Last week, DC released Super-Pets Special: Bitedentity Crisis, an anthology issue featuring such famous pet sidekicks as Krypto, Ace, Streaky, and Bitewing to name but a few. There are also many lesser known pets in here, some of whom don't even have any super powers! It seems every animal showed up for this party, every animal except two: Booster Gold's housecats, Jack and Jill.

That's right, Booster Gold has pets, and he always has. Jack and Jill debuted alongside Booster and his suffering secretary, Trixie Collins, in 1985's Booster Gold Volume 1 #1!

To be fair, calling them Booster's "sidekicks" might be a bit of an overstatement. Booster has never spent much time in the same room with them, and his robot buddy Skeets openly dislikes them.

Booster and Skeet's disinterest in them doesn't seem to much bother Jack and Jill. They clearly prefer to spend their time lounging around the Goldstar, Inc. offices with Trixie, where they help her manage Booster's adoring public (in Booster Gold #2), greet Jason Redfern and the alien Z (Booster Gold #6), and avoid the lecherous advances of comic book artists Benny and Marty (Booster Gold #7).

The cats spend so much time with Trixie that it would be easy to mistake her as the cats' proper owner (in as such as anyone can "own" a cat). However, Booster's self-serving manager, Dirk Davis, makes their relationship clear while rescuing them from a building collapse in Booster Gold #11. Whatever you do, don't call them "ordinary."

When Booster left Metropolis to join the Justice League International, he left Jack and Jill in Trixie's care (Booster Gold #25). They must like it there, as they haven't been seen since, not in stories with other super pets.

Other People in Booster Gold's Neighborhood:

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I consider Justice League of America #34, featuring the infamous Club JLI fiasco on KooeyKooeyKooey island, to be among "The 12 Best Booster Gold Stories Ever" for a very good reason: it's very, very good.

I explained my reasoning here, but no matter what I write about it, the best argument can be found in pages like this:

James Gunn could do a lot worse than adapting that!

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Since my antennae are always up for Booster Gold news, I'm being bombarded these days by nonstop rumors about which actor will play our hero in the announced James Gunn television show. The latest gossip (reported seemingly everywhere) is that someone has reported that they were personally told by someone else at a convention who it will be. Sorry, Internet clickbaiters, but I'm going to hold out for something a little more concrete before I declare the news Boosterrific-worthy. When DC/HBO are ready to announce the casting, they'll tell us.

Obviously, I'm not excited about this "news," but the dirty truth is that I really don't care who gets cast as Booster Gold on TV. That's because I know that they aren't making a television show for me. Heck, I doubt they're making it for any existing Booster Gold fans.

Why do I say that? Math.

Booster Gold Volume 2, which you would expect all then-existing Booster Gold comic book fans to have bought, sold approximately 53,000 copies of its first issue when first released during the month of August 2007. That's not too bad. Fifty-thousand continues to be a very respectable audience for a comic book even seventeen years later.

Compare that to the final episode of Peacemaker from February 2022. On release, HBO announced it set a single-day viewership record, and Forbes reported that over 584,000 households watched it opening weekend alone. You don't need to be a mathematician to see that 584k > 53k. By a factor of 10!

(If you want to turn those audiences into dollars: At $3.50 cover price, BG v2 #1earned a gross retail income of $185,500 in a whole month. An HBO Max subscription cost $15/month in 2022, so Peacemaker took in some portion of $8,775,000 worth of eyeballs in a single weekend!)

As the data indicates, if I was making television shows, I wouldn't be bothered by the opinions of a small minority 10% (or less) of my potential audience. You know I'm a die-hard comic book Booster booster, and if I could afford to get someone with the name recognition and box office clout of, say, Samuel L. Jackson in the role, you better believe I'd do it. He might not look or sound like Dan Jurgens' creation, but people would certainly pay to see what he delivers. And that's the whole point.

Not that I'm speculating, of course. I wouldn't do that.

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It's been a long weekend, so all you're getting from me today are these delightful headshots from comic book artist Francis Portela's Instagram.

Hmm. They look like they're up to something. But then, when are they not?

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To make Google happy, I've been tinkering under the hood here at Boosterrific.com to change how news items are retrieved and archived. If all goes well, this should only result in some changed URLs, and the average site visitor will never notice any difference. If anyone finds anything broken, please let me know, but "I'm not expecting any trouble" are some pretty good last words. (Just ask CrowdStrike.)

Meanwhile, as a good test case for new blog posts going forward, Booster booster J has found a new "Booster Gold" appearance in a comic that isn't already in the Boosterrific Database.

I'm currently reading Volume 2 of The Flash, from 1987. I just wanted to point out that on the very last page of The Flash, Vol. 2 #2, Booster's name (together with the DC Comics logo) is advertised (in-universe!) on the side of a truck.

Here is that panel in particular, taken from The Flash: Savage Velocity collected edition:

written by Mike Baron; art by Jackson Guice, Larry Mahlstedt, Carl Gafford, Steve Haynie; edited by Mike Gold

The reason this book does not appear in the Boosterrific Database is because the character of Booster Gold himself does not appear in this issue. But cases like this are a key reason why the Boosterrific Blog exists. I even have a banner and tag for it:

I do not think I had posted about this before, but that's one of the reasons I'm trying to make the news archive more Google-friendly. Sometimes it's hard for even the archivist to find information buried in the dusty virtual bookshelves in Booster Cave! In any case, I have definitely blogged about it now, thanks to J.

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