So begins the first super-team team-up in the career of Booster Gold in 1986.

Sure, he'd fought alongside the Legion of Super-Heroes in Booster Gold #8 and #9, but he wasn't technically going by "Booster Gold" at the time. And he wouldn't join the Justice League International for another half-a-year.

As you can see, Booster had been called in by Magenta as backup for the Teen Titans in their struggle against Brother Blood. The 4-part storyline ran from New Teen Titans #28 through #31, all of which are collected in today's New Teen Titans Volume 12 reprint collection.

Though the stakes were high and many heroes were involved in the fight, Booster played but a small part in only a few panels in the middle two issues, #29 (above) and #30:

And that's that. Booster goes off to defend Washington D.C. and is not seen again for the rest of the story. At least we know he succeeded. Thanks to Booster Gold, Washington D.C. is still around today.

It may not be a glamourous job, but somebody's got to do it.

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The Internet buzz this weekend was all about DC's post-Future State solicitations coming this March. It looks like we're down to 20 titles in its shared DC Universe, which is a far cry from 52. But maybe less is more. DC certainly wants us to think so.

Anyway, the big news for Booster Gold fans is that our hero is featured on the cover of DC's tentpole March title: Infinite Frontier #0.

cover art by Dan Jurgens and Mikel Janin

Isn't that cover a beaut? (Thanks to Rob for making sure I saw it.)

HollywoodReporter.com confirms that Infinite Frontier is a one-shot, but most of the characters on its cover appear in one or more of the 19 other titles in the publisher's solicitations on GamesRadar.com. Conspicuously absent is any hint of where we might next see Blue Beetle and Booster Gold. (There are several reprint collections that will include Booster cameos — more on those later — but nothing new.)

Will Infinite Frontier be Blue and Gold's only appearance in this new DC Universe? (DC doesn't want to call it a reboot, but if it talks like a reboot....) Has their comic not yet been announced? Will they be playing a supporting role in someone else's comic? Or are they on that cover just because Dan Jurgens drew it?

Come to think of it, Jurgens' name isn't mentioned anywhere else in the solicitations, either. Batman Beyond was canceled, and Nightwing has been passed to the very capable hands of Tom Taylor. So what will Jurgens be up to? So far, mum's the word.

I hate to speculate about such things, but it sure would be nice to see Jurgens working on Booster Gold full time again.

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December brings us to end of our list of the twelve best Booster Gold comics. We've come full circle.

In the second entry on the list, 1986's Booster Gold #6, Skeets reveals Booster Gold's origin story to Superman for the first time. Thirty two years and several continuity reboots later, some things haven't changed. In our final entry, 2016's Action Comics #995, Skeets once again reveals Booster Gold's origin story to Superman.

Booster's creator Dan Jurgens took partial inspiration for Booster's origin from the Silver Age adventures of Superman. In this issue, he expands their connection by exploring the difference between the upbringing of the two characters. How much credit do their parents deserve for setting them on their respective heroic journeys? (Hint: a lot.)

The entire issue is rife with this sort of parallelism.

The story starts with Superman confronted by a Kryptonian policeman, the Eradicator, and it ends with Booster hunted by 25th-century federal agent Broderick (last seen in the excellent Booster Gold #18). Despite the comparable situations, Superman is seen as history's greatest hero while Booster Gold is considered nothing more than a criminal. Perception is reality, even in comic books.

By the way, since we're keeping track of such things, in their first meeting, Superman taught Booster Gold about the responsibility of using his super powers in Booster Gold #7. This time around, it's Booster's turn to explain the rules. I love that.

Perhaps the best thing about this issue is among its least consequential. The first time we visited this story, Booster's mother had died believing her son was a failure. It was long overdue that Ma Carter finally learn her only son would go on to become one of history's greatest heroes.

I think you can see why I include Action Comics #995 on my list of the twelve best Booster Gold comics.

And those twelve are just the tip of the iceberg. There are many, many more great Booster Gold comics to discover, and hopefully many more to come in the years ahead.

Here's to Booster Gold forever.

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The Greatest Hero The World Has Never Heard Of makes his triumphant return to the world of Dark Nights: Death Metal with this week's issue 6.

If you've got a really high definition monitor and a magnifying glass, you might have spotted our hero in the background of a panel in the issue preview available online at CBR.com, but Booster gets to play a bigger part later in the issue: He delivers a whole line of dialog!

But that's not the only place you'll see Booster this week. He also gets a cameo on the first page of Tales from the Dark Multiverse: Crisis on Infinite Earths (which should really be called Tales from the Dark Multiverse: Last Days of the Justice Society, but I digress). You can see Booster in CBR.com's preview of *that* issue.

(Oops. That panel might be something of a spoiler for last year's Tales from the Dark Multiverse: Infinite Crisis, if you haven't read that — and I don't blame you if you haven't. These What If? Dark Multiverse one-shots are starting to stack up. How many unhappy endings does one company need?)

And lest you think that you'd have to pick up one of these two issues to get a Booster Gold cameo appearance this week, think again. Booster is appearing in all the DC books this week in the house ad for Generations: Shattered #1. Here's the important bit:

(click the image above to link to the full ad)

That's a lot of Gold!

Buy any book from DC this week and make Skeets happy.

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Last week, Booster Gold appeared in the one-shot anthology DC's Very Merry Multiverse special, and the book immediately started selling for three times its cover price!

Okay, so the aftermarket mark-up has less to do with seeing Booster Gold inside Kingdom Come's Planet Krypton restaurant than the issue's being the first appearance of Kid Quick, the Flash of the upcoming Future State event. DC has promoted Kid Quick as a non-binary character, and even the "mainstream media" has taken notice.

While I'm always irritated by short-term comic speculation — especially these days, as the numbers of printed comics continues to fall — I'll not begrudge the introduction of a new non-binary hero. As I understand it, non-binary means the Kid will exhibit behavior outside the traditional binary male/female gender roles. I've consumed enough American pop culture to recognize that non-conforming gender characters have almost always represented as villains. For example, it's no accident that many of the designs of the troublemaking meta humans locked in the Gulag prison in the aforementioned Alex Ross and Mark Waid's 1996 Kingdom Come are the ones most outside the norms of what our society expects from "good" boys and girls.

(That was no accident. Ross painted such outsiders as Magenta from 1975's LGBTQ-friendly Rocky Horror Picture Show among the crowd to emphasize the point. In case I've given you the wrong idea, let me point out that one of the major themes of Kingdom Come is that the salvation of a fractured society lies in putting aside individual differences to embrace our shared humanity. It really is a great comic.)

Meanwhile, since I've wandered onto the subject of Kingdom Come, let's take a look at Booster Gold's only "appearance" in that mini-series:

A quarter-century later, that name drop led to "Twas the Night" in DC's Very Merry Christmas, which is a pretty cool legacy. Who can guess what we'll see in the next quarter century? Only your friendly neighborhood time-traveler knows for sure.

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