My Halloween treat was this email from Booster booster FZ:

Was just reading Manhunter #4 cover date Oct 88 and spotted a kinda sorta Booster Gold cameo on page 4. Wasn't sure if you knew about this. Happy Halloween.

Wow! Somehow, no, I did *not* know about that.

For reference, this is the panel that FZ is referring to:

FZ is right. That's not really Booster Gold. It's not even a flashback. The apparition appears only as a helpful illustration for the reader to reinforce Olivia Vancroft's speach about the power of masks. That sort of thing is kind of rare in modern comic books.

Rare or not, it is an appearance previously undocumented in the Boosterrific.com database. How could I have I overlooked that for all these years? Perhaps there was some sort of crisis that caused all of history to be re-written around me so that things I once thought I knew have changed in unexpected ways. Yeah, that's the ticket.

In any event, thanks to FZ, that oversight has now been corrected.

If anyone else ever spots an appearance they don't think I'm tracking, please reach out to correct me. Booster boosters everywhere will thank you.

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Happy Halloween, Booster boosters. Please resist the temptation to eat all your candy at once!

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Booster booster Logan Peterson works in a bookstore and writes in to tell us that he has spotted our hero in the new book DC Greatest Events coming soon from Stephen Wiacek and DK.

I meandered my way through and can report that Booster makes several visual appearances--mostly in group shots from events like Zero Hour and Heroes in Crisis. He is listed in the index, though, which directs one to this particular page in the Flashpoint entry:

Golly. At the time, I believed Flashpoint was nothing more than a naked cash grab before the "New 52" launch. Reading that recap description of the "16 interlinked but self-contained three-issue limited series" makes me think my original opinion was too generous.

Thanks for the heads-up, Logan. Now everybody knows what to ask for from Santa this Christmas!

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Since I started this week showcasing one incentive variant cover, I should keep the theme going with another incentive variant, one I've never show on Boosterrific.com before, mainly because Booster Gold isn't actually on it.

His goggles are.

That's the 1:200 Francesco Mattina cover for 2018's Heroes in Crisis #1, and as you can see, it depicts a bloody Harley Quinn wearing Booster Gold's (broken) goggles.

This cover was also used as the basis for Graphitti Designs' New York Comic Con 2018 Silver Foil Convention Exclusive. I honestly don't know which one is rarer. ComicChron.com estimated that retailers ordered approximately 140,700 first-edition copies of Heroes in Crisis #1, which implies there are fewer than 700 of the 1:200 variants in the world. How many silver foils were printed for New York Comic Con, which sold over a quarter million tickets? 500? 1000?

For what it's worth, both are available on eBay right now unslabbed for about $35-$70. In either case, that seems like a pretty good deal for such a rare book.

I mean, if you're into that sort of thing.

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If you're looking for Booster Gold in the new releases coming to your Local Comic Shop this week, look no further than the display case holding the rare covers!

This is the "1:25 variant cover by Ryan Sook" for Human Target #8:

Oddly, that cover omits the issue's Very Special Guest Star, Rocket Red, visible in the preview at AIPTComics.com. Which Rocket Red? I'm really not sure.

Early issues of this series (and the cover of the hardback collection) included an image of original JLI-era Dimiti Pushkin (Rocket Red 4), and I might have expected Gavril Ivanovich (Rocket Red 07) who was a member of the New 52 JLI. But the armor of the Rocket Red in the preview looks like that of Maks Chazov (Rocket Red 01), who was a member of the pre-Flashpoint Checkmate.

So which one is under that mask? Just one more mystery for the Human Target to solve before he finally dies.

UPDATE 2022-10-25: Though it is never explicit, clues in the issue imply that the man wearing the Rocket Red 01 armor is Dimiti Pushkin. So is this an error of the writer (who didn't make it clear which Rocket Red it was supposed to be), the artist (who didn't verify which Rocket Red he was supposed to be drawing), or the editor (who didn't pay enough attention to which suit it should have been)... or is this an intentionally revisionist history of the Rocket Reds by one or more of the above?

Anyway, Booster's not in this book. So whatever.

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