DC released September solicitations last week to give readers this tease for Blue and Gold issue 3:

BLUE AND GOLD #3
story by DAN JURGENS
art & cover by RYAN SOOK
ON SALE September 21 · $3.99 US

The million-dollar debut of Buggles! Booster Gold and Blue Beetle go...broke?! Ted Kord's secret is out: the heir to the Kord Industries fortune has been cut off and cut out of his family's company! Now the duo needs all the help they can get to fight off the Omnizon's attack and set up their new business. Who can possibly save the guys from themselves? Meet the newest member of Blue & Gold...BUGGLES!

So who is this "Buggles"? Judging from the art, it sure looks like Ted is building his own robotic sidekick. Finally, a playmate for Skeets!

But that name.... Sure, the Blue Beetle has always had his Bug, but....

All children of a certain generation will remember that The Buggles were the rock group featured in the first video ever played on MTV. It was a fitting choice, as the video's song, "Video Killed the Radio Star," is about the inescapable march of progress as the future eats the past. I'd say that's a fitting theme for any Booster Gold story. Dan Jurgens has always had a keen instinct for pop-culture references. I wouldn't put such a sly wink past him.

Am I reaching? I'm sure we'll find out more in September. In the meanwhile, you can see the original solicitation at GamesRadar.com/Newsarama.

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DC's August solicitations are out this week, and we've gotten our first glimpse at Blue and Gold issue 2:

BLUE AND GOLD #2
story by DAN JURGENS
art & cover by RYAN SOOK
ON SALE August 17 · $3.99 US

Who needs the Justice League anyway? Our heroes certainly don't! After a painful rejection from the DC Universe's team of a-list heroes, Booster Gold and Blue Beetle strike out on their own. Thanks to the Kord Industries fortune, anything is possible for this dynamic duo...right? Little do they know, an alien assassin seeking revenge places Blue and Gold in her crosshairs, and The Omnizon never misses!

The only bad news is that it looks like this is probably the only place we'll be seeing Booster Gold in August. (I think he'll be showing up — very briefly — in a Birds of Prey collection solicited for late September, but that's four months away. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.)

You can see all the solicitations yourself at GamesRadar.com/Newsarama.

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GamesRadar.com has the list of DC's June 2021 solicitations... and it seems slim. Counting reprint collections and hard covers, it looks like DC is planning to release only 73 total books in the entire month. (Eighteen of those — nearly 25% — have "Batman" or "Detective Comics" in their title.)

So setting aside previously announced trades (we're currently still expecting a Superman reprint collection in June), the bad news for Booster Gold is that there is no sign of our hero in the solicitations through the end of spring. Has our hero gone AWOL? What will we read in the meantime?

Also missing is Dan Jurgens, who hasn't had his name publicly attached to anything at DC since the cover to Infinite Frontier. (He's drawing the Heroes Reborn: Marvel Double Action due in June for Marvel.) Since Booster historically is most likely to show up in Jurgens' work, this bodes ill for our hero in the short-term future at least.

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I said at the start of the week that I wanted to talk about Generations Forged, so if you haven't read that yet (or for that matter Generations Shattered or Dark Knights: Death Metal ), beware that spoilers follow.

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You've been warned.

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You know from cover (and timing) of Generations Shattered, this story takes place in the DC Omniverse created in the wake of Dark Nights: Death Metal.

Dark Nights: Death Metal #7, January 2021

As if the Omniverse wasn't a big enough concept to take in, it only gets bigger. ("Infinity is just so big that, by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy," explainsthe Hitchhikers Guide the Galaxy.)

At the end of Generations Forged, as Waverider returns the Batman of 1939 (abducted by Kamandi in Detective Comics #1000) to his native time, he introduces us to another concept:

Generations Forged #1, February 2021

Waverider goes on to imply that the Batman of 1939 will continue fighting into the modern day, that the Batmen of all publishing ages (Golden, Silver, Modern) are the same character (who may or may not have memories of all of his adventures.)

While the Omniverse just increases the size of the bucket for potential story settings, the Linearverse is a radical revision to understanding DC Comics' publishing history.

For GamesRadar.com, Michael Doran has already written several articles on the implications of this revelation, each quoting Generations Forged architect Dan Jurgens on his intent with this new Linearverse.

"It's fair to say that what we built here, the Linearverse, is its own universe that can fit into the larger context of DC's Omniverse," explains Jurgens. "It's a place where some unique and individual stories can be told."

Jurgens himself admits that this is an imperfect solution to an artificial problem. Comic book fans have always struggled with reconciling how Dick Grayson could be a boy in 1940 and still a young man in 2020 or how both Superboy and Superman could each have co-existing adventures for most of 80 years. These are only "problems" when trying to reconcile the lives of fictional characters with the passage of nonfictional time, but they are problems that fans have nonetheless tried to resolve for as long as we've been reading and relating to new monthly comics.

I don't mean to suggest that I think the Linearverse is necessarily any worse than any other attempt at reconciling the impossible. From my restricted point of view as the chronicler of the adventures of multiversal time-traveler Booster Gold, I've always attempted to to harmonize the many incarnations of Booster Gold onto a single entity, albeit an occasionally fractured and splintered one. That's no so different from what happens in the Linearverse.

So, to finally get to the serious question I referenced in my post title, what I want to know is whether the adventure told in Generations Shattered and Generations Forged happened to a Booster Gold in a previously existing continuity or not? The rules as explained for the new Linearverse would seem to suggest it happened to all known Boosters while at the same time happening to none of them, or maybe only those that exist inside a Linearverse that reflects the sum of all other universes.

For reasons I can't quite express, I don't find any of these options entirely satisfying (thought that may not be surprising coming from someone who obsessively tracks super hero minutia for a hobby).

Perhaps there is no definitive answer to my question, at least not yet. As GameRadar reports,

"There are all sorts of stories and adventures worth exploring in the Linearverse," Jurgens concludes. "If readers like what they've seen, react well to the concept, and ask for more, it might just happen."

Like so much else, maybe the answer to my question will only become clearer with time.

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This past Friday, Kat Calamia interviewed writer Joshua Williamson for the ghost of Newsarama at GamesRadar.com. Williamson is the brains behind Infinite Frontier #0, the issue launching the post-Death Metal DCU.

There's actually a lot of useful information in the interview to those curious about where the DCU is headed, but the important part for Booster boosters is this exchange:

Newsarama: There are a ton of characters that appear on the main cover. Some characters that stand out, in particular, are President Superman, Alan Scott, Jade, Obsidian, and Blue Beetle. You mentioned James is writing an Alan Scott-centered chapter of Infinite Frontier #0. Do the others I mentioned have a role in Infinite Frontier, and/or the DCU going forward?

Williamson: Blue Beetle only has a very small scene in this, but that's partially because of him having a role in something else later on in the year. Like we wanted the cover to represent not just this one issue, but also some of the stuff that's coming in DC for 2021 and because of Blue Beetle and Booster Gold and some of their roles later is why we put them on the cover.

Be still my beating heart! DC has only been promising us a Blue and Gold team-up book since at least the letter column of Justice League International #25 in April 1989! Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me for 30 years... well, what's another year going to hurt?

Maybe 2021 is finally our lucky year!

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