Available tomorrow at your Local Comic Shop:

Yes, that is Booster Gold on the wraparound Daniel Sampere/Alejandro Sanchez cover.

I should also mention that Booster is definitely on the inside, too. Pretty significantly, in fact.

That should be all you need to know before deciding to pick up Dark Crisis #1, but if you want (slightly) more, AIPT.com has a preview of the first five pages (with Booster appearing on two of them!).

Buy this book and make Skeets happy.

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Booster Gold does not appear in this week's Justice League: Road to Dark Crisis #1, or as Booster booster Rob Snow recently called it, Countdown to Dark Crisis. (I love that title. I mean, seriously, DC, It was right there! )

Although there's no Booster to be seen here, there are still two things I find interesting about this issue.

Thing 1: Despite its cover blurb that "It All Starts Here," Dark Crisis #0 was already released for Free Comic Book Day, and that's not even counting the Justice League issue where the team died or the three Infinite Frontier mini-series that led up to their deaths. So it really began months ago. Or, really, decades ago, since this is very overtly a retread of the seminal 1985 Crisis on Infinite Earths.

Thing 2: Booster Gold isn't on the cover. And before you tell me that's not unusual for a book Booster Gold is not in, let me explain.

I'm talking specifically about the issue's variant cover by Chris Burnham & Nathan Fairbairn:

As you can see, Crisis on Infinite Earths' Pariah is sitting on a throne built of long-boxes of comics reading other comics featuring other famous DC "crisis" events. The book in his hand is the Silver Age Justice League of America Volume 1 #30 (1964), in which the JLA of Earth-One and the JSA of Earth-Two battle the Crime Syndicate of America of Earth-Three in a story called "The Most Dangerous Earth of All." (It's a great "meta" cover for an issue that expects its readers to know the ins-and-outs of 40 years of comic book history.)

More relevant to this blog are the three books on the floor at his feet: Final Crisis #1 (2008), Zero Hour: Crisis in Time #4 (1995), and Infinite Crisis #1 (2005). Booster Gold played a role in all of these mini-series events, even appearing on some of their covers. But he does not appear in any of these particular issues, just as he doesn't appear in or on this issue.

So what's interesting about that?, I hear you say. What's interesting about this cover that Booster isn't on is that he's still kind of on it!

On a cover like this, a cover celebrating the fantasy and history of comic books and multiverses, where else should we expect to find Booster Gold — the first character introduced to the DC Universe after the initial Crisis and a modern superhero whose sole desire is to be famous enough to be a character in comic books — than inside the comic book box by Pariah's left foot labeled "A - B"!

So close but yet so far, Booster.

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This week, DC is killing off the Justice League, which is bad for them but good for us because Booster Gold is on the third variant ("CVR D") card stock cover by Dan Jurgens and Norm Rapmund!

Yes, this cover is the rare self-homage, as Jurgens references his own work (inked by Brett Breeding) on the poster accompanying Superman #75 in 1993. (Superman dies once every thirty years, I guess.)

I have no reason yet to suspect that Booster Gold will actually be *in* the book, but *on* a book is good enough for me. Consider buying this comic and making Skeets happy.

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If you pay attention to DC's solicitations for upcoming issues, you may remember that the image solicited in October as the cover of Blue and Gold #6 was actually used on the cover to issue #4.

So what will the cover of issue #6 look like? In a word, this:

That's the cover that Lunar Distribution included in its Final Order Cutoff last week for books to be released February 22, which means there is a very high probability that it's what you'll be seeing in your Local Comic Shop in three weeks.

If you like what you see, I recommend a visit to artist Ryan Sook's Instagram, where you'll find this art without trade dress plus previews of some of his interior art.

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Today I'm going to tell you to go read someone else's website instead of this one, specifically the blog of Todd Klein.

Todd Klein is perhaps best known as the letterer of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, but knowledgeable Booster boosters will recognize him as the designer of the original 1980s "Booster Gold" logo. You know, the one I shamelessly ripped off for the logo of this here website. This one:

In a recent post, Klein reviewed the covers of Booster Gold volume 1 that have contributions by the legendary letterer Gaspar Saladino. Gaspar was not credited for his contributions at the time, and I have updated the Boosterrific database with Klein's expert information.

You can read Klein's post at at kleinletters.com.

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