Late last week, Collected Editions posted a review of the collected Showcase Presents: Booster Gold. I run a Booster Gold website, but even I was surprised by the thoughtful insight that the author, CEB, gleaned from the source material. Take a peek at the quality of the following excerpt, a small fraction of the total review:

Jurgens's Booster Gold reflects the materialism of the 1980s, and the certain innocence that went with it. Booster arrives in 1986 with a flashy costume and an expectation to make money, and it never occurs to him that achieving such might not be so simple. Though Booster performs feats of strength, little of what he achieves is actually his doing, but rather that of Dirk and other handlers. As is the case throughout the book, here too Booster is gambling -- on his own potential for success -- possibly without even knowing that he's doing so. It's no coincidence that in the story, President Reagan is one of Booster's biggest supporters, as the government encouragement of consumer spending at the time would no doubt pass muster with Booster. I would not go so far as to say that Jurgens specifically compares Reaganomics to gambling here, but we do see Booster lose his fortune twice shortly before the stock-market crash of the late 1980s.

There's plenty more where that came from, including a particularly delightful investigation of the relationship between Booster and Broderick from Booster Gold #18. Maybe if this article had been published before the turn of the DCnU, we would have encouraged a writer to have Broderick return!

If you like reading about Booster Gold -- and who doesn't? -- the entire review itself is highly recommended reading. You can find the review, and many other insightful reviews, online at collectededitions.blogspot.com.

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It's been over a week since the news broke, and we here at Boosterrific are still justifiably giddy over the possibility of a Booster Gold television series.

Last week's poll question: What is your initial response to the news that Booster Gold has been optioned for television? (39 votes)

Fan casting is a popular passtime across the internet, so it's natural to take a look around for ideas who could end up playing Booster Gold. (Sure, it's premature, but it's fun.) In the past year, fan casts have appeared on ComicBookMocie.com and IGN.com. Earlier this week, Russ Burlingame ran his own casting call over at ComicBook.com. Popular suggestions seem to include Eric Martsolf, James Roday, Nathan Fillion, and Tom Everett Scott. I'm sure you probably have someone in mind.

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Recently in the Boosterrific Forum, Morgenstern noted, "The news about this script seems to have caused more media buzz for Booster than anything he did ever in the comics." That's quite true.

For years, comic books have been an increasingly small market. With DC's recent hype machine running full blast, they sold nearly 4.5 million comics for the entire line for the entire month. By comparison, SyFy recently renewed their most recent show about super heroes, Alphas. The network claimed that this one show alone averages 3.3 million viewers weekly.

For a more direct, apples-to-apples comparison, consider that if a television series about Booster Gold has as many viewers as the least-watched episode of Caprica, a SyFy series cancelled earlier this year because of low ratings, that series would represent a nearly 980% increase in views over the best selling issue of Booster Gold, Volume 2. That's a significant increase in audience! Here's looking at you, SyFy!

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Booster Gold does not appear in any of the comics DC has scheduled for release today. However, that doesn't mean that DC is not releasing anything worth reading. Specifically, if you have the means, you could do much worse than Wonder Woman Chonicles, Volume 2.

The Golden Age adventures of the Amazon Princess are absurdly entertaining. It's a fanciful, anything-goes style of storytelling alien to the satirical, social-commentary nature of Booster Gold stories.

Maybe they do promote lesbianism and sexual bondage, as Doctor Frederic Wertham once famously wrote. But considering modern fare where the DC women now seem to have an unprecedentedly lewd nature, these comics can seen quaint by comparison.

Buy this collection and show Skeets that we will support our DC characters, whether they get television shows or not.

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If you want news about Dan Jurgens, Russ Burlingame is the journalist to get it for you. Last week, he posted Jurgens' immediate reaction to the news that Booster Gold may be headed to SyFy on ComicBook.com:

ComicBook.com: The description given to The Hollywood Reporter feels a bit more like the original Booster Gold run, playing down the time travel aspect outside of just the origin story and playing up the "saving today to ensure a better tomorrow" part. You've been pretty heavily invested in both volumes; what take would you run with if you had to submit a pilot script to Syfy?

DJ: For a general audience, the pattern of Booster Gold Volume One probably fits best. The book that Geoff Johns, Jeff Katz and I did was a little more "inside baseball", if you will, keying on cool moments in DC's history. Plus, when you look at Booster's original concept, which is being both hero and fame whore, well, I think that seems even more tuned in with our world today than it did when I first created him. I think that tanslates quite well to TV.

Geoff picked up on much of that with his script to Smallville— dancing girls in every episode!

Seems to me there's a great deal there to work with.

If it's good enough for Booster's creator, it should be good enough for the rest of us!

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