The cover of Blue and Gold #3 teases "the million-dollar debut of Buggles," but the real guest of honor in this issue is...

It has been too long, girl! For those who don't remember, Trixie was Booster's first secretary at Goldstar, Inc. (as seen in the immortal Booster Gold #1 in 1985). Trixie was also the first to wear the Goldstar uniform. She and Booster made a great team back in the day.

When Booster joined the JLI full time, he and Trixie drifted apart. In fact, we haven't seen her since Chase #4 (in 1998!) while she was landlord to the Teen Titans. As you might expect from two former friends who couldn't make the time to maintain their relationship, their relationship was a bit frosty at the time.

It's good to see they've both grown past that.

In one of his long-lost-to-the-web "Gold Exchange" columns — presumably one that will be reprinted in his upcoming book — Russ Burlingame once reported that Dan Jurgens had plans to revisit Trixie in Booster Gold Volume 2, but the title was canceled before it ever happened. Thanks to DC for giving Jurgens another opportunity to bring Trixie back.

For more about Booster Gold's original secretary (and second sidekick), see my Character Spotlight on Trixie Collins.

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On Wednesday, I showed you this panel created by Steve Lieber for the June 2021 issue of Teen Titans Academy #4:

Seeing that panel, Cort Carpenter realized that the Booster Gold headshot looked incredibly similar to one he had commissioned from Lieber last year (previously shared with Boosterrific.com on October 19, 2020):

They do look alike, don't they? My first impression was that Cort's commission was a study used for the new work, but closer inspection makes it clear that Lieber used his earlier black and white commission as the foundation for the new piece of digital art. Just to make it clearer, here's a gif of the two pieces overlaid:

Isn't that cool? You can even see where Lieber erased his signature when adding color. Cort's commission is now a piece of original comic art. How often does that happen?

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This week DC released Bizarro Comics: The Deluxe Edition, which is a collection of two earlier collections, Bizaro Comics and Bizarro World. Booster Gold makes a very brief cameo in the former:

Granted, that panel might not be significant enough to encourage you to buy a $50 book, but it's not the smallest Booster Gold appearance this week. That honor belongs to Teen Titans Academy #5:

No, he's not Red X. (At least, I don't think so.) Look under the "W" on the bulletin board. That golden hair couldn't possibly belong to anyone else!

To prove I'm not crazy (about this), here's the better look at the bulletin board we got in last month's previous issue:

Thanks to Logan for bringing that panel to our attention. I can't imagine a Booster cameo getting much smaller than that.

For the record, that's not the only Booster in Teen Titans Academy #5. Blue and Gold appear twice in this house ads, once in the Infinite Frontier promotion that's now on it's third week, and once in Director Bones' newest Multiversal Monitor.

These house ads appear in all of this week's books. You might think it's silly to buy comics just for the ads, but a Booster booster's gotta do what a Booster booster's gotta do.

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OG Booster booster Shawn Baston notified me that Booster makes a very brief, non-continuity appearance in this week's Teen Titans Academy #4 (thanks, Shawn!). Since I was already in the Boosterrific Database, I decided to take the time to (finally!) update data on some other minor reprint collection appearances I'd been putting off. That's when I noticed something odd.

Justice League Unlimited: Time After Time is a collection of time-travel themed Justice League Unlimited stories. The volume was published last November. (Sorry. Like I said, I got a little behind. I'm blaming the pandemic.) This is its cover:

Usually, these trades reuse cover art from one of the issues they collect, but this one clearly needed something a bit more general for the hodgepodge of volumes within. Instead of an existing cover, art was chosen from an existing interior splash page.

The chosen art comes from Justice League Unlimited #9, credited to penciller Carlo Barberi and inker Walden Wong and reprinted in Time After Time. The issue's story sees the JLU travel back in time to help Shining Knight save Camelot from Morgan Le Fey, and the selected art has some of the DCU's biggest names flying into action alongside King Arthur — swinging on a Batrope! That's an image that will sell some comics!

There's just one problem. To make the existing art fit the desired cover layout, it had to be altered. And I don't just mean that the art was recolored to remove the backgrounds. One hero was edited out of the picture entirely.

Care to guess who that hero was?

Here's the splash page as it originally appeared:

Poor Booster!

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So begins the first super-team team-up in the career of Booster Gold in 1986.

Sure, he'd fought alongside the Legion of Super-Heroes in Booster Gold #8 and #9, but he wasn't technically going by "Booster Gold" at the time. And he wouldn't join the Justice League International for another half-a-year.

As you can see, Booster had been called in by Magenta as backup for the Teen Titans in their struggle against Brother Blood. The 4-part storyline ran from New Teen Titans #28 through #31, all of which are collected in today's New Teen Titans Volume 12 reprint collection.

Though the stakes were high and many heroes were involved in the fight, Booster played but a small part in only a few panels in the middle two issues, #29 (above) and #30:

And that's that. Booster goes off to defend Washington D.C. and is not seen again for the rest of the story. At least we know he succeeded. Thanks to Booster Gold, Washington D.C. is still around today.

It may not be a glamourous job, but somebody's got to do it.

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