As Booster booster Rob Snow alerted me, after months of Booster Gold references, we actually get to see our hero on panel in this weeks' Fire & Ice: Welcome to Smallville #5!

Is it just me, or is it starting to feel like none of the New 52 continuity applies anymore? I feel like I opened a comic book to find Bobby Ewing taking a shower. (If you don't get that reference, kids, you're on the wrong website. Your homework is to go watch something from back when television was good, specifically the 1985 Dallas season 9 episode, "Blast from the Past.")

The events of this series have some really weird, life-threatening things happening, things that it would seem would not go unnoticed by a particular Man of Steel. Things like several gristly murders and much destruction of property. Makes me wonder why the story's setting is Smallville and not a suburb of Gotham, where these sorts of things wouldn't attract so much attention amidst the psycho clowns and sewer-dwelling crocodile-men.

The solicitation text for next month's mini-series final issue teases "the fate of Smallville itself hangs in the balance!" After reading issue 5, I can believe it.

Buy this issue and make Skeets happy.

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Lazy bloggers all around the Internet are using the New Year as an opportunity to create clickbait lists of previous posts.

As it happens, I'm no better than they are.

So here, for your nostalgic end-of-year reading enjoyment (and my self-serving need for blogging content), I present the 5 most-read Boosterrific.com blog posts of 2023:

5. Monday, September 25: Fall Housekeeping
In which we celebrate the 1,000th and 1,001st books including a Booster Gold appearance added to the Boosterrific.com Database. As I type this, we're now up to 1,012. The more Booster Gold, the better!

4. Friday, September 8: My Favorite Pages: Suicide Squad 13
In which we review Booster Gold being awesome (and taunting both Blue Beetle and Superman with it) on Suicide Squad, Volume 1, #13, page 3.

3. Friday, August 18: Go See Blue Beetle
In which we encourage people to go see the best Booster Gold-adjacent film to hit theaters in 2023, Blue Beetle. (Curmudgeonly shut-in that I am, I did not follow my own advice until recently. I've seen it now. It's fine, certainly better than the average DC superhero movie. It would go on to make $129 million against a budget of $104 million, which also seems fine to me. But every DC movie is a failure if it makes less than a billion these days.)

2. Monday, April 3: A Hard Day's Night
In which we tease how The Flash #795 retconned the important bits of Heroes in Crisis, meaning that we can all now and forevermore ignore that HiC happened.

1. Tuesday, January 31: Giving Thanks for Hollywood 2023 Edition
In which we interrupted our regular posting schedule to share the news that James Gunn announced that one day Booster Gold might actually get one of those television shows Hollywood has been promising us for over a decade. I'm sure this time they really mean it. At least I'm pretty sure they did at the time. January 2023 was a whole year ago! Who knows what ripple effects were created behind the scenes by the ensuing months-long strikes of both the writers and actors guilds? I mean, to know what the future of entertainment holds, you'd have to be some sort of time-traveler. And that's just crazy talk.

Here's to another Boosterrific year in 2024!

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Today marks the negative 419th birthday of Jon Michael "Booster" Carter, born this day in the year 2442.

For most of the past decade, I've been accompanying my annual Booster Gold birthday wishes with the same pic of a Booster Gold cake based on the opening splash page from Booster Gold volume 1, #3.

That image first appeared on the the Internet sometime about 2008 and, according to The Oklahoman, is the work of Annette Price, co-owner (then and now) of Speeding Bullet Comics in Norman, OK.

As you might expect, the Internet has come a long way since 2008. Back in the day, photos had to be small to fit easily through all the tubes. One terabyte hard drives were only just becoming commercially available in 2008. But tubes and storage space are much, much bigger now — The Cloud! — so we can use bigger pictures on our giant monitors. Isn't living in the future great?

All of which means that it is finally time to retire my tiny cake picture and replace it with...

...

...

... a large cake picture!

Yes, that's the same photo, now embiggened through the use of modern "artificial intelligence" algorithms and ready for re-use for many more birthdays to come.

Congratulations, Booster!

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Cort Carpenter sent me an email full of his best holiday wishes, and even better, he attached his latest addition to his Booster Gold Sketchbook:

Even if it wasn't signed, that piece is pretty obviously by John McCrea, co-creator of DC's Hitman.

Cort usually requests his commissions include Booster Gold's fabulous high collar, but this time McCrea even included the original hollow star and the bulbs on the end of Skeets' fins. Boosterrific!

Thanks, Cort!

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Yeah, yeah, DC's 'Twas the Mite Before Christmas has finally given us a Booster Gold in a full Santa suit.

But for my money, the best (and most extreme) Booster Gold Christmas panel is still this one:

Justice League Task Force #37 (1996)

What can I say? I just prefer a classic Christmas.

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