Cort's back with more Booster Gold sketchbook pages! He writes

These are a fun and varied mix of styles so it was nice to add them all to my collection. Which is now 59 pieces large! 2020 has had a lot of downs and twists and turns, but it has been fruitful for having artists open their lists for mail-in commissions, and I've been very lucky and very grateful for that.

Jon Bagdanove

Will Conrad

Elsa Charretier

Nick Prolix

Way to find the bright side of everyone being stuck at home without regular jobs in 2020, Cort! (And we're grateful that you shared your luck with us.)

You can see Cort's full Booster Gold sketchbook online at imgur.com.

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Quick recap: In early 2021, Booster Gold will be appearing in a two-part mini-series, Generations: Shattered (January 15) and Generations: Forged (February 23). This story will not be related to the "Future State" event DC is publishing over the same period. (More details available in these Boosterrific posts.)

Until now, we've talked only about Shattered, but we're finally starting to get some good information about the second half of the series. Noah Dominguez and CBR.com and Michael Doran at Gamesradar.com have the advanced solicitation text:

GENERATIONS FORGED #1
written by DAN JURGENS, ANDY SCHMIDT, and ROBERT VENDITTI
art by BRYAN HITC, MIKE PERKINS, BERNARD CHANG, PAUL PELLETIER, and others
covers by LIAM SHARP and RAFAEL ALBUQUERQUE

Dispersed through time by the villain Dominus, our ragtag team of generational heroes -- featuring 1939 Batman, Kamandi, Superboy, Steel, Starfire, Sinestro, Booster Gold, and Dr. Light -- must find a way to restore the timeline... and what they ultimately discover is something far, far greater You'll have to read it to believe it as time dies... and generations rise!
ON SALE February 23, 2021

standard cover by Liam Sharp

alternate cover by Rafael Albuquerque

Booster boosters know that our hero's planned origin story relied heavily on Superboy's continuity which was erased from the DC Universe by the original Crisis on Infinite Earths. It will be pretty cool to see the two characters finally interacting.

By the way, if you don't recognize "the villain Dominus," Russ Burlingame has the explainer of this 1990s Superman foe at Comicbook.com.

It's looking like it'll be a very Boosterrific 2021! Hooray!

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Booster Gold doesn't show up in any of DC's books this week, so let's talk about next week, where we should expect our hero to make a cameo appearance in Underworld Unleashed: The 25th Anniversary Edition.

For those of you who weren't reading comics in 1995, Underworld Unleashed was that year's universe-wide "crisis" crossover event. The demon Neron engaged in a campaign tempting the inhabitants of the DCU to sell their souls for a taste of greater power and influence

For obvious reasons, many villains were quick to agree to the bargain, and even some heroes found the temptation impossible to resist. Those who accepted were warped into XTREME versions of their former selves. (The influence of Underworld Unleashed is painfully evident in the current, never-ending Death Metal series, which probably plays a role in DC's decision to reprint it now.)

Eventually, the remaining heroes rallied their fractured teams (divided at the time into the Justice League America, Justice League Task Force, and Extreme Justice) to confront the growing evil.

Sometimes these group panels are like playing "Where's Booster?"

Despite being far from a moral paragon, Booster Gold was never approached by Neron, leaving our hero at the fringes of the story. He made cameo appearances in only two panels in the three issues in the mini-series (issues #2 and #3). And while the crossover event spilled over into two issues of the ongoing Extreme Justice series, Booster was mired in a sub-plot about Firestorm's immaturity and missed out on events when Star Sapphire made life difficult for his teammates in issue #10.

(Ironically, Booster would succumb to the temptations of a different evil manipulator just two months later in Extreme Justice #12 as culmination of a long-running subplot. One imagines that Extreme Justice editor Ruben Diaz, knowing what he had planned for future issues of his series, used his influence as assistant editor of Underworld Unleashed to keep Booster out of the event. That's the sort of role that editors used to play behind the scenes before DC Comics' parent company Warner Bros decided they were an unnecessary expense.)

If you like the 1990s DCU, especially if you like the villains, then you'll get a kick out of the 25th anniversary collection. Personally, I'm still saving up for the inevitable Extreme Justice omnibus. I mean, if DC is reprinting the 90s, they might as well go straight for the top (or bottom, depending on your point of view).

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If you read Detective Comics #1027 back in September, you might remember its last page:

When I saw that last panel, I thought, "what the heck is Generations: Future State?" The answer wasn't immediately clear because DC was keeping its plans to itself.

We eventually learned that Future State is going to be a two-month alternate-Earth event interrupting whatever it is that passes for continuity in the DC Rebirth Universe. But how would this new title connect to Dan Jurgens' Generations comic which we'd already heard solicited as Generations: Shattered? (Or was Generations: Shattered a different book altogether? How many Generations books were there going to be?)

Despite what we may have guessed, according to Newsarama Senior Editor Chris Arrant, they aren't related at all.

"Originally, we were going to touch on what's coming with Future State," Dan Jurgens, one of Generations' writer/artists told Newsarama. "We're detouring from that a bit to focus more on our own story."

In other words, for readers under the impression that Generations: Future State #1 (as mentioned in Detective Comics #1027) on September 15 and Generations: Shattered #1 announced by DC on September 9 are two distinct projects, they are not. They are one and the same. The one-shot was renamed from 'Future State #1' to 'Shattered #1' sometimes in between its September 9 announcement and whenever Detective Comics #1027 went to the printers prior to that. DC has also seemingly made the editorial decision to remove any story connection between Generations and Shattered.

The 'Generations' story will play out next in January 5's Generations: Shattered, and then continue in February with Generations: Forged.

Whew, 2020 has been a mess, hasn't it? Thanks to Newsarama for finally setting that record straight and untangling all those names and projects. (I recommend that you read the full article at at Gamesradar.com for all the details.)

Personally, I'm glad that the two events are unlinked. Future State sounds like it's going to be a lot, and I still suffer a little PTSD from trying to keep up with all those Convergence mini-series back in 2015.

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On October 7, 2019, I wrote (based on news from HollywoodReporter.com):

"DC finally plans to release their comprehensive Rebirth continuity in 2020. That's a mere 9 years after they threw out decades of character development in a bid to boost sales."

Well, guess what DC's plans are for 2021?

"It now appears as though DC's comic book line could be abandoning the idea of a single, shared continuity in favor of a multiverse / metaverse / omniverse model in which each individual comic will have its own story to tell, without much concern for what's going on in other titles across the publishing line."

So says Russ Burlingame at ComicBook.com. This merry-go-round is starting to make me dizzy.

Burlingame's report is based on a post from BleedingCool.com, which qualifies DC's plan thusly:

But what the DC Omniverse will mean is greater creative freedom, less interference by editors (or publishers), and no one saying "you can't use that character, they died in City of Bane/got lost in a Dark Dimension/went evil and currently approaching Gotham, slowly, with all her plants."

Longtime readers of Boosterrific.com know that I consider "continuity" to be a synonym for "character development." If DC fractures their Universe into an Omniverse, instead of having one dynamically developing Booster Gold character with a single continuity threading through many stories, there will be an infinite number of Booster Golds, each with his own continuity of appearances. That doesn't sound very simple to me. Unless they intend for there to be one static Booster Gold character who never learns anything or does anything new. I can't wait to spend money monthly on that.

But this plan would save DC Comics the cost of paying salaries to all those editors. I wonder how much longer until they can get robots to draw the panels?

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