DC will be releasing Harley Quinn #72 tomorrow whether your Local Comic Shop is open or not (and whether your shop is accepting non-Diamond shipments or not).

Some of you young 'uns with your newfangled digital devices may want to forego buying a floppy and instead opt for the digital edition somewhere like Comixology.com.

In any event, know that the issue will soon exist in the wild for you to hunt down at your convenience. And I know that you'll want to, because Booster Gold is definitely in it, as the preview at DCComics.com proves.

Golly, does everything have to be about death these days? I mean, COVID-19 trigger warning, people.

Hey, wait a second, are they holding hands? Gasp! They're not social distancing!

No, seriously, Booster. I'm doing you a favor, man. Stay away from her. She's bad news. She literally tried to kill you. Multiple times. And not with a disease, with a mallet. That's a relationship red flag, buddy.

Buy this issue (sooner or later — but safely!) and make Skeets jealous.

Thanks to Michael Stalans for the preview link.

UPDATE 2020-05-11: Eskana put this link in the comments below, but I'm going to repost it here so everyone can see it. From CBR.com: "Harley Quinn's Sam Humphries Explains Her Budding Romance With Booster Gold". Just say no, Booster!

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In case you missed it, the big news in comics publishing last week was DC Comics' announcement that they will be resuming new comic book releases tomorrow, Tuesday, April 28. Diamond Comic Distributors remains closed until at least the middle of May, so these releases will be coming by way of mail-order retailers (per Newsarama.com).

The first thing Booster Gold fans need to know is that DC has rescheduled Harley Quinn #72, originally planned for an April 1 release, to May 12.

The second thing Booster Gold fans need to know is how to get their hands on this issue. Many stores will still be shuttered by local and state ordinances, and there are some unanswered questions about how DC's new (temporary?) distribution partners will be handling orders.

Personally, I expect I'll have to order my copy online. I guess we'll see what we see as we get closer to May 12.

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If you can make it to your Local Comic Shop today, and if your shop hasn't already been closed by the ongoing COVID-19 emergency measures, you might consider picking up Harley Quinn: The Final Trial, a collection reprinting Booster Gold's appearances in Harley Quinn #66 and #67.

Sadly, as I'm sure most of you who visit this site already know, this is to be the last New Comics Day for a while. Diamond Comics Distributors, the sole distributor of all major American comic publishers, has announced that they are not shipping anything "until further notice." I don't disagree that this is probably a necessity in the current environment, but I'm still disappointed by the news.

I've been buying comics once a week since before the inception of the direct market, so I honestly don't know what life is like without a weekly trip to the comics shop. I feel a little like I've lost a limb.

(Once upon a time, I commented to a friend that I didn't understand how people could go a week without comics. Sometime later, I had to miss a week while out of town — I was literally driving across the country — and he teased me about it. The moral to this story, I guess, is be careful what you say to your friends.)

Not that the distribution halt will make all that much difference to Booster boosters. So far as I'm aware, there's only one book guest staring Booster in the current pipeline. On the up side, Booster Gold has already appeared, by my count, in over 850 comics in the past 35 years. That's plenty of re-reading material for any apocalypse.

Retailers and publishers are going to be the ones to really suffer as their revenue streams are closed indefinitely. (Forbes.com has a pretty good piece on what this may mean to the future of the direct marketplace.) They can use all the support we can give them. If you can afford it, consider filling in the holes in your Booster Gold comics collection by mail order from your LCS. After all, we need them to still be there when Diamond finally re-opens their doors, whenever that may be.

UPDATE 2020-03-25: not thirty minutes before I walked in the door of my LCS this afternoon, my local government announced that starting tomorrow, all local "nonessential" businesses must close for the next two weeks. Which certainly means it's a good thing for them that Diamond won't be shipping while they cannot receive the stock. Hooray, silver lining!

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If you've been reading recent issues of Harley Quinn, you may have noticed that the relationship between the title character and her recurring guest star, Booster Gold, is not what you might have expected from a pair who this time last year were trying to kill one another.

Some of us readers might call that bad writing. Others might say that people forced into dysfunctional relationships have been known to form traumatically bonded pairs. Still others are so happy to see their heroes in a relationship that they'll ignore all that went before. That's more or less the tact that Brandon Zachary takes in his article "Harley Quinn's New Love Interest Could Be... a Justice League Hero?!" for CBR.com.

Booster Gold is far from the worse candidate, especially given their shared sense of humor, similar optimistic personality, and mutual attempts to move past trauma. While Harley has long conquered much of the trauma in her life, she's suffered more of it in the recent events in her life. Booster has been through his fair share of problems too, and the two can probably be helpful to one another as they try to sort their emotions out. Booster also proves to at least be trying to be more empathetic, immediately apologizing when Harley reveals the full extent of what's been happening in her life. The fact that they met during the tragic circumstances of Heroes in Crisis but ended up able to work together proves they're at least somewhat compatible.

Counterpoint: They didn't "work together" in Heroes in Crisis so much as they just sort of succeeded in not being killed themselves.

That said, who am I to judge? Harley Quinn #71 writer Sam Humphries' interpretation of the characters isn't any worse than Tom King's take on the pair in Heroes in Crisis. (No take can be worse than that.) If Humphries decides he wants Booster and Harley to couple up — a sentiment that even Zachary admits isn't explicit yet — so be it.

But I have to warn you, I've heard that relationships based on intense experiences never work.

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I'm reminding you to visit to your Local Comic Shop today, because I know you're going to want to get your hands on Harley Quinn #71 with Booster Gold (and Skeets!) on the cover.

What do you think about that old-school Booster Gold logo? I like it, 'natch.

BleedingCool.com has the preview. Your LCS has the issue.

And while you're there, consider grabbing a copy of Flash #750. Logan Peterson has gotten an early look and says Booster makes an appearance there, too. Thanks, Logan.

Buy these issues and make Skeets happy!

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