Over at Yahoo! Answers, Rachel has asked a very important question:

"How close are Booster Gold and Blue Beetle really?"

Micheal Jon Carter ("Booster Gold") and Ted Kord ("Blue Beetle") have over the past 25 years been teammates, rivals, and business partners, but most significantly friends. Both share the tragic loss of significant business fortunes. Booster supported Beetle through his battle with obesity and nursed him through a coma. Beetle stood up for Booster time and again against criticism of Booster's motives and maturity. Each is everything that the other could ask for in a friend.

Yes, of course they're friends. But what Rachel is really asking is whether Booster Gold and Blue Beetle are lovers.

Comic book readers recognize the pair from years of Justice League International adventures. Internet readers, however, are probably more familiar with the duo as the two-halves of the portmanteau "Boostle," or a very particular sub-genre of romantic fan fiction (itself called "slash fiction") portraying the friends as homosexual lovers.

Here at Boosterrific.com, I try to avoid the Boostle phenomenon. While I have nothing against fan fiction, and I whole-heartedly support anything that would bring Booster Gold to a larger audience, Boosterrific.com is a chronicle of the adventures of a character owned and published by DC Comics. And in DC Comics' comics, Booster Gold and Blue Beetle are most certainly not romantically entwined.

I've wondered from time to time if I'm doing Booster Gold fandom a disservice by ignoring the Boostle community. I justify my decision by saying that even a site striving to be as all-encompassing as Boosterrific.com has to draw the line somewhere. Certainly, the Boostle-ers don't need this site to have their fun.

Therefore, Rachel, to answer your question, until such time as DC Comics officially sanctions a romantic relationship between Blue and Gold by including it in their published canon, Booster Gold and Blue Beetle are really just friends so far as Boosterrific.com is concerned. Really, really good friends.

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It may seem like a lifetime ago, but it was only 4 years ago today that DC published Booster Gold, Volume 2, #15, the issue marking the return of Booster Gold's creator, Dan Jurgens, as credited writer on a book titled Booster Gold.

When Booster Gold Volume 1 was cancelled did Jurgens expect 21 years, 1 month, and 13 days to pass before he would return to writing a Booster Gold series? If the past is any indication, we'll have to wait until September 2032 before we see Jurgens named as writer of Booster Gold Volume 3. Jurgens will be 73 years old in 2032, but Booster Gold will probably still be going on 23. (Time travel has its advantages.)

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Back in August, The Blot shared his collection of Booster Gold commissions. But The Blot's sketchbook still had blank pages to fill, and lucky for us all, he has uploaded three more sketches:

From left to right, that's the work of Andy Kuhn, Janet K. Lee, and Cody Schibi. You can see the whole sketchbook in much larger detail at The Blot Says' Flickr page. While you're out and about, also consider dropping by The Blot's blog, TheBlotSays.com. Thanks for sharing, Blot!

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The internet age is certainly finding new ways to tax individual morality. If Les Misérables were written today, would Jean Valjean be going to jail for downloading mp3s?

Last week's poll question: How do you feel about Rip Hunter being replaced by John Constantine as chronicler of the secrets of the DCnU? (47 votes)

Yesterday at ComicBook.com, Russ Burlingame explored the possible meanings of the scribblings seen in Justice League Dark #14. While Burlingame may be concerned about what they mean, I'm far more interested in who wrote them!

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In this modern age of reinventing the DC Universe (again), once familiar characters are reappearing with only superficial similarities to what came before. While this clean slate allows for redevelopment of existing properties, it also allows those previously established characters to interact with one another in new and exciting ways.

While we're left to wonder how Booster Gold will emerge from his forced hiatus, John Simcoe of Comics on the Brain is using his time to pair Booster with some other not -so-familiar faces to the world at large: time-displaced Roman soldier Alpha Centurion and time-displaced cowboy Terra-Man.

That leads CotB to suggest that these three characters need to be pulled together. Perhaps they need a common origin. Perhaps the same aliens that kidnapped Terra-Man are the same that conscripted Alpha Centurion. Or even better, what if the "aliens" they thought they encountered weren't aliens at all, but Booster Gold operating as one of the Linear Men.

Heck, why not re-launch the Linear Men as a team of time-displaced characters from DC's pantheon specializing in the skills of their respective eras? Alan Moore gave the concept charm with Supreme's League of Infinity. Given that DC enjoys nothing more than exploiting the ideas of Alan Moore, this seems like a natural fit.

You can read Simcoe's full post (along with a brief description of who Alpha Centurion and Terra-Man are) here.

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