Justice League America #61 officially kicked off the Dan Jurgens era of the Justice League International. And it has a lot of fun moments, from villains and weapons originally appearing in the Silver Age Justice League of America, to the opening panel callback to the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League #1, to having Booster Gold return to the team full time, to seeing Superman put Maxwell Lord in his place, to reading Blue Beetle accuse Weapons Master of pulling "a big boner."

Choosing a single favorite page in this one was especially difficult because while I enjoyed many of the panels and bits of dialogue, they are pretty evenly distributed, meaning few pages stand out as a whole. So I ultimately settled on page 3, which introduces Maxima, mostly because I like the flow of the art from panel to panel, especially how Maxima's hair meanders through those last two panels.

I also like that Booster Gold comes across as the rational one on this new team. Someone's got to be the adult in the room (at least when Superman isn't around).

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Today's Booster Gold fan art comes from Ben Robson, aka RobsonDoodle on DeviantArt.com:

According to Ben's Deviant Art bio: "In his early years he was diagnosed with autism, but in his later years he has shown a real determination that would not allow this to hold him back."

I sure do think that New 52 costume design works better here in Ben's signature style than it did in Justice League International Volume 3. Good work, Ben.

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The 15-part "Breakdowns" storyline that ran through late 1991 into 1992 of the Justice League titles spelled the end of the heyday of the Justice League International's very popular "Bwah-Ha-Ha" era.

The letter column of Justice League America #55 (Breakdowns Part 5) made the announcement that a new team lineup would coming in issue #61 and gave fans a ballot to vote for the heroes they most wanted to see on the team.

According to the letter column in Justice League Spectacular #1 (which I recently re-read while preparing for last week's "My Favorite Pages" feature), DC received more than 6 million total votes!

To be fair, many of those votes were duplicate ballots that were not double counted, but it's not clear whether any of the votes received made any actual difference on which characters were chosen for the new team. After all, the poll was published only six months before issue #61 was to released and the production of a DC comic book generally takes about three months, meaning there was only a small window for voters to influence any decisions made by editors or writers.

The full results of the poll were not made public, but Justice League editor Kevin Dooley did reveal that the top vote-getter was J'ohn J'onzz, who pointedly was not on the new team. Dooley also explicitly named Peacemaker as the character with the fewest votes, and to no great surprise, Peacemaker wasn't on the team, either.

Of course, this being a Booster Gold blog, we'd be most interested to know how many votes Booster got. All we can know for sure was that it was more than three. Dooley listed all the characters, mostly write-ins, who got three or fewer votes, and Skeets got two votes! (Other two-vote getters were Angel and the Ape, Arisia, Beefeater, Brother Power the Geek, Catwoman, Deadman, Sue Dibny, Dove, Lady Flash, Maser, Mera, Nuklon, Peter Canon, Praxis, The Question, Red Star, Sandman, Snapper Carr, Valor, Wildcat, and the Wonder Twins. That some pretty good company, Skeets!)

However many votes Booster Gold got, the important takeaway is that he made the team. Maybe one day, Skeets will, too.

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I quote Scott Snyder, architect of the DC Absolute Universe, from his recent interview with Comic Watchers (Episode 254 via youtube.com/live/7_KXuTodUdU):

My job, just to be clear to everybody out there what my relationship is to DC right now, is that I got a writing contract to write a certain amount of books over the next couple years. It was really just kind of one flagship book and then books that involve the meta story, the All-In number one special. We're planning, without giving too much away, but big spoiler, we're planning a second beat of that meta story, a big event, towards the end of this year. Really excited about that. So I'll be involved in that, and then I reup again. I'm reupping now for another year to sort of get to the big finale of that story in '26-'27.

So will we see the resolution of Booster Gold's disappearance story "towards the end" of 2025, or will we have to wait until 2027?

Inquiring minds want to know.

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Last April, J.M. Dematteis posted to his blog, jmdematteis.com, pictures of the late Keith Giffen's plots for Booster Gold Volume 2, #43, and for some reason, I bookmarked them but never posted about them here at Boosterrific.

I'm correcting that oversight now.

This is page one of the issue, with Giffen's signature thumbnail plotting on the left and finished art (by Chris Batista, Rich Perrotta, Hi-Fi Designs) on the right.

I enjoy Bastista's work (I even own some), but side by side, I definitely prefer the Keith Giffen-drawn comic.

By all means, visit jmdematteis.com to see some more.

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