In the eternal search for Booster Gold cameo appearances, I made the mistake of flipping through Dark Nights: Death Metal The Multiverse Who Laughs #1. WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO READ A COMIC ABOUT BELOVED PET SIDEKICKS EATING PEOPLE? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, DC? Damn it, there should be a warning on the cover.

Fortunately, Batman Beyond #49 is a delightful antidote for most of the drek that DC is publishing these days.

Thank you, Dan Jurgens, et al.

A preview of the issue is online at CBR.com, but you don't need it. Go buy this issue and make Skeets happy. Sir.

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Cort's back with more Booster Gold sketchbook pages! He writes

These are a fun and varied mix of styles so it was nice to add them all to my collection. Which is now 59 pieces large! 2020 has had a lot of downs and twists and turns, but it has been fruitful for having artists open their lists for mail-in commissions, and I've been very lucky and very grateful for that.

Jon Bagdanove

Will Conrad

Elsa Charretier

Nick Prolix

Way to find the bright side of everyone being stuck at home without regular jobs in 2020, Cort! (And we're grateful that you shared your luck with us.)

You can see Cort's full Booster Gold sketchbook online at imgur.com.

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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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In Booster Gold Volume 2, our hero became a time travelling policeman, someone whose job was to travel through time and ensure that history unfolds correctly. Given that the DC Universe has a propensity for frequent, reality-shifting Crises, the obvious question becomes "what is correct"? What history can be changed, and what can't?

Booster Gold #5 answers that question, which is why it is in my list of the twelve best Booster Gold comics.

To teach Booster Gold (and his audience) about the limits of interfering with history, the original Time Master, Rip Hunter, sends Booster back to one of the most known and respected stories in DC Comics history: The Killing Joke. Booster soon learns there is nothing funny about it.

What follows are about a dozen pages of Booster Gold (and Skeets!) having his shiny butt handed to him by the Joker and his goons. Over and over again, Booster tries to prevent the Joker from brutalizing Barbara Gordon. Over and over again he fails.

It's not always an easy read, but it is a worthwhile one — especially when you realize the gambit Hunter is playing and at what personal cost. It is also a valiant definition of true heroism courtesy of writer Geoff Johns. No matter how many times Booster Gold gets knocked down, he always gets back up again. What a guy!

It should be noted that a large part of what makes this light-on-dialogue book such a great read is the art, which Dan Jurgens and Norm Rapmund intentionally based on the original material drawn by Brian Bolland.

While legendary writer Alan Moore always gets most of the credit, Bolland's detailed and disturbing art is no small part of what has made The Killing Joke an enduring classic, and he deserves some recognition for making Booster Gold #5 one of The Best Booster Gold Stories Ever.

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You may have noticed that Modinda dropped by the comments in Wednesday's post to chastise me for my omission of a six-year-old comic from the Boosterrific.com database. Could I really have been ignorant of a Booster Gold comic appearance from as long ago as 2014? The answer is yes.

Set your eyes on this panel, from Scribblenauts Unmasked: A Crisis of Imagination #6:

That's obviously Nu52 Booster Gold (and original Skeets) partaking in a reference to the famous "one-punch" from Justice League #5. How could I have missed that?

That panel is just a small fraction of a delightful two-page spread, by the way. (It did my heart good to see the Dibnys back together!) A very belated kudos to issue artist Adam Archer.

Rest assured that the now-more-complete-than-ever-before Boosterrific.com database has been updated to include both Scribblenauts Unmasked: A Crisis of Imagination #6 and the series collected edition. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, Modinda. And if anyone else spots anything they think I've missed, please do not hesitate to let me know.

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