I woke up yesterday to find this very important email from Marty:

Booster sighted in Superman's story in DC's Legion of Bloom anthology! He and Beetle seem to have summoned imp versions of themselves, making Superman's day just a little bit more annoying.

Sure enough, here's the panel:

Ooh, that's a good panel. Good enough to get me to buy a full book!

(Full disclosure: I was already going to buy the book because it has a Captain Carrot story in it. Although, come to think of it, I buy all the DC anthology books because I'm a sucker for short stories. So from that point of view, getting a bonus Booster Gold panel is icing on the cake. If anthology books were slot machines, I won!)

Obviously, Marty interprets "chibi" Blue and Gold to be 5th-dimensional imps. And it's certainly true that Mr. Mxyzptlk makes several appearances in Dave Weilgosz's (delightful) 10-page story Superman story.

However, I interpret these two as the Blue and Gold from Earth-42. The Li'l Justice League played a significant role in Grant Morrison's 2015 Multiplicity event, and they returned to action as recently as 2020's DC' Very Merry Multiverse. We've not seen the Booster Gold and Blue Beetle from that world before, but Booster is certainly capable of traveling through the Multiverse, so... why not now?

Whatever the case, thanks to Marty for being sure all Booster boosters can all enjoy the latest Blue and Gold (and Blue and Gold) hijinks!

Buy this issue and make Skeets happy! (Is there a chibi Skeets? There has to be, right?)

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There are at least 11 different covers for this week's Lazarus Planet: Omega, but only one of those is any good because it's the only one with Booster Gold on it.

This one.

The issue preview at AIPTComics.com doesn't give any hint whether we'll actually see any Booster inside the book, so this cover may be all we get.

UPDATE 2023-02-21 Part 1: Yep, this is a cover-only appearance.

And we'd better enjoy it, Booster boosters, because AIPT also has the complete list of DC's May 2023 solicitations. For the third month in a row, there's no sign of any new Booster Gold adventures, just reprints like DC All Out War: Part 1 and the DCeased Box Set.

Surely this is a short-term problem, right? DC wouldn't announce a Booster Gold television show then put our hero in mothballs, would they? Would they!?

(Although, come to think of it, DC also announced a show for the Creature Commandos who haven't been in a whole bunch of comic book appearances recently... or ever, really. So yeah, they would.)

Regardless of what the future will bring, buy the David Marquez & Alejandro Sanchez cover of Lazarus Planet: Omega and make Skeets happy.

UPDATE 2023-02-21 Part 2: As Marty tells us via email, Booster Gold also plays a small part in this week's Superman: Space Age. Thanks, Marty!

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Hey, DC, as someone who bought your product throughout the 1990s, let me say that I think you've forgotten the lessons we learned during the Dark Age of Comics, namely, "Thou Shalt Not Get Carried Away With Variant Covers."

This week alone, you're releasing 18 distinct books with at least 73 different covers! I love comics, but that's too many.

Booster Gold appears on exactly 1 of those covers, the 1:25 Filya Bratukhin retailer incentive card stock variant (Cover C) of DC Vs. Vampires #12.

I haven't seen all the interior pages (other than what is visible in the preview at AIPTComics.com), but is that Booster's New 52 costume? Do these damn vampires spill over into other alternate Earths? Please, no. Just no.

Elsewhere on this week's comic rack, Booster will also be found within the collected edition of Superman Red & Blue (reprinting his appearance in issue #3), Nightwing Volume 2: Get Grayson (reprinting Nightwing #88) and the second printing of Death of Superman 30th Anniversary Special (reprinting, um, Death of Superman 30th Anniversary Special).

Buy some (reprinted) comics and make Skeets happy.

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It's a big month at Boosterrific.com for Doomsday fans! (Or fans of Dead Superman. Either way.)

We all know that Booster Gold was on multiple covers of Death of Superman 30th Anniversary Special #1 a few weeks back. (And, as it happens, he'll be on the cover of a few more when the second printings arrive after Christmas.)

Whether or not the 30th Anniversary Special was the inspiration, Booster booster J got to reading other Doomsday stories and discovered the following Booster appearance was missing from the Boosterrific.com database:

That's from Superman's nightmare sequence at the beginning of Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey #1. I'm sure I've seen that before, but somehow I failed to track it. Oops. (I wonder if I decided once upon a time that it didn't count because it's not really Booster Gold? Oh, well. Whatever. Never mind.) Fixed now.

And, as it happens, that's not the only Doomsday-related Booster appearance that's been added to the database this week. The cover to Justice League America #69 showed up in this week's Superman: Kal-El Returns Special #1:

Superman and Doomsday (and Booster Gold) together forever!

Thanks to J for setting me straight.

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Let's turn back the clock a little to last week's The Death of Superman 30th Anniversary Special, which turns back the clock a lot.

The book, if you didn't know, is an opportunity for the creators involved in that seminal event to tell additional stories related to it. Dan Jurgens and Brett Breeding give us the moment Jon Kent learns his dad once died (with a Booster flashback!). Jerry Ordway and Tom Grummet show us what the elder Kents were thinking while the fight went down. Roger Stern and Jackson "Butch" Guice revisit the events of the day from the Guardian's POV (with a Booster flashback!). And Louise Simonson and Jon Bogdanove return John Henry Irons to the day Superman died.

As you might expect, most of those creators are very loyal to the story as it was originally told in 1992, which is what made this panel in the Simonson/Bogdanove story stand out for me:

As you can see, in addition to being a re-creation of panels from Adventures of Superman #500, it gives the credit for naming Doomsday to... Lois Lane?!

While most sources in the DCU recognize Superman for popularizing the name, every Booster booster knows the real naming honor rightfully belongs to Booster Gold (as recorded in Justice League America #69)!

Even Booster will admit that his casual aside to Superman wasn't loud enough for everyone in the world to hear, so how *did* the name "Doomsday" reach the general public? I assure you, Lois Lane didn't have anything to do with it (but to be fair to the Man of Tomorrow, Superman himself very much did).

Justice League America #69 leads directly into Superman #74, where Superman calls the monster "Doomsday" directly to its still-masked face.

By the start of the next chapter in the story, Adventures of Superman #497, everyone present for that momentous meeting is also calling the monster "Doomsday," including young civilian Mitch Anderson. A badly beaten Guy Gardner soon uses the name in front of emergency first responders, who are instructed to get in touch with Maxwell Lord. Two pages later, Superman yells the name in front of the Kirby County Chief of Police, who immediately informs his state governor.

Whether it's Mitch, the doctors, Maxwell Lord, the police, or the politicians, someone promptly reveals to the media that "Doomsday" has come, as we find out when Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane travels to the Galaxy Communications Building in Metropolis on page 16 of that issue:

The reporter who breaks the news to the general public is not newspaper reporter Lois Lane but WGBS-TV sportscaster-turned-anchor Steve Lombard!

The name stuck. By Superman: The Man of Steel #19, Lex Luthor is using it in television interviews, and Metropolis bystanders use it when calling for help. So it comes as no great surprise that John Henry Irons knew the name before the monster set off a gas main explosion that dropped a building on him (occurring off panel in Superman: The Man of Steel #19 as later revealed in Superman: The Man of Steel #22).

And it makes sense that it would be the first word out of John Henry's mouth when we first meet him — after Superman's funeral! — in Adventures of Superman #500:

I'm willing to cut John Henry some slack here. I mean, he did just have a building dropped on his head, so it's understandable that he's a little confused. But Lois Lane didn't name Doomsday.

Nope. That credit belongs to someone else.

Superman: Day of Doom #1, 2002

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