While I was busy trying to have a good time on April Fool's Day, DC was trying to sneak a new Booster Gold appearance by me! Fortunately for all of us, SLW was paying attention and spotted our hero (and Blue Beetle) in this week's Jimmy Olsen's SuperCyclopedia graphic novel.

The main events of Jimmy Olsen's SuperCyclopedia are aimed squarely at young readers, but there's plenty in this Multiversal story to entertain Old School DC fans. SLW liked reading about young Rip Hunter, while I got stoked seeing Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew back in action — with an explicit Oz/Wonderland War reference, no less!

Unfortunately, it seems that nothing herein takes place in the mainstream DC Universe of Earth-0 (or whatever we're supposed to be calling it these days), meaning this counts as an out-of-continuity Booster Gold appearance and doesn't disrupt the Missing In Action count at the top of the Boosterrific! Blog.

But I maintain that any Booster Gold is better than none, so let's all enjoy what we do get (even if it's not quite what we want).

Consider buying Jimmy Olsen's SuperCyclopedia. It'll make Skeets (and maybe you) happy!

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Once upon a time, there was a movie in which a young fellow named Marty unintentionally traveled through time and accidentally set in motion a series of events that would unravel his own existence. Marty could only watch helplessly as he was gradually erased from a family photo.

Do you suppose that's happening to Booster Gold?

As we approach the six-month anniversary of DC All-in Special, released last October, Booster remains absent and forgotten by the DC Universe at-large. Given that Booster has played a role in almost every major event in the DCU for the past 40 years, that disappearance from history has to be causing a cascading rewriting of history as we knew it.

What does a DCU look like without a Booster Gold to save the Multiverse from Mister Mind or restore the timeline after Brainiac's Convergence? Do the Manhunters win the Millennium without Booster Gold's interference? Is Ronald Reagan felled by an assassin's bullet?

It's one thing for Booster Gold to be the hero that the world has never heard of. It's another thing altogether for Booster Gold to be a hero who never existed.

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For most of the history of the human race, mankind could only dream what it would be like to fly above the clouds or have the contents of the world's libraries available to be read to us by artificial intelligence on instantaneous demand. Those achievements have changed the course of civilization. However, one thing we still cannot do is predict the outcome of a basketball tournament.

We are now in the second week of the annual NCAA "March Madness" basketball tournament, and already all of this year's 34 million brackets, 1 for every 10 people in the United States, tracked by NCAA, ESPN, CBS, Yahoo, USA Today, or X.com now have errors in their predictions. That's a lot of bad guesses.

You may have heard reporting that the odds of flipping a coin to determine all winners in the field of 64 basketball teams would result in a perfectly selected bracket 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 tries. Assuming that 34 million distinct brackets are submitted each year, that should produce a winner approximately once every 271,275,648,143 years. That's 20 times longer than the universe is old.

Of course, the outcome of NCAA tournament games is not truly random, and NCAA.com reports that the real odds of picking a perfect bracket are the much more feasible 1 in 120,200,000,000. (That's 3 fewer commas!) They then go on to calculate that if every American knew enough about college basketball to complete a competent bracket that was completely unlike everyone else's bracket, we should expect to get one perfect bracket in 366 years. By comparison, that seems almost reasonable.

It's incredibly unlikely anyone reading this will live to the year 2385, so we'll likely never know what it is like to live in a post-perfect bracket world. However, Michael Jon "Booster" Carter won't even be born until 2442, fifty-seven years after the perfect NCAA March Madness bracket. For a smart, athletic, good-looking kid living in a world like that, the sky's the limit. Even time travel will be possible!

As for the rest of us, like the cavemen of yesteryear, we can only look at the stars and imagine.

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Oh, shoot. I almost forgot to post something today. See, I was writing a script to help me identify where the current drought of new Booster Gold adventures sits historically* — I had an old script that did this years ago, but DC continuity has only gotten more convoluted since then and so has how the Boosterrific Database tracks it — and I lost track of time.

The good news is that Rob Snow has me covered. Or at least he tried to.

Earlier this week, to counter the lack of official Booster Gold art coming from DC, Rob forwarded me a picture of the JLI drawn as tweenagers that has been making the rounds on a particular website. But try as I might, I cannot identify the artist, and that anti-social media site won't even let me see the posts unless I log in. And since I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to share the art here at this time. (If you ever identify that artist, let me know, Rob.)

The good news is that while I was trying to identify the artist for that, I found this, a totally awesome color wheel by Melonnabar at Between Two Worlds on Tumblr.com (which still seems quite happy to share):

Pretty awesome, right? Yeah, I'd say that all worked out.

*For the record, "175 days" is 11th on the all-time list and only two weeks from breaking into the top ten. But let's not focus on the negative today, okay? Color Wheel!

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The June 2025 DC Comics solicitations are here... and Booster Gold is not.

Booster booster Rob Snow thinks there's "a chance" we might see Booster in Justice League Unlimited #8, which is the finale of the "We Are Yesterday" crossover story. That would be nice, wouldn't it? (It would certainly make Tiffany happy, as she has been promoting that theory for months.)

If you want to read the solicitation text for Justice League Unlimited yourself to set your own level of hopefulness, you can read the full list yourself at AIPTComics.com.

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