Thanks to the unique combination of Keith Giffen's plotting and layouts, J.M. DeMatteis's vaudevillian dialogue, and Kevin Maguire's rendering of body language and facial expressions, almost every page in Justice League International #19 is a standalone delight.

From Ice Maiden falling for Guy Gardner to Green Flame hitting on Lobo to Oberon saying goodbye to Black Canary to Superman rejecting Batman: pick a page at random, and it's probably a winner.

But the best page, my favorite page, is the one where Booster Gold and Blue Beetle get a door slammed in their faces.

If you ask me, turkeys are much more intimidating than beetles.

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Lazy bloggers all around the Internet are using the New Year as an opportunity to create clickbait lists of previous posts.

As it happens, I'm no better than they are.

So here, for your nostalgic end-of-year reading enjoyment (and my self-serving need for blogging content), I present the 5 most-read Boosterrific.com blog posts of 2023:

5. Monday, September 25: Fall Housekeeping
In which we celebrate the 1,000th and 1,001st books including a Booster Gold appearance added to the Boosterrific.com Database. As I type this, we're now up to 1,012. The more Booster Gold, the better!

4. Friday, September 8: My Favorite Pages: Suicide Squad 13
In which we review Booster Gold being awesome (and taunting both Blue Beetle and Superman with it) on Suicide Squad, Volume 1, #13, page 3.

3. Friday, August 18: Go See Blue Beetle
In which we encourage people to go see the best Booster Gold-adjacent film to hit theaters in 2023, Blue Beetle. (Curmudgeonly shut-in that I am, I did not follow my own advice until recently. I've seen it now. It's fine, certainly better than the average DC superhero movie. It would go on to make $129 million against a budget of $104 million, which also seems fine to me. But every DC movie is a failure if it makes less than a billion these days.)

2. Monday, April 3: A Hard Day's Night
In which we tease how The Flash #795 retconned the important bits of Heroes in Crisis, meaning that we can all now and forevermore ignore that HiC happened.

1. Tuesday, January 31: Giving Thanks for Hollywood 2023 Edition
In which we interrupted our regular posting schedule to share the news that James Gunn announced that one day Booster Gold might actually get one of those television shows Hollywood has been promising us for over a decade. I'm sure this time they really mean it. At least I'm pretty sure they did at the time. January 2023 was a whole year ago! Who knows what ripple effects were created behind the scenes by the ensuing months-long strikes of both the writers and actors guilds? I mean, to know what the future of entertainment holds, you'd have to be some sort of time-traveler. And that's just crazy talk.

Here's to another Boosterrific year in 2024!

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Comics publishers are always looking for new (cheaper) artists. In 1988, DC had the bright idea of testing new talent with "Bonus Books," full stories inserted inside established titles.

One of those Bonus Books, the story "Raising the Roof," appeared in Justice League International #18. While the writing and art might feel a little off DC's usual model, the story still contains my favorite page in the entire issue:

Batman "executes" his master house plan? That's a pretty good punchline.

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Justice League International #17 has a delightful sequence in which Booster Gold escapes from prison by using just his Legion Flight Ring... while he's not even wearing it!

But that's not my favorite page in the issue.

No, my favorite page is one that takes place shortly after Booster and Blue Beetle have re-united with Batman (disguised as Maxwell Lord because, aw, just read it). Page 8:

If you ask me, Booster, "Catcher of All the Beautiful Half-Naked Girls That Fall Out of the Sky" sure would look good on a resume.

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Some days you just need a hug.

And a handshake from Batman seals the deal: Page 22 is definitely my favorite in Martian Manhunter #4.

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