Somehow, Booster Gold doesn't appear anywhere in Millennium #2, but Millennium #3 makes up for that by dedicating several pages to our hero.

Of those, my favorite is this one, page 11, written by Steve Englehart and drawn by Joe Staton:

Somehow, Steve Englehart's characterizations of the JLI here feel much more "correct" than Len Wein's JLA we saw last week in Blue Beetle #20. Both writers had worked on Justice League comics before, in the early (Wein) and late (Englehart) 70s. It's probably worth noting that according to Englehart's own website, steveenglehart.com, he was brought on to the book in 1977 to "give the characters personalities." That tradition clearly continued into Giffen/DeMatteis's International era, where personalities were often more important than plots.

And while I'm talking Englehart, I should probably also add that although he didn't introduce the "Manhunter" characters — that credit technically belongs to Joe Simon and Jack Kirby — Englehart did introduce the concept of the Manhunters as Oan robot constructs in Justice League of America #140. So there's a direct line from Englehart's 1970s JLA to Millennium a decade later.

That concludes your comics history lesson for this week, kids. Your assignment: read more comics!

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Though he has drawn almost everything over the course of his incredible career in funny books, I most associate artist Joe Staton with the Green Lantern Corps (especially Guy Gardner).

And, of course, with 1988's Millennium mini-series.

Millennium promo from DC Focus, summer 1987. Art by Joe Staton

Say what you will about Millennium and its place in DC's steady parade of "no really, this one's important!" events, but at least Millennium reserved a prominent role for Booster Gold in his first big company-wide event. (And then was used as an excuse to cancel his series. So a mixed bag there overall.)

Thanks for helping introduce Booster Gold to the masses, Joe.

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In a recent peek through my long boxes, I found two issues that I had failed to put into the Booster Gold non-chronological appearances database here at Boosterrific.com.

Those are the covers to Independent Comic Group's Millennium Index. Those two issues were published in 1988 to catalog the comics and characters appearing in DC's Millennium event. (ICG must have licensed the use of the "Millennum" masthead.) In many ways, like DC's Who's Who, those comics were the pre-World Wide Web equivalent of websites like Boosterrific.com.

I'm sure I originally overlooked these because they weren't published by DC Comics. However, as you can see, Booster Gold appears on Joe Stanton's cover of Millennium Index #1. As you can't see, Dan Jurgen's cover to Booster Gold, Volume 1, #25, appears inside Millennium Index #2. These two issues are chock-full of Booster Gold references.

Anyway, I've finally added these to the more-complete-than-ever Boosterrific comic book index. Could there be other books out there that I'm still missing? If you come across one, please let me know.

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