When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president, the United States was in a shambles. The Great Depression had hit the country hard, and something drastic had to be done to restore the economy before things got worse.

As part of his "New Deal," Roosevelt rushed to restore American's faith in their currency and ease the suffering. Among other measures, the new president encouraged Congress to inject more currency into circulation. To do this, he first had to uncouple the United States dollar from the value of gold.

The key event in this process took place on this day in 1933, when Congress passed the Gold Repeal Joint Resolution, legally substituting United States currency for all debts public and private. In other words, it suddenly became impossible to make payments in gold.

An unintended side effect of this measure was that it made it very difficult for certain time-traveling superheroes to barter their services for appropriate compensation.

Thankfully, Gerald Ford corrected this problem forty years later, paving the way for Booster Gold to return and reap the benefits of Ronald Reagan's "trickle-down" system in the 1980s.

Comments (0) | Add a Comment | Tags: economics fdr gereald ford photobomb ronald reagan secret history

Booster Gold fans are a hard bunch to please!

Last week's poll question: Are you satisfied with the resolution to the post-Crisis Booster Gold's story told in Convergence? (59 votes)

Since we were all so evenly divided last week, it makes me wonder if the new status quo — specifically that from this point forward, the only Booster Gold is nuBooster Gold — changes your plans for future Booster Gold comics purchases.

Comments (6) | Add a Comment | Tags: convergence polls

Convergence has killed the tyranny of the New 52, and humor can now return to the DC Universe!

Introducing Bat-Mite, a 6-issue limited series featuring everyone's favorite, uh, mite, I guess. Say, who's that on Corin Howell's cover?

Booster doesn't show up inside this issue, but I'll give you good odds he appears before series end. (Dan Jurgens is the writer.) You can decide for yourself what you think by reading the preview online at ComicVine.com.

Buy this book and make cartoon Skeets happy.

Comments (3) | Add a Comment | Tags: bat-mite comicvine.com corin howell dan jurgens new releases

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!

Comments (2) | Add a Comment | Tags: 2015 blot bob mcleod comicartfans.com commissions conventions fan art flickr.com katie cook mike mckone simon bisley

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.

Comments (0) | Add a Comment | Tags: all-star western comicbook.com convergence dan jurgens futures end gold exchange interviews justice league international russ burlingame