Russ Burlingame's latest "Gold Exchange" column with Dan Jurgens was posted late last week on Comic Related.com. Unfortunately, this month's column doesn't touch on the biggest Booster Gold news of the month: the impending demise of Booster Gold Volume 2, but it's not without its value.

GX: If he can track chronal energy using the defense department computers, I've got to wonder: can he see the Speed Force? And if so, does the fact that he didn't cross-reference that with chronal residue to find Zoom indicate that the Speed Force maybe doesn't work the same way here?

DJ: Booster has the equipment that can certainly detect and isolate the chronal residue within the speed force, particularly if someone isn't working to hide it.

Booster Gold can see un-obfuscated evidence of time travel in the Speed Force? That's certainly a new and cool (if apparently useless) power.

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Remember 3 weeks ago, when I wrote that mistake-filled blog post about the issue of Booster Gold that tied-into Flashpoint? Well, welcome back. DC appears to have really hit a home run with the Flashpoint event.

DC announced via The Source on Friday that Booster Gold #45 has sold out and would be going back to press in coming weeks. Flashpoint #2 was released a week earlier and also sold out of its initial printing. Does all of this sound familiar? It should, as the exact same scenario happened last month with Booster Gold #44 and Flashpoint #2.

I think I've made my disdain for alternate history stories perfectly clear, but I am going to have to accept that I am in the minority on this. Flashpoint and its tie-ins are doing exceptionally well. No doubt they will make a great springboard for DC's second Explosion or first Heroes Reborn or whatever shenanigans DC is planning to roll out at the Flashpoint conclusion.

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Last Friday, I made a fuss over Booster Gold's new costume. After careful contemplation of what I wrote, I stand by my original assessment.

THIS COSTUME STILL SUCKS.

However, I laid all of the blame for the vomit-inducing misguided costume redesign on DC Co-Publisher Jim Lee, largely because that's who DC blamed it on in their original announcements. However, yesterday Lee announced that he would not be taking the fall alone. On DC's The Source blog, Lee wrote:

Months ago, when the decision was made to launch 52 new number ones, Co-Publisher Dan Didio, Editor-in-Chief Bob Harras along with DCU Executive Editor Eddie Berganza and VP-Art Direction and Design Mark Chiarello and I went over the entire proposed DCU lineup and bookmarked the characters we felt would benefit the most from a visual redesign.
... Realizing the amount of time and effort it would take to complete the long list of designs, Mark Chiarello and I enlisted artist Cully Hamner onto the team, giving us not just another set of hands but another style altogether so we would have a variety of styles to literally draw from.
... And of course, all the designs were shaped and refined by the input of a series editor, writer and artist. In the end, we wanted to make sure all the key creators on a title were satisfied with the final look of the characters as the creative teams were the ones who had to live with and draw the new looks on a near daily basis.

So now that we've gotten an eyeful of the worst costume designs since the 1990s, Lee is being sure to drag everyone else down with him give "credit" to all the other artists involved. What a great guy.

Does this mean that Dan Jurgens, a "key creator" for the upcoming Justice League International title, was a significant part of the team that designed that Booster Gold costume? Being pretty familiar with Jurgens' artistic history, I somehow doubt it. Would Jurgens' involvement in the creation of that costume make me hate it less? I somehow doubt that, too. This would be at least the third Booster Gold powersuit that Jurgens had a direct hand in designing, and it is by far the worst.

Not every costume in this entire shake-up is bad. The problem is that most of them are. And they are all coming at the same time, so rather than being given time to acclimate to the horrific appearance of, say, a Jersey Shore-Superboy or an anime-Deasthstroke, we readers are forced into making a snap decision: do we want to pay to look at these abominations Hot Topic-inspired fashions or not?

Jim Lee, I don't care whose fault it is, I just don't want to look at the comic books you are publishing anymore.

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Look, up in the Sky! It's certainly no plane. It's the first sign you're in an alternate universe: it's a dirigible.

Sure, we've got dirigibles here on Earth-Prime, but you don't see them everyday. However in alternate universes, such as the Flashpoint timeline visited in the panel above from Booster Gold #45, they are more common than birds. Why is that?

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The DC solicitation text for today's Booster Gold #45 is unusually vague.

Booster knows that the Flashpoint world isn't his own. But how does he get back? How does he make things right?

Maybe he doesn't.

Normally, that sort of hype would lack dramatic tension. At the end of the story, we would assume that everything returns to business as ususal. But now? If nothing else came out of DC's dramatic announcement last week, at least they are making us wonder if maybe this time things are a little bit different.

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