While some of us have been wasting time with things like vacations, The Blot has been studiously adding to his already overflowing Booster Gold Sketchbook.

Those are The Blot's newest pieces by (clockwise from top left) Simon Bisley, Tom McLeod, Katie Cook, and Mike McKone. Click on any one of them to see a larger copy.

Keep up the good work, Blot!

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Russ Burlingame and Dan Jurgens have developed a real rapport over the course of the past seven years of "Gold Exchange" columns. That relationship was renewed last week as the pair discussed Convergence Booster Gold #1:

Burlingame: Do you have in your head an explanation for the All-Star Western thing? Was that taking place on Telos?

Dan Jurgens: Whenever it gets into a case like that, I always want to avoid providing that explanation for every little thing that happened under the sun. I felt very comfortable addressing what the Booster Gold Five Years Later book [Booster Gold: Futures End] was because it just came out last summer. To go beyond that? I don't know how much the fans know and I wanted to make this as accessible as possible to people who were picking up an issue of Booster Gold for the first time. So it was streamlining it more.

In my head, I've always thought of it this way, and that is after Justice League International, Booster got kind of caught in a time vortex where he was bouncing through time. That would have included the events of the Justice League International Annual. And then from there, he kind of appeared in Booster Gold five years later. It's almost as if he could have gone straight to Telos after all that happened. That's just a classic case where rather than break things down, you take things at face value. You saw Booster in Justice League International and then you saw him in All-Star Western and then all of a sudden in the Five Years Later book, one could say that yeah, he bounced through time and then ended up on Telos.

I don't blame Jurgens for A.R.G.U.S. Booster in Justice League International Annual or the character's unexplained appearance in All-Star Western. After all, Jurgens didn't write those books. But you know it's been a bad couple of years for a character when even his creator can't make any sense of it.

Anyway, you can and should read the rest of the interview at ComicBook.com.

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So Convergence is now over, and it represents a paradigm shift for our hero. We shouldn't be surprised; the first time DC tried a weekly, eight-issue event series, it, too, rewrote the book for Booster Gold.

By the conclusion to 1988's Millennium, Booster Gold was penniless and disgraced thanks to the machinations of his manager, Dirk Davis. It was revealed that Davis had all along been a sleeper agent for the evil Manhunters, and he had manipulated our hero into a corner. As a result, Booster lost his solo series and very nearly quit adventuring altogether.

Davis' personality was hard to nail down throughout Booster Gold volume 1. Some issues he was Booster's friend, and some issues he was in league with Booster's enemy or trying to steal Booster's girl. That might make readers wonder what creator Dan Jurgens might have intended for Davis if Millennium hadn't resulted in the series' cancellation.

Naturally, I put the question to Jurgens himself.

I was merely trying to write Dirk as a more complicated individual-- multifaceted, as so many people are. So, yes, he was a huckster. The MILLENNIUM crossover came somewhat out of nowhere and we were encouraged to use important characters as Manhunters. I plugged Dirk into that role as part of the story, but was never really thrilled with the concept of doing so.

In this case, it was more about the general notion that we use fairly important characters as the Manhunters. It was also thought that it would be more effective that we use someone who'd been there from issue #1, and I wasn't about to use Trixie.

When I would have started the series, there was no plan for Davis or anyone else to be a Manhunter because MILLENNIUM didn't even exist. All of it came later and in a situation like that, you do what you can do make things work.

Nearly 30 years later, Convergence reveals that DC is still flying by the seat of its pants. Would we want our comics any other way?

As always, thanks to Dan Jurgens.

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I love seeing commissions, but I'm not comfortable commissioning anything. I'm always glad to see that other people don't share my reluctance.

Last week's poll question: Have you ever commissioned a Booster Gold sketch from an artist? (42 votes)

So, have you read Convergence Booster Gold #2 yet? I'd say it was a change to our hero's status quo, but his status hasn't been very quo since Flashpoint.

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It's a Booster bonanza this week, as Booster Gold appears in not only his own title, Convergence Booster Gold #2, but also the final issue of the main event, Convergence #8.

Previews for the two issues can be found at ComicVine.com and HitFlix.com respectively. ( Thanks to Morgenstern for the links.)

Now go buy both issues and make Skeets happy!

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