While my attention was focused on turkey and apple pie last week, DC sneaked a Booster Gold by me!

As you can see, the Earth-22 version of our hero (and Skeets!) makes a very brief appearance in Batman Superman World's Finest #21, now on sale at Local Comic Shops everywhere:

The events of this issue take place prior to the events of Kingdom Come, so this is chronologically Earth-22 Booster's first appearance!

It seems likely that we'll see Booster again in the next issue, currently scheduled for a December 19 release. You can be sure I'll be paying attention to that.

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Last week, Booster Gold appeared in the one-shot anthology DC's Very Merry Multiverse special, and the book immediately started selling for three times its cover price!

Okay, so the aftermarket mark-up has less to do with seeing Booster Gold inside Kingdom Come's Planet Krypton restaurant than the issue's being the first appearance of Kid Quick, the Flash of the upcoming Future State event. DC has promoted Kid Quick as a non-binary character, and even the "mainstream media" has taken notice.

While I'm always irritated by short-term comic speculation — especially these days, as the numbers of printed comics continues to fall — I'll not begrudge the introduction of a new non-binary hero. As I understand it, non-binary means the Kid will exhibit behavior outside the traditional binary male/female gender roles. I've consumed enough American pop culture to recognize that non-conforming gender characters have almost always represented as villains. For example, it's no accident that many of the designs of the troublemaking meta humans locked in the Gulag prison in the aforementioned Alex Ross and Mark Waid's 1996 Kingdom Come are the ones most outside the norms of what our society expects from "good" boys and girls.

(That was no accident. Ross painted such outsiders as Magenta from 1975's LGBTQ-friendly Rocky Horror Picture Show among the crowd to emphasize the point. In case I've given you the wrong idea, let me point out that one of the major themes of Kingdom Come is that the salvation of a fractured society lies in putting aside individual differences to embrace our shared humanity. It really is a great comic.)

Meanwhile, since I've wandered onto the subject of Kingdom Come, let's take a look at Booster Gold's only "appearance" in that mini-series:

A quarter-century later, that name drop led to "Twas the Night" in DC's Very Merry Christmas, which is a pretty cool legacy. Who can guess what we'll see in the next quarter century? Only your friendly neighborhood time-traveler knows for sure.

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For almost 20 years, DC Comics has been struggling with the success of Kingdom Come. While the events of that series have now been shuffled off to an alternate Earth (thank you, return of the Multiverse!), for awhile it appeared that Kingdom Come represented the future of the regular DCU. The 1998 mini-series event, The Kindgom, changed that.

The Kingdom followed a band of heroes from the future as they traveled back in time to prevent the events of Kingdom Come. Frankly, its stories were not very good, perhaps doomed by their inevitable comparison to Kingdom Come itself. Though most remember The Kingdom for its introduction of Hypertime, there's a better reason for Booster Gold fans to remember it: Planet Krypton.

The late 90s were a fallow period for the Corporate Crusader, and in this issue he returned to his roots as an up-an-coming businessman. Semi-retired from super-heroics, he's working to make a theme-restaurant celebrating Justice League memorabilia, Planet Krypton, a success. It's quintessential Booster Gold, supported by a healthy dose of writer Mark Waid's extensive knowledge of DC Universe history.

(Footnote: Despite Booster's best plans, Planet Krypton wouldn't last long. But then, it wasn't designed to. It turns out that Booster had a silent partner, someone named Rip Hunter, who had the restaurant built because it was centered on a unique position between timelines. It'd be another seven years before Booster and Rip Hunter teamed up again in the pages of 52.)

Planet Krypton is mostly concerned with the angst of a runaway bride named Rose and a tangential relationship with the "bigger" Kingdom storyline, but Booster Gold is the star here, a bright spot amid the rest of The Kingdom's muddled drek.

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