As I've been compiling this list of my favorite pages, I have avoided including books that contain less than a full page of Booster Gold. But today I'm going to make my first (and probably not last) exception to that rule for Blue Beetle #20, where Booster is visible in only three panels on page 6:

The JLI presented here feels a little... wrong. (J'onn J'onzz has his feet on the desk? Booster says "Wowzer"?) A lot of that is writer Len Wein's over-written script, but some blame has to be shared by penciller Ross Andru's Bronze Age-throwback vibe. (I admit that Andru did many things right in his long, celebrated career, but 1980s Blue Beetle belonged to Paris Cullins.)

At this point you may be asking why I am including this page of minimal, off-model Booster in my list of favorites? Because it is Booster's first appearance in a Blue Beetle comic, and that's a good enough reason for me.

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I recently got an email from Travis Bickle, and although he was clearly "talkin' to me," I think it's best if I just pass along exactly what he said:

We certainly are in a heavy Booster dry spell right now, which is why I was pathetically exuberant upon finding the news I'm about to share. HBO just updated its streaming service to be called simply "Max" instead of "HBO Max" (really clever change), and with this came some slight adjustments to other aspects of the experience as well, including allowing HBO's userbase to more options for their avatars in-app. Now, a user's profile can be represented by none other than Booster Gold, utilizing his look from the JLU animated series. Previously the options were a lot more limited.

Just last week, Warner Bros. Discovery put out a press release announcing new avatars were coming to their retooled app. Booster was nowhere to be seen. I'm very glad to see that oversight has been corrected.

Thanks for the news, Travis, but don't stay up all night watching movies. Lack of sleep is bad for your mental health.

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Ongoing monthly publishing schedules are based on planning for a release every four weeks. So the few months a year where the calendar contrives to have five weeks in a month throws a real wrench into the works.

This fifth week is sometimes called a "skip week" because publishers often release no ongoing books during the week to maintain their regular 4-week release schedules. Rather than just skip a week of potential sales, DC has traditionally solved this "fifth week" problem with mini-events and one-shot standalone issues.

That's why this is the week you'll be seeing the DC Pride 2023 anthology and the Power Girl Special in your Local Comic Shop.

While I don't expect we'll be seeing Booster Gold in either of those issues, they both will be offering Booster Gold fandom-adjacent entertainment. The Boostle crowd will probably find something to love in DC Pride, and Justice League International aficionados will want to read the back-up story in the Power Girl Spcial featuring Fire and Ice, the female "Blue and Gold," if you will.

As DCComics.com made clear last month's press release, Power Girl's Fire and Ice story is laying the groundwork to their own mini-series, Fire & Ice: Welcome to Smallville, coming in September. Again, I have no rational expectation that Booster Gold (and/or Blue Beetle) will be appearing in that series, either. But it would be nice if they did.

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The third Booster Gold comic released on September 15, 1987 was Justice League International #9, which contained events explicitly taking place immediately after Millennium #1 (also released on September 15).

As it happens, for several reasons, not the least of which was limited funding, I didn't buy every Justice League International comic the week it was released. But it happens that I did buy this one because it tied into Millennium #1. (So I'm living proof that major crossover events sell books, I guess.)

I mention that because at the time, page 3 was my favorite page simply for the reason that I always thought it was cool that Blue Beetle was able to put out a cry for help with his breath on a window.

But my tastes have changed. These days, I have a different favorite page... for two specific reasons. One of those reasons will be immediately self-evident to all Booster boosters who lay eyes on it:

See? Booster Gold is just the coolest. (Golly, I love those panels 3-6 of reaction shots zooming in closer and closer to the eyes before the big reveal that it was Booster Gold who saved the day.... just in time for Blue Beetle to bring our arrogant hero back down to Earth! What a wonderful sequence.)

The second — and considerably nerdier — reason I love this page is how wrong it is.

What you see above is the page as it appeared in more modern reprints on higher quality paper. You can see that the re-colorist (presumably using the original color master?) maintained the coloring mistakes that the late, great Gene D'Angelo unintentionally made in the original newsprint publication, such as Booster's flesh-colored star and Martian Manhunter wearing Booster's pants.

When the same issue was republished just a few years ago in Justice League International: Born Again, the page coloring was corrected, but washing out the existing color from scans of the original resulted in thinner blacks. The overall effect is a page that actually looks worse despite the "correction." (Leave D'Angelo's work alone!)

And both of those reprints have eliminated one of my favorite details: the page number! In the original publication, this is clearly marked "14" in the lower left corner. Why did it go away when other pages have maintained their in-art numbering?

(Side note: As a chronicler, I love page numbers! Please, please, please, bring back page numbers, DC!)

All of these little idiosyncrasies plus a badass Booster Gold moment add up to make page 14 (numbered or not) my favorite page of the issue.

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Booster booster Eskana has recently found Booster Gold in a very unexpected place: a 1987 issue of the academic Journal of Consumer Research.

The journal article, "Material Values in the Comics: A Content Analysis of Comic Books Featuring Themes of Wealth," as its author Russell W. Belk explains, "seeks to investigate a more detailed agenda of materialistic themes expressed in comic books." To do this, he studied stories from popular series featuring wealthy characters, specifically issues of Fox and Crow, Archie, Uncle Scrooge, and Richie Rich.

Comic book aficionados will not be surprised to learn that the results of this qualitative and quantitative analysis of American pop-culture reveals that American pop-culture generally reflects Protestant Christian values. "In terms of wealth and consumption per se, the message in the stories seems to be that material possessions can be both good and bad."

Booster Gold appears more or less as a footnote following the article's conclusion, wherein the author concedes that the stories of yesteryear may not be indicative of future themes, especially considering the more "fallible and human superheroes" who began appearing in the 1970s and 80s. Particular attention is drawn to — you guessed it — Booster Gold Volume 1. "If Booster Gold is a prototype, it will be extremely interesting to examine the messages about materialism that are delivered to the next generation of comic book readers."

Given that nearly four decades later, Booster continues to be a polarizing figure explicitly because of his unquenchable twin desires for wealth and fame, I'd say not all that much has changed. Thank goodness. (And thanks to Eskana for bringing this article to our attention.)

REFERENCES

Russell W. Belk, Material Values in the Comics: A Content Analysis of Comic Books Featuring Themes of Wealth, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 14, Issue 1, June 1987, Pages 26—42, https://doi.org/10.1086/209090

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