These days, the DC Universe seems to be chock full of secret organizations of dubious morality. There's nothing new about that. In fact, Booster Gold's 1985 nemeses, the 1000, was a rebirth of the 100, which originally debuted in 1970.

Of course, the 1000 did have something none of the other clandestine organizations have had: a Director of Death!

The Director was a typical power-mad dictator wanna-be who had a mad-on against Booster Gold. By making Booster's first archenemy a corrupt politician desperate for more power, was Dan Jurgens drawing an intentional contrast against Booster's origins as a corrupted athlete desperate for attention?

I put the question to Jurgens himself.

Somewhat, but not entirely.

If I'd gotten too close to Booster, it might have seemed too "one note".

So the actual difference worked well. The Director craved power whereas Booster simply wanted fame and money. I think one of the attractive things about Booster is that a simple desire for recognition and wealth is really easy to relate to.

The Director could have been the head of any number of evil organizations. As a follow-up question, I asked Jurgens whether it was determined the Director and the 100 would be Booster's first foes before or after it was decided that one of the organization's oldest foes, Thorn, would be Booster Gold's first guest star?

That was actually decided before the firm idea of adding Thorn.

I always thought the idea of Thorn fighting the new 100 and having the numbers to go with each one she took down was cool. Though I always wondered why they didn't just add more guys to replace the fallen.

There you have it. It takes a Director to have a direction.

Thanks again to Dan Jurgens, whose Booster Gold #1 hit newsstands 30 years ago today.

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Interesting to see Johns' support appear to be back-sliding among Booster Gold fans.

Last week's poll question: Who should write the next New 52 Booster Gold series? (44 votes)

There will be no new post for Thanksgiving next week, so the Boosterrific.com poll is taking a 2-week hiatus. It will return in December.

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DC's solicitations for February/March came out earlier this week and to no one's great surprise, there isn't a hint of any new Booster Gold titles. There are, however, several trades collecting previous Booster Gold appearances.

JUSTICE LEAGUE 3001 VOL. 1: DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN TP Written by KEITH GIFFEN and J.M. DeMATTEIS
Art and cover by HOWARD PORTER
On sale MARCH 16 • 192 pg, FC, $16.99 US
Reprints Booster's appearance in Justice League 3000 #14 and Justice League 3001 #3.

WORLD'S FUNNEST TP
Written by EVAN DORKIN, ALAN GRANT, and others
Art by KEVIN O'NEILL, RAFAEL ALBUQUERQUE, FRANK MILLER, DAVID MAZZUCCHELLI and others
Cover by BRIAN BOLLAND
On sale MARCH 30 • 296 pg, FC, $16.99 US
Among other Bat-Mite and Mr. Mxyzptlik stories, this reprints Booster's brief appearance in the World's Funnest one-shot.

SUPERMAN AND THE JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA VOL. 1 TP
Written by DAN JURGENS and others
Art by DAN JURGENS, RICK BURCHETT and others
Cover by DAN JURGENS and RICK BURCHETT
On sale MARCH 23 • 412 pg, FC, $17.99 US
This one is chock full o' Gold (and Blue!) as it reprints Dan Jurgens' 1990s run on Justice League America.

Better start saving your pennies, Booster boosters!

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While looking for something to post here today — it's been a slow month for Booster Gold news even by recent standards — I realized that the character appearance lists weren't being sorted properly.

This was a side effect of Convergence and the sudden need to make all non-continuity appearances report as in-continuity appearances. I've fixed that by simplifying it a bit.

So good news, everybody! There might not be any new Booster Gold to talk about, but at least the old Booster Gold is now easier to find.

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Russ Burlingame finally got around to releasing his 30th anniversary interview with Booster Gold creator Dan Jurgens on ComicBook.com last week. It was totally worth the wait.

Burlingame: Is there anything you would have done differently in that first series?

Jurgens: It's funny. The biggest discussion at the time perhaps was, when we started off with issue #1, does the world know who Booster is, or are we getting him at Day One? In other words, is he already partway into being the character he's going to be, so we can play up those differences? We actually had a lot of discussions about that and my feeling at the time was to get him halfway into it. If we start from Day One, and we get those first struggles, that we can't immediately show that which makes him different.

I'm not sure that was the right way to go, I'm not sure it was the wrong way to go, but I think there would have been ways to do it better, and if I had it to do all over again, I think that humor would have still been part of the book but I would have gotten more drama into it with heavier-duty villains, stuff like that. And some of the later stuff we saw, where Broderick came from the future looking for him and stuff like that, I think we should have had him in #1. Let's introduce his own personal adversary from Day One, get him in issue #1 or #2 so he's there and we can already start to set up that kind of confrontation.

Burlingame: When [Giffen/DeMatteis] left Justice League and then you came on, you were there for like six months before Doomsday trashed Booster's costume that began this long odyssey of getting him back to a status quo. Was there a master plan when you did that, or what was the thinking?

Jurgens: That actually came out of a conversation between Mike Carlin and me, where he said "Let's give Booster a little bit of a different look," just to dust it up a little bit. I said sure, that sounds like a great idea. So we started to pursue that at the time. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine he would end up in that awful, robotic sort of mechanical, big shoulder pad armor. It's like "Oh, my God," but that's kind of where that originally came from.

That's just a sampling. I encourage all Booster Gold fans to visit ComicBook.com for the full interview.

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