DC's July solicitations were released last week, and now we know that the Booster Gold/Jurassic League story that began in Batman: The Brave and Bold #13 is at least a three-parter.

BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #15
Written by TIM SEELEY, MARK RUSSELL, JOSHUA HALE FIALKOV, and ALEX SEGURA
Art by KELLEY JONES, JON MIKEL, LISANDRO ESTHERREN, and ANDY MacDONALD
Cover by SIMONE DI MEO
Variant cover by FRANCESCO MATTINA
Variant cover by DAN HIPP
$7.99 US | 64 pages | Prestige | (all covers are card stock)
ON SALE 7/24/24

Nightwing and Deadman's journey down long-forgotten circus paths begins to reveal answers...but they might wish it hadn’t! Booster Gold realizes getting everyone to agree on a perfect timeline is easier said than done! Batman and Guy Gardner face the secrets of the universe! And finally, our hard-hitting Question story begins as Renee Montoya finds herself under attack as both the commissioner and the Question!

Thanks again to Rob Snow for the alert. If you want to read the rest of DC's July solicitations, you can find them all at AIPTComics.com.

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The TwoMorrows website says that the Spring 2024 issue of Comic Book Creator will be released on April 10, but my issue arrived in my mailbox late last week. That may be because I ordered it as soon as it was announced that the issue's feature interview would be with Booster Gold creator Dan Jurgens!

And what a great long-form interview it is! Over the course of 33 pages, interviewer Greg Biga asks Dan about his entire career, from his early days breaking into the business working on Mike Grell's Warlord through his experiences working on characters like Flash Gordon, Spider-Man, Thor, and, of course, lots of Superman.

The interview reveals some great information that will delight Jurgens fans, including some trivia nuggets even I had never heard before. From page 57:

CBC: I'm going to skip past asking the questions you've heard a thousand times, and circle back to do follow-up questions on "Death of Superman." With that story having happened, with "Funeral for a Friend," was one of the main reasons behind that to show how relevant this character of light and hope was?

Dan: That's going to be something of a long answer and, for part of it, we do have to come back to the overall discussion of "Death of Superman" a little bit. For some time, I'd had in the back of my mind that I could make a big adventure story out of killing off a title character and investigating how his absence affects his friends, family, and the people who rely on him.

By the way, I first thought of the idea when I was working on Booster Gold. Booster wasn't like any of the other characters in the DC Universe at the time, and the book was struggling to find an audience. Readers seemed to think Booster was a jerk. That's why I introduced his twin sister, Michelle. That way I could kill off Booster but we could keep the book going as Michelle stepped into her brother's role playing a somewhat more conventional hero while we explored what Booster had gotten right and wrong. Kind of an evil twin, good twin scenario. I was going to retitle it Busty Gold.

I wish I'd know that during Women's History Month! Can you imagine "good twin" Michelle taking Booster's place in the Justice League International?

For more gold nuggets like these, be sure to pick up your own copy of Comic Book Creator #34 at twomorrows.com.

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We learned last month that Booster Gold will be in May's Batman: Brave and the Bold #13. In DC's solicitations for June (now online at AIPTComics.com), released last week, we now know our hero will also be in Batman: Brave and the Bold #14... and on the cover!

BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD #14
Written by TIM SEELEY, MARK RUSSELL, JOSHUA HALE FIALKOV, and HAYDEN SHERMAN
Art by KELLEY JONES, JON MIKEL, LISANDRO ESTHERREN, and HAYDEN SHERMAN
Cover by SIMONE DI MEO
$7.99 US | 64 pages | Prestige | (all covers are card stock)
ON SALE 6/25/24

Nightwing and Deadman continue their rail-ridin' odyssey and find themselves face-to-face with a terrifying new foe. Booster Gold's adventures across time and space have delivered him to an alternate future inhabited by dinosaurs—but this alternate reality needs protectors, and it has them in the form of the all-new, all-different Jurassic League! In the finale of "The Poison Within," Artemis's attempts to return home are blocked by the anti-Amazon agents of AXE! Batman and Guy Gardner delve into a realm of high strangeness that is truly out of this world as they confront the grey alien that has crash-landed in Gotham. And last, but far from least, Hayden Sherman dazzles with a brand-new Batman Black & White story that needs to be seen to be believed.

I did not read Jurassic League, so I'm surprised to learn that it takes place in the future. What a twist!

Thanks to Rob Snow for making sure we didn't miss this solicitation.

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In addition to being the final issue of Justice League International volume 1 (next issue the team will be downsized to just Justice League America), Justice League International #25 is also the first book-length team-up between Booster Gold and Blue Beetle. Historic!

My favorite page comes early, which is probably not a surprise to those of you who know that Ty Templeton is one of my favorite artists. He only drew the intro and outro pages of this issue (over Keith Giffen's layouts), with the rest handled by Mike McKone (also over Giffen).

But it's not just the art I love; almost every panel on page 3 has its own punchline!

Despite the early (and often) jokes, the main plot of this team-up issue is a vampire hunt that turns into an overt criticism of Western consumer culture which, in Twilight Zone style, questions who the real monsters are on plane Earth. As Booster and Beetle (and the reader) will eventually realize, it just might be our heroes.

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Yes, that banner up there says "one page at a time," but today you're getting two!

In 1989, a three-part story written by Cary Bates in Captain Atom #26 , #27, and #28 that more-or-less resolved the messiest parts of the backstory of why Captain Atom lied to the Justice League about his personal history.

(Turns out the adventures of the pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths Captain Atom were just a government cover story to disguise how Atom was really blackmailed into participating in the weapons test that gave him his powers by a criminal conspiracy of Vietnam vets in a plot stolen directly from Lethal Weapon. Like I said, it's messy.)

Anyway, the point here is that Booster Gold was one of the three Leaguers who confronted the good Captain with evidence of his mounting lies. Since Booster played a significant role in only the first two chapters of this story, appearing only on the first page of the third, I figured I might as well present my favorite pages from those two issues at the same time.

First is Captain Atom #26. As my favorite page, I could have chosen a sequence earlier in the book in which Booster, Blue Beetle, and Mister Miracle clasp hands then go undercover... by wearing sunglasses. But for full-page goodness, I'm going with page 22, in which a thief from the future living under an assumed name unironically demands "no more secrets"!

Yeah, the posed figures are stiff, but I'm enamored by the layout. Note how the top of the page is a separate panel presenting an establishing shot of the city skyline, and the tail on Booster's speech balloon acts like a pointer showing where they are, as well as allowing Booster to speak first despite being in the center of the page. I assume the balloons were all created by letterer Carrie Spiegel on top of Pat Broderick's art. Well done.

In the very next issue, Captain Atom #27, my favorite page is also based mostly on what Booster has to say. Despite never having been seen wearing a deerstalker cap or skis, our hero is suddenly an amateur detective and an expert skier!

And he flies faster than the Blue Beetle's bug? Oh, Booster, is there anything you can't do?

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