If you buy a new DC Comic this week, congratulations! You've struck Gold!

...Because Booster appears twice(!) in the line-wide house ad for the final chapters of the "game-changing two-month epic" Lazarus Planet series.

I expect we'll find out just how much Lazarus Planet changes the game for Booster Gold when Lazarus Planet Omega arrives at Local Comic Shops on February 21.

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Over the weekend, a friend who does not read superhero comic books sent me a screenshot of a link to an online article teasing "Top Gun: Maverick's Glen Powell Wants to Play Booster Gold in the DCU."

Well, of course he does. Who wouldn't want to play Booster Gold?

More importantly, this should serve as a reminder that the mere announcement of a Booster Gold television show instantly reaches far, far farther into pop culture than four decades of comic book storytelling has. Even without a director or actors or even a second of screen time, my friends and family are now engaging with a character I doubt any could pick out of a police line-up. That's the power of TV!

That's why my inbox is now filled with links to articles like "11 Facts About DC's Time-Traveling Superhero Only Huge Fans Will Know" and "Who is Booster Gold in the DC universe and what are his powers?" It turns out that not everyone in the world is a Booster booster... yet.

My brother used to say that what sounds like pointless repetition to me is someone else hearing the news for the first time. He was right, of course. There are 8 billion people in the world, but no more than a few million have ever held a Booster Gold comic book.

So have a little patience with non-comic-reading people who are just now getting up to speed on how terrific Booster Gold is. If you're lucky, they'll remind you of how and when you first became a fan yourself.

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Rather than wait for Friday, I might as well tell you about this week's new release today in the hopes that maybe you haven't been to your Local Comic Shop yet. I'll plan on resuming my regular Monday/Wednesday/Friday posting schedule next week, assuming James Gunn can refrain from dropping big Booster Gold news on my off days again.

(That's ok, DC. Whenever you've got something important to say about Booster Gold, you go right ahead. I might be a Grumpy Gus, but I'm always listening.)

It warms my heart to be able to say that Booster Gold makes a cameo appearance in this week's DC's Harley Quinn Romances #1. Technically, the cameo is his dating profile in an app for superhero hook-ups (as viewed by former Justice League International teammates Fire and Ice), but that's close enough, right?

The issue is an anthology with eight different stories. That panel is from "Dating App Disaster," and all Booster boosters will be relieved to know that Booster isn't the titular disaster.

Ten dollars is a bit steep for a single panel Booster Gold cameo, but I'm a sucker for these short-story anthology issues. I can't necessarily recommend it to everyone, but I personally bought this issue and made Skeets happy.

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Big announcement today about our favorite hero coming to HBO! Says the press release:

The story will center on Booster Gold, a washed-up athlete from the future who travels back to the present in hopes of becoming the greatest super hero of all time. Instead of chasing criminals, however, his main priority is chasing fame and money. But Booster Gold discovers that being a hero takes more than just a megawatt smile, and that the future doesn't happen without first protecting the present.

Oh, wait. Sorry. That one was from the press release from 2011 when Booster Gold was coming to SyFy. Obviously, that one never materialized. I'm sure this new one by *checks notes* James Gunn is totally better and will really happen this time.

Don't let my snark fool you. I'm pleased as punch that Booster might be finally coming to a... whatever screen it is you can watch HBO Max on. Tablet? Cell phone? That seems appropriate for Booster.

You can see for yourself Gunn's announcement of DCEU "Chapter 1: Gods and Monsters" — which one is Booster? God or monster? — on Youtube.com, and you can read a pretty good write-up about what all it entails on Variety.com. In both Gunn describes the upcoming Booster story as:

Booster Gold is one of comics really popular cult heroes. He is a fascinating guy. He is a loser from the future who uses future technology to come back to present day and become a superhero so that people will love him. It is basically a superhero story of Impostor Syndrome on an HBO Max series.

That does sound like an angle that HBO would want to tackle. And I don't disagree with that take on the character, although I might have worded it a little differently. Personally, I prefer how Booster's creator Dan Jurgens described his hero to Russ Burlingame at ComicBook.com:

With a character like Booster, who's more complex that many people realize, clarity is essential. Many writers have made the mistake of treating him like an idiot, which he most certainly isn't. It's just that his journey from problem to solution sometimes gets a bit tangled up, which is what happens to most of us in our own lives.

Heck, that might be the best, most succinct description of Booster Gold ever. Nobody gets him like Dan does.

If the ten different projects Gunn mentioned are released in order, it sounds like we shouldn't expect Booster Gold sooner than 2025. We've all got plenty of time to get excited.

Thanks to all who made sure I knew the news.

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I recently saw an AI-generated piece of art depicting Chris Pratt dressed as Booster Gold. It looked impressive, but I'm not going to link to it here because I don't think it is appropriate for me to promote the AI art generators, even when they are being used to produce stellar Booster Gold fan art.

For one thing, as both an artist and coder, I have reservations about how the AI algorithms have been created. It's one thing to program them with public domain art. It's another to indiscriminately scrape images from the World Wide Web. It wouldn't be okay for a human to reproduce that work, so the same ethics should apply to computer coders.

Perhaps more importantly than the issue of attribution, I don't want to encourage AI-generated "fan" art because I don't want to aid in normalizing acceptance of computer-generated storytelling. I'd hate to think that I played any role in robbing the creators I respect of the opportunity to continue creating for profit because they can be replaced by cheaper computer programs.

On the other hand, I have to imagine that Booster Gold would be in favor of using AI art. In addition to being raised in an era with sentient robots, he has a demonstrably weak grasp on the concept of private property. If he can make a buck selling computer-generated images of himself in action, he'd totally do it.

Maybe this is just another case of how sometimes Booster Gold is a role model for what we should not do.

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