I'll let you in on a little secret: I wasn't always a huge Booster Gold fan.

Which is not to say that I didn't consider myself fortunate to have first met Booster Gold in 1985, when I found his debut appearance in Booster Gold Volume 1 #1 sitting on the magazine rack at my local convenience store.

Even at a young age, I had seen enough Super Friends episodes to recognize that Booster Gold was lampooning traditional superhero ethos and consumer culture in a way I immediately found equally engaging and endearing. At the same time, I was still impressionable enough that if anyone had sold Flakies cereal, I would have begged my parents to buy a box.

I was devastated when his comics were canceled, but it would take another twenty years before I would call Booster Gold my favorite comic book character. The truth is that my first love in comics was Captain Carrot, the cosmic carrot-chewing leader of DC Comics' Amazing Zoo Crew.

The Zoo Crew's adventures were overloaded with smile-inducing puns, and the pop culture references read like a long-form Mad Magazine segments. I read and re-read each issue until its cover fell off. I spent years rebuilding my collection with better copies. I think I currently own the entire series in triplicate.

It's entirely possible that Captain Carrot would still be my favorite comic book character if DC hadn't canceled the Zoo Crew in 1983. Even then it took years before I was willing to let another character take his place at the top of my personal pantheon. After reading a lot of books from a lot of companies, I decided that my second love in comics was a key member appearing in Justice League International. However, that wasn't Booster Gold but Batman.

Specifically, I loved the Batman still more driven detective than deified super hero. I spent summers watching syndicated reruns of Batman's 1960s television series, and I grew up respecting his innate ability to solve riddles and escape deathtraps with nothing more than his honed mind.

As the 80s and 90s progressed, I bought every Batman comic I could afford. I watched Batman grow increasingly grimdark as he relied evermore on his wealth at the expense of his wits. Ironically, this made him more popular than ever with the reading public. Like any jealous lover, I did not appreciate my hero growing away from me. (And yes, I'm aware that my emotional, nostalgic bias for "the Batman I first met" is its own set of problems, but are ex-lovers ever rational?) Which brings us back to Booster.

About the time that I decided that Batman and I should just be friends, Booster Gold was returning to the limelight with a tragic turn in Countdown to Infinite Crisis. Despite never being my favorite hero, I'd been following Booster's adventures for years, even through the wasteland of Extreme Justice and the lean years that followed.

Booster's subsequent rise from the ashes in 52 finally made me realize how truly unique he was. I couldn't name another character who had survived such a long journey from origin to the triumph of saving a multiverse. With that realization, Boosterrific.com was born.

I now gladly call Booster Gold my favorite character, and I'm grateful he was willing to wait for me to come around. I assume that eventually, everyone will eventually realize Michael Jon Carter's greatness. Time has always been on Booster Gold's side.

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Assuming you live in a place where your weekly comics shipments haven't been affected by blizzards or power outages or shipping delays, you'll find this at your Local Comic Shop today:

Despite having a different title and being marked as issue number one, this is the second half of Generations: Shattered, released last month. You can find a preview online at comic-watch.com.

Also available today is Future State: Suicide Squad #2, which continues the adventures of Gold Beetle. Her connection to Booster is made clearer in this issue, with a brief cameo by none other than our beloved Chronal Crusader plus a significant role for Skeets in the era of DC One Million!

Buy both of them and make Skeets happy.

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Two Saturdays ago, I directed you to Russ Burlingame's newly-created Indiegogo campaign for his "Best Movie Ever: A Totally Jerkin' Book" critical history of the Josie and the Pussycats movie. At the time, I wrote

If this goes really well for Russ, I'm betting he'll finally re-release those "Gold Exchange" columns in book form. I'd really like to get my hands on that book.

Burlingame listened. He soon updated his campaign with this promise:

If the campaign reaches $5,000, I'll provide everyone who bought the book with a PDF copy of a collected edition of my "Gold Exchange" columns, which ran on ComicRelated and Blog@Newsarama from about 2006 until 2011. The Gold Exchange was a monthly interview column in which I and the creators of the comic provided a running "commentary track" on Booster Gold.

The ebook will be free, but at $5,000, those who are interested will also be able to purchase a paperback copy of The Gold Exchange, which features interviews with Dan Jurgens, Geoff Johns, Rick Remender, J.M. DeMatteis, and Keith Giffen. This collection is something I had meant to print back in 2011 and put the content together to do so, but ran out of time and resources and ultimately left it unfinished.

Well, good news, Booster boosters! He's now well past $5,000! Hooray!

It's not too late to join this party. For as little as $15, you can secure your own link-rot proof "Gold Exchange" eBook on IndieGoGo.com. Then, if you like, you'll have the opportunity to own a print copy of Booster Gold's oral history.

That's a small price to pay for a unique companion piece to place on your bookshelf beside Booster Gold: 52 Pick-Up and your other Booster Gold Volume 2 collections.

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I was working on something else to post here today, but I ran out of time (or, more accurately, I overloaded on work).

In any event, by way of apology, I'm going to lean on Booster booster Cort, who recently added this piece, drawn by his friend, Julius-LZL, to his Booster Gold commission sketchbook:

click to see much larger on Twitter.com

This scene is a re-imagining of Booster Gold's first meeting with Doomsday, originally presented in Justice League America #69. If it had gone down this way in 1992, today we'd probably be calling Doomsday "Cupcake."

Thanks for bailing me out, Cort (especially since you didn't know that's what you'd be doing).

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It's been half a year since we last saw images from Susan's Booster Gold sketchbook, but that doesn't mean she hasn't been busy.

Susan has posted both of these beauties to her Twitter account in recent months:

Jim Calafiore

Jeremy Haun

I think they're both pretty darn Boosterrific.

Don't forget that you can see more of Susan's pieces in her Flickr.com account.

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