Over 3000 different keywords/phrases have been used over the years here on the Boosterrific! Blog, some obviously more often than others. Some of them are recurring categories, perhaps first and foremost among them being "solicitations" and "new releases," which alert Booster boosters to upcoming and new Booster Gold appearances in comic books.

Select few recurring items over the years have earned their own banner images. Click on any of the following banners to see their associated posts.

And one more for a series that should have a banner but doesn't...

Thanks for reading!

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Monday, Kieran Shiach of ComicsAlliance.com recapped Booster Gold's first appearance. His article is very good and mostly accurate. His only mistake is saying that Booster Gold #1 was first released on November 2, 1986. It wasn't.

For the record, Booster Gold #1 was released to comics specialty shops (the emerging "direct market") on October 29, 1985. We know it's true because Dan Jurgens says so.

But that one little nitpick aside, it's great to see Comics Alliance celebrating our hero. Just one more things to give thanks for this week.

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In celebration of the 30th anniversary of the first appearance of Booster Gold, I've spent the year asking Dan Jurgens questions about Booster Gold's earliest adventures. Today I conclude this year-long column with two final questions about Booster's powers.

In the pages of Secret Origins #35 (1989), Mark Waid pointed out that all of Booster's original powers and abilities were based on equipment found in Superman's pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths adventures, including Superboy's Legion flight-ring, Brainiac's force-field, and Lex Luthor's power suit. Most of those original powers are still part of Booster's ability set today, except for the Mass Dispersal Force, originally based on Jor-El's Phantom Zone Projector.

Being able to dematerialize and rematerialize matter at will is a pretty significant power. I asked Jurgens why it faded into the land of forgotten powers so quickly.

People seemed to have a hard time grasping what it was.

On top of that, I'd had a conversation with a couple of people at DC who thought it seems a bit too "magical". So, with that in mind, we dropped it.

On the other hand, one of the most enduring components of Booster's power set didn't have any clear antecedent: his Booster Shots ray blasts.

What could have inspired Jurgens to give Booster ranged gauntlet attacks? And perhaps more importantly, which came first, the power or the "pun"-ny name?

Good question!

The name really did come first in that case. I had been scrawling ideas in a note bad -- just sort of an idea matrix, if you will -- and wrote down "Booster Shots".

Once I did that, I simply had to find a way to use it!

There you have it. (And yes, I did save that one for last because Jurgens said it was a good question. Hooray, me.)

Thank you, Dan Jurgens. I've really enjoyed quizzing you on thirty-year-old trivia.

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These days, the DC Universe seems to be chock full of secret organizations of dubious morality. There's nothing new about that. In fact, Booster Gold's 1985 nemeses, the 1000, was a rebirth of the 100, which originally debuted in 1970.

Of course, the 1000 did have something none of the other clandestine organizations have had: a Director of Death!

The Director was a typical power-mad dictator wanna-be who had a mad-on against Booster Gold. By making Booster's first archenemy a corrupt politician desperate for more power, was Dan Jurgens drawing an intentional contrast against Booster's origins as a corrupted athlete desperate for attention?

I put the question to Jurgens himself.

Somewhat, but not entirely.

If I'd gotten too close to Booster, it might have seemed too "one note".

So the actual difference worked well. The Director craved power whereas Booster simply wanted fame and money. I think one of the attractive things about Booster is that a simple desire for recognition and wealth is really easy to relate to.

The Director could have been the head of any number of evil organizations. As a follow-up question, I asked Jurgens whether it was determined the Director and the 100 would be Booster's first foes before or after it was decided that one of the organization's oldest foes, Thorn, would be Booster Gold's first guest star?

That was actually decided before the firm idea of adding Thorn.

I always thought the idea of Thorn fighting the new 100 and having the numbers to go with each one she took down was cool. Though I always wondered why they didn't just add more guys to replace the fallen.

There you have it. It takes a Director to have a direction.

Thanks again to Dan Jurgens, whose Booster Gold #1 hit newsstands 30 years ago today.

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Russ Burlingame finally got around to releasing his 30th anniversary interview with Booster Gold creator Dan Jurgens on ComicBook.com last week. It was totally worth the wait.

Burlingame: Is there anything you would have done differently in that first series?

Jurgens: It's funny. The biggest discussion at the time perhaps was, when we started off with issue #1, does the world know who Booster is, or are we getting him at Day One? In other words, is he already partway into being the character he's going to be, so we can play up those differences? We actually had a lot of discussions about that and my feeling at the time was to get him halfway into it. If we start from Day One, and we get those first struggles, that we can't immediately show that which makes him different.

I'm not sure that was the right way to go, I'm not sure it was the wrong way to go, but I think there would have been ways to do it better, and if I had it to do all over again, I think that humor would have still been part of the book but I would have gotten more drama into it with heavier-duty villains, stuff like that. And some of the later stuff we saw, where Broderick came from the future looking for him and stuff like that, I think we should have had him in #1. Let's introduce his own personal adversary from Day One, get him in issue #1 or #2 so he's there and we can already start to set up that kind of confrontation.

Burlingame: When [Giffen/DeMatteis] left Justice League and then you came on, you were there for like six months before Doomsday trashed Booster's costume that began this long odyssey of getting him back to a status quo. Was there a master plan when you did that, or what was the thinking?

Jurgens: That actually came out of a conversation between Mike Carlin and me, where he said "Let's give Booster a little bit of a different look," just to dust it up a little bit. I said sure, that sounds like a great idea. So we started to pursue that at the time. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine he would end up in that awful, robotic sort of mechanical, big shoulder pad armor. It's like "Oh, my God," but that's kind of where that originally came from.

That's just a sampling. I encourage all Booster Gold fans to visit ComicBook.com for the full interview.

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