Reminder: today's the day that you can get your hands on Trinity: Daughter of Wonder Woman #1 with the previously mentioned Booster Gold corgi on the cover.

While you're at your Local Comic Shop, you might want to consider checking out Action Comics #1087, which features a guest appearance by Booster Gold's 25th-century employer, the Space Museum (as can be seen in the preview available at AIPTcomics.com).

And as if that's not enough excitement for one day, be aware that also out today is Fire and Ice: When Hell Freezes Over #3, which makes it explicitly clear that "I Can't Believe It's Not the Justice League" (long treated as an out-of-continuity tale) in JL Classified in 2005 is canon in the modern Rebirth-era DCU.

words by Joanne Starer, pictures by Stephen Byrne, editorial note by (presumably) Andrea Shea

Now if only we could get Booster Gold himself to actually appear in a comic book again...

Comments (6) | Add a Comment | Tags: aiptcomics.com continuity fire ice new releases previews space museum

con•ti•nū′i•y, n
1. The state or quality of being continuous.
2. a continuous series or succession; unbroken, coherent, whole.

"Continuity." Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged Second Edition, edited by Jean L. McKechnie, Collins World, 1977, pp. 395

It's a good topic for the start of a new year.

Booster Gold being written out of DC's current "All In" era got me thinking about this.

Ever since Justice League International volume 3 #1 in late 2011, I've been chronicling new releases of Booster Gold's adventures as taking place in what I call "New 52 Continuity." That was certainly necessary at the time, as the then-continuity of the mainstream DCU in the wake of changes to history in Flashpoint was, for most characters, very different than what had come before. Since everyone's personality is heavily influenced by their experiences, and the characters in the New 52 could no longer be assumed to have the same experiences as their pre-Flashpoint selves, these characters were, to a significant degree, entirely new people (Alan Scott), even when DC pretended that they were not (Clark Kent).

Then came 2015's Convergence, which proved the New 52 Booster Gold and the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths Booster Gold (who I called "Original Gold" or "OG Booster Gold") really were two distinctly different characters living two distinctly different lives. It was like Barry Allen meeting Jay Garrick in "Flash of Two Worlds!" in 1961's The Flash #123 (arguably the single most important story in DC's history, as it first defined the DC Multiverse).

However, in 2016, Rebirth repaired Flashpoint's broken history, and in the years since, further revisions to reality following Death Metal have made it clearer that the pre- and post-Flashpoint continuities have now been fully merged (Wallace West). So which continuity are we in now?

The longest single gap between Booster Gold in-continuity appearances coincided with the Rebirth era, between Bat-Mite #4 in 2015 and Action Comics #992 in 2018. (The Booster Gold/The Flintstones Special was between those two, but it is set in the "Hanna-Barbera Beyond" universe, and it remains unclear which, if any, continuity that Booster Gold belongs to.) It seems logical in hindsight that Action Comics #992 represents the start of a new era, the first (re)appearance of a Booster Gold with a post-Crisis on Infinite Earths history.

Therefore, I think it's past time to update Boosterrific to recognize the modern era of stories as post-Rebirth continuity. I will retroactively make that change beginning with Action Comics #992.

Hopefully, Booster Gold will return to the DC Universe before it becomes necessary to recognize another fundamental change to its ongoing continuity.

Comments (3) | Add a Comment | Tags: continuity website update

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?

Comments (3) | Add a Comment | Tags: bleedingcool.com comicbook.com continuity hollywoodreporter.com rumors russ burlingame

Friday afternoon, The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that 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.

"We're starting to figure out how continuity works," [DC Comics co-publisher Dan] DiDio said about the process, noting that reboots and complicated retcons are what happens when "things stop making sense."

I'm glad that DiDio, who has overseen DC Comics' output since 2004, has finally realized the value of continuity to the types of stories that his company sells. Better late than never, I guess.

Anyway, I'm sure that what you want to know, as a visitor to a Booster Gold fan site, is "how will this affect Booster Gold?" The answer looks to be: Pretty significantly.

DiDio made the announcement at the "DC Nation" panel of this past weekend's New York Comic Convention accompanied with an illustrated graphic. Bleeding Cool spent most of the weekend pouring over the visible bits of that timeline. I can't make out anything, but Rich Johnston seems to think it restores most of the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths continuity as the third generation of DC heroes.

If that is to be believed, it looks like Booster Gold's history once again includes his joining the original "Bwah-ha-ha" Justice League International alongside Blue Beetle. Also restored: Infinite Crisis and Justice League: Generation Lost. Is there time for 52 to have happened in there somewhere? One can only hope.

Will any of this ever make it to print? Will the short-lived New 52 continuity be abandoned? How can Convergence be shoehorned into this new chronology? Who knows. Maybe we'll find out after Doomsday Clock finally ticks down in December.

Comments (2) | Add a Comment | Tags: 2019 bleedingcool.com continuity conventions dan didio hollywoodreporter.com new york comic con rich johnston

DCComics.com released some alternate covers for upcoming issues of Heroes in Crisis via , including this J.G. Jones alternate featuring Booster Gold and Harley Quinn.

It looks like that will be a 1-in-50 "chase" variant, meaning that comic shops will get one for every fifty of the regular covers they order. (For obvious reasons, these are also called "incentive" variants, as they incentivize shops to order more comics than they otherwise would.) Comic shops price these rarer variants according to the purchase threshold, so expect to pay a pretty penny to acquire this cover, probably three or more times the $4 cover price.

There will also be 1-in-100 and 1-in-200 variants, the second of which is by Francesco Mattina and depicts a very bloody Harley wearing Booster's broken visor. Good luck finding that one for less than $50.

In addition to those rare variants, DC also released the Ryan Sook standard alternate covers for the first three Heroes in Crisis issues. Each depicts an "incident report" based on more traumatic moments in the lives of DC heroes. These are purportedly from the files of Sanctuary, "a facility designed to allow superheroes to process the trauma of those not-so-heroic moments." These traumatic moments include the death of Superman, Batman's broken back, Aquaman's lost arm, and Jason Todd's death. Oddly, they also include Wonder Woman's assassination of Maxwell Lord.

That seems to imply that Lord has died at Wonder Woman's hand. Where does this fit in continuity?

When last we saw him in the pages of Justice League vs Suicide Squad (2016), Lord was still alive and continuing his villainous ways. Since the original Justice League International never existed and Ted Kord is still alive in the DCnU, the events kicking off Infinite Crisis that led directly to Lord's death and eventual rebirth must have played out somewhat differently than originally seen in Wonder Woman #219 (2005) and Brightest Day (2010). Does this cover reference that old continuity destroyed by Flashpoint? Or are we being given a glimpse of a as yet unrevealed relationship between Lord and Wonder Woman in the DCnU? (Could Lord be behind the deaths at Sanctuary?)

Maybe we'll find out more when Heroes in Crisis finally sees print.

Comments (0) | Add a Comment | Tags: continuity covers dccomics.com harley quinn heroes in crisis jg jones max lord rebirth ryan sook wonder woman