Brighten your week with Kerrith Johnson's "Believe - Blue and Gold."

This is just one of several Blue and Gold inspired pieces that illustrator Kerrith Johnson has posted on his Tumblr blog this year. You can find even more of his work on his page at Deviant Art. Thanks to Morgenstern for the link.

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I suspect that the results of this poll pretty accurately represent the ratio of Boostlers to the larger Blue and Gold fan base.

Last week's poll question: What should Booster Gold fans be most thankful for from 2012? (45 votes)

No matter how you look at it, 2012 wasn't a very good year for Booster Gold fans. Besides the news that there might be a Booster Gold television show, there isn't anything else to crow over. So I put it to you, Booster boosters, what made you happy in 2012?

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We might be loyal to our Carter clan, but we still have some lingering animosity about the reboot, don't we?

Last week's poll question: So far as you are concerned, are Booster Gold and Blue Beetle friends or lovers? (41 votes)

I suspect that you knew after Tuesday that this next question was coming. Note that I'm not asking whether Blue and Gold are actually a couple, just whether you think of them as a couple. (It's an audience poll, not a quiz!)

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Over at Yahoo! Answers, Rachel has asked a very important question:

"How close are Booster Gold and Blue Beetle really?"

Micheal Jon Carter ("Booster Gold") and Ted Kord ("Blue Beetle") have over the past 25 years been teammates, rivals, and business partners, but most significantly friends. Both share the tragic loss of significant business fortunes. Booster supported Beetle through his battle with obesity and nursed him through a coma. Beetle stood up for Booster time and again against criticism of Booster's motives and maturity. Each is everything that the other could ask for in a friend.

Yes, of course they're friends. But what Rachel is really asking is whether Booster Gold and Blue Beetle are lovers.

Comic book readers recognize the pair from years of Justice League International adventures. Internet readers, however, are probably more familiar with the duo as the two-halves of the portmanteau "Boostle," or a very particular sub-genre of romantic fan fiction (itself called "slash fiction") portraying the friends as homosexual lovers.

Here at Boosterrific.com, I try to avoid the Boostle phenomenon. While I have nothing against fan fiction, and I whole-heartedly support anything that would bring Booster Gold to a larger audience, Boosterrific.com is a chronicle of the adventures of a character owned and published by DC Comics. And in DC Comics' comics, Booster Gold and Blue Beetle are most certainly not romantically entwined.

I've wondered from time to time if I'm doing Booster Gold fandom a disservice by ignoring the Boostle community. I justify my decision by saying that even a site striving to be as all-encompassing as Boosterrific.com has to draw the line somewhere. Certainly, the Boostle-ers don't need this site to have their fun.

Therefore, Rachel, to answer your question, until such time as DC Comics officially sanctions a romantic relationship between Blue and Gold by including it in their published canon, Booster Gold and Blue Beetle are really just friends so far as Boosterrific.com is concerned. Really, really good friends.

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Happy Halloween! To celebrate the holiday, we DC comic book bloggers are banding together to give you what you want most: reviews of DC's "Ghosts" annuals from 1998! (What's that you say, you'd rather see more pics of hot chicks cosplaying? Hey, it wouldn't really be Halloween if we gave you what you really wanted, now would it?)

While Booster doesn't actually appear in any of the 1998 annuals, that's not going to stop me from joining in the ghoulish fun. Booster has encountered spiritual apparitions of the undead, including the time he led the Super Buddies to Hell to recover Ice in 2005's JLA Classified #6 and 7!

Ok, so it wasn't actually Booster's intention to rescue Ice from Hell. In fact, it hadn't been Booster's intention to go to Hell at all. Booster was just blowing off some steam when things got out of hand, and he accidentally wished the team to Hell. It wasn't Booster's finest moment.

Arguably, nothing about his time with the Super Buddies represents any of Booster's finest moments. Because Blue Beetle had something of a makeover in recent appearances in L.A.W. and Birds of Prey, Booster is used as comic relief and scapegoat for the duo. We Booster-philes may chafe at seeing Booster playing the fool, our raw feelings should be salved by the fact that he's doing it in support of his best friend.

Booster himself is surprisingly resilient to finding himself in Hell. This could be a psychological defense, or perhaps Booster is truly an atheist (as he himself stated as part of a punchline in 1988's Justice League International Annual #2). In any event, he remains skeptical when his friends encounter the apparition of their long-dead teammate, Ice (who died in 1994's Justice League Task Force #14).

Is she Ice, or isn't she? Is the team in Hell, or isn't it? The answers to these questions aren't immediately clear, and that very uncertainty is key to the psychological insecurity at the heart of this ghost story. No matter how you think about it, you don't have the answers. That's not a very comfortable position for anyone, much less heroes who are required to make split-second decisions with lives in the balance.

Published over a decade after their best work on Justice League International , this issue's mix of humor, action, and psychological drama is indicative of the best works of co-writers Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis. If you like your super-hero comics not to fit within any easily definable genre, you'll find something to love in this issue.

If you're looking for something else spooky to pass the time on today, try something from one of these 17 other scary DC bloggers:

• "Ghosts" @ The Aquaman Shrine
• "Bough Breaks" @ Batman: Gotham Knights Online
• "Swamp Thing's Ghost Dance" @ The BLOG from the BOG - Swamp Thing
• "Life Itself" @ Captain's JLA Homepage
• "Ghosts' - The Corpse Corps!" @ Corps Conjecture
• "What Creeps Out The Creeper?" @ DC Bloodlines
• "The Distance Gone" @ Diana Prince is the New Wonder Woman
• "Shoe Shine.. Back from the Dead" @ Firestorm Fan
• "The Death Sentence" @ Great Krypton!
• "Happy Halloween" @ I Am The Phantom Stranger
• "Heart's Afire" @ The Idol-Head of Diabolu
• "Legend of Driq" @ Indigo Tribe
• "Role Model" @ Justice League Detroit
• "Ghosts" @ Power of the Atom
• "Zor" @ Siegel & Shuster: Mythmakers
• "High-Speed Hauntings" @ Speed Force
• "Ragman - Ripped to Shreds!" @ The Suit of Souls

Thanks to Chad Bokelman of corpsconjecture.blogspot.com for putting this crossover together.

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