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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Since Gold Beetle is a Booster Gold legacy character, I'm sure Booster boosters everywhere will want to know that AIPTComics.com previews reveal that she's in this week's The Flash #796.

But I can't talk about it. Not yet.

You'll recall that just last week, I mentioned that The Flash #795 ended with a big reveal related to Heroes in Crisis. Well, it seems that in this week's book, Gold Beetle tells us what she's done and how.

Even though I've got a bone to pick about this particular revelation — why can't we all just agree that Heroes in Crisis never happened? — I'm not going to talk about it yet. I'm not even going to link to the preview because it definitely counts as spoiler territory (even though Heroes in Crisis came out four years ago!).

At the very least, I should read the whole story before I form a solid opinion about it. For all I know, by the end of the "One-Minute War" storyline, time travel shenanigans will have rewritten history (again). It certainly wouldn't be the first time a Flash has changed history.

Maybe this time, they can finally excise Heroes in Crisis from all continuities. That would be nice.

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During my weekly visit to my Local Comic Shop, the store's newest employee waved me over. "You're the Booster Gold guy, aren't you?" she asked. I confirmed that I was. "Tell me," she said, "what did you think about Booster Gold dating Harley Quinn?"

I assume it was this week's Harley Quinn 30th Anniversary Special that prompted her question. (Booster's not in that, by the way. DC doesn't like to put Booster in anniversary issues, presumably because they don't want him stealing the spotlight. They didn't even give him his own anniversary comic when he turned 30, you know. Not that I'm jealous. I'm sure they'll do right by our boy when he turns 40 in 4 years, right? Right?)

Anyway, in answer to the original question, what I said back in 2020 was

On the one hand, if Booster and Harley were real people and not comic book characters, they'd deserve the same chance at happiness as everyone else. Regardless of the fact that she was trying to kill him as recently as a year ago, the pair would still have the right to seek happy, fulfilling romantic relationships regardless of their past history or public opinion. Whatever anyone outside the relationship (read: me) thinks about the suitability of the pairing of a jock from the future and a psychopath's gun moll should be irrelevant to that relationship.

On the other hand, neither Harley nor Booster is a real person. They are comic book characters who have become widely recognized by fans for being in decades-long relationships with other members of their same sex. Booster's relationship with BFF and fellow hero Blue Beetle has always been intimate but canonically platonic, yet the dastardly damsels Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy have chosen a more physical relationship. (As is the norm in American popular entertainment, the good guys have to play it straight while the femme fatales enjoy "forbidden" love.) Is it a coincidence that these two standard-bearers of non-traditional relationships were chosen to enter into a gender-conforming heterosexual relationship by publishers, editors, writers, and artists who should be aware of the characters' metatextual associations? I find that hard to believe.

That still pretty much sums up my feelings, especially in the wake of the aforementioned 30th Anniversary Special, which goes way out of its way to lean into the Harley/Ivy romantic/sexual relationship.

That said, my opinion about the issue really isn't that important. But I can think of someone's whose is. (Hint: his initials are "DJ.") I'll have more to say about that in a future post.

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This name drop is the closest that Booster Gold comes to making an appearance in this week's The Flash 2021 Annual:

words by Jeremy Adams, art by Fernando Pasarin, Brandon Peterson, Hi Fi, Michael Atiyeh, Steve Wands

For what it's worth, it's cool that Booster and Rip Hunter are still Time Masters in the DCU. Though how Green Arrow knows Booster is a time cop isn't clear. Do secret identities mean *nothing* in modern comic books? And if everyone knows that Booster Gold is a time cop, why hasn't anyone called him in to help while Wally West has been bouncing through time for the past few months? Maybe it's best if I don't climb down this rabbit hole....

Still, I have to admit that I had expected more in an issue revisiting the events detailed in Heroes in Crisis. Especially since a key element of that story was Wally framing Booster Gold for murder.

The DC Universe has been rebooted (twice!) since Heroes in Crisis. It would be so easy to say that the murders at Sanctuary didn't happen. I won't spoil any of the details of the issue, but The Flash 2021 Annual doesn't want to ignore all of that past, just the parts that are inconvenient. Inconvenient to Wally West, I mean.

Gunfire and Lagoon Boy might be alive again somewhere in the Multiverse. (Thanks, Infinite Frontier!) And Professor Zoom has taken credit as the true puppet master behind Wally West's criminal acts. (Thanks, Flash Forward!) Apparently now we need another excuse for why none of whatever happened was really Wally's fault in the first place. (Thanks, The Flash 2020 Annual!) Funny how one bad story can generate a cottage industry of retcons. (Thanks, Tom King!)

Anyway, Booster has forgiven Wally, and The Flash 2021 Annual wants us all to follow suit. So I'll try to forgive it its flaws. Any book that finally gets rid of Wally's over-detailed New 52 costume can't be all bad.

Is this the last appearance of the Gold Beetle? Only time will tell.

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If you're in your Local Comic Shop today, perhaps picking up the latest copy of Dial H For Hero, you might find the new Heroes in Crisis hardcover collection with Booster Gold on the cover available for $29.99.

The solicitation gives no indication that there's any new content in this one that wasn't published in the nine individual issues that it collects. Therefore, if you bought the floppies, there's no reason to pick up this one unless you like hard covers.

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