourth time this project has been on my board, the first in '88or '89. Nice to have it become a reality and even better to have the incredible Ryan Sook drawing it. So good! (@thedanjurgens, Twitter.com, Apr 21, 2021)

I can attest that 1988 is the date that fans first learned about it. What follows is the first in a series of three posts that originally appeared here on Boosterrific in June 2011:

In Boosterrific.com's never-ending quest to catalog every Booster Gold appearance in a DC publication, I recently perused several issues of DC's pre-Previews solicitations, Direct Currents. Many of the early issues include interviews with DC artists. The artist interviewed for the "People At Work" column in issue #8 (August, 1988) is Dan Jurgens.

The article -- presumably written by Paul Kupperberg -- includes a brief biography, including the facts that Jurgens was inspired to read comics by the 1966 Batman television show, and that his first work for DC on Warlord resulted from a chance meeting with Mike Grell at a comic book convention. It even contains a bit about the origin of Booster Gold. But the part I found most interesting was this paragraph:

"Then there's next year's ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN ANNUAL, which I'm co-writing with Jerry Ordway and pencilling. And, of course, the one project I'm really excited about is something that DC's still got in the planning stages, called THE BLUE AND THE GOLD, a new series starring Booster Gold with the Blue Beetle. They've gotten real popular as buddies in Justice League International, so I think a book co-starring the two of them is a natural. It's going to have that unique JLI flavor to it."

We know it was never released, but how close did DC come to publishing The Blue and the Gold series teaming Booster Gold and Blue Beetle?

It's worth noting that there was no Adventures of Superman Annual released in 1989, and that no Adventures of Superman Annual shares writing credit between Dan Jurgens and Jerry Ordway (though both contributed to Action Comics Annual in 1989 and several issues of Adventures of Superman). So it seems that DC was being very flexible with their schedule in the late 1980s.

Next time, we'll look for more clues about the series that almost never was in Justice League letter columns from the 1990s.

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