Earlier this month, DC made several creators of the DC All In Special available to reporters. You can find snippets of the conversations at several websites, but I think these two posted this week at thecomicsourceblog.com are particularly interesting.

First, from the article "DC’s All In Publishing Initiative and Darkseid’s Evolution with Scott Snyder and Wes Craig: The Comic Source":

Reporters: Booster Gold is elevated to a new height in this issue as the person bridging 2 universes. Why is he the right person to connect these two storylines and will that remain his role in the future?

Scott Snyder: I was talking to Josh [Williamson] and we wanted somebody who hasn't been a huge part of the Justice League, but who would have a different perspective on it and be so excited to be welcomed in. So, we thought of a lot of different characters you wouldn't expect to be on there, from Ambush Bug to whoever. Then it was, you know what, Booster has this really powerful view of it because having been, not only a time traveler, but specifically being familiar with this kind of resplendent Superman inflected future of Legion, it feels like he would understand this moment in the trajectory of the DCU narrative, and he would see its importance. And so if he was kind of both the comical character who you're like. How could he be invited and then you start to get a sense of what it means to him to be here at this moment because he knows it goes a certain way and then suddenly when that moment doesn't go that way, he understands the gravity of why and how badly things can go because of that. So he felt like just the right kind of figure to bring both those things and we were really happy when Dan Jurgens liked the idea when we saw him.

We were on the Superman set in Atlanta and he was there. It was me and Josh and him and that's where we told him about it. When we got to visit the James Gunn Superman set and we're like, what if he hates it and we have to change it? But he liked it.

For the record, that meeting of Superman writers on the set of the Superman movie in Atlanta was back in May. So it would seem this has been in the works for a while.

And second, from the article "DC’s All In Publishing Initiative and Darkseid’s Evolution with Joshua Williamson and Daniel Sampere: The Comic Source":

Reporters: What went into the redesign of Booster Gold and his popped collar?

Josh Williamson: That's not a redesign. I'm not sure how much I can explain about this without getting to in the weeds with spoilers for the future. So, in the beginning he's wearing the last costume he wore. He is the costume from Blue and Gold that Dan Jurgens design with Ryan Sook. That's the costume he's wearing in at the beginning, and then we originally pointed it out [in the story], but we cut the line because we thought it was a little weird for Booster in the middle of this very bad situation, to say, wait a minute, why am I back in my original costume, minus the cape? Which is funny cause Dan Jurgens and I had this whole talk about this, because it was originally because Booster really idolized Superman. So when he would show up really early on, he would sometimes wear the cape. And I was thinking about that, but Danny had already drawn that page and I was thinking, he should have a cape. And then Dan Jurgens was the one that said Booster only wears the cape during press conferences, and I said perfect, good. OK, don't worry about it. We don't have to worry about this, but he's wearing his original first appearance costume in in the last scene, and there's a reason for that. That is a spoiler for future stuff. Let's just say something happened to Booster that made him revert back to his original stuff, so I can't go beyond that without giving out spoilers for much further down the line.

"Revert back to his original stuff"? Hmm. Sounds like something a Time Master would need to investigate.

Those two articles contain even more All in Booster Gold info than I reposted here, so you might want to go read them before you get your hands on DC All In Special #1 next week.

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I'm a reclusive misanthrope, so I have to rely on awesome Booster boosters like Steven Palchinski to alert me when cool Booster Gold info shows up on social media, info like this post from Dan Jurgens on X:

Hmm. That would mean that Booster Gold aged about three years over the first sixteen months of Booster Gold comics, and then aged only another three-or-so years over the next nineteen years nine months of comics? That seems... too young.

But who am I to argue with Booster's creator? In the past twelve years, The New 52, DC Rebirth, and Infinite Frontier have all consecutively rewritten the history of the DCU (with occasional contributions and input from Jurgens), so if Dan Jurgens says our hero is still under 30, I guess Booster Gold is under 30 years old.

Thanks, Steven!

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The TwoMorrows website says that the Spring 2024 issue of Comic Book Creator will be released on April 10, but my issue arrived in my mailbox late last week. That may be because I ordered it as soon as it was announced that the issue's feature interview would be with Booster Gold creator Dan Jurgens!

And what a great long-form interview it is! Over the course of 33 pages, interviewer Greg Biga asks Dan about his entire career, from his early days breaking into the business working on Mike Grell's Warlord through his experiences working on characters like Flash Gordon, Spider-Man, Thor, and, of course, lots of Superman.

The interview reveals some great information that will delight Jurgens fans, including some trivia nuggets even I had never heard before. From page 57:

CBC: I'm going to skip past asking the questions you've heard a thousand times, and circle back to do follow-up questions on "Death of Superman." With that story having happened, with "Funeral for a Friend," was one of the main reasons behind that to show how relevant this character of light and hope was?

Dan: That's going to be something of a long answer and, for part of it, we do have to come back to the overall discussion of "Death of Superman" a little bit. For some time, I'd had in the back of my mind that I could make a big adventure story out of killing off a title character and investigating how his absence affects his friends, family, and the people who rely on him.

By the way, I first thought of the idea when I was working on Booster Gold. Booster wasn't like any of the other characters in the DC Universe at the time, and the book was struggling to find an audience. Readers seemed to think Booster was a jerk. That's why I introduced his twin sister, Michelle. That way I could kill off Booster but we could keep the book going as Michelle stepped into her brother's role playing a somewhat more conventional hero while we explored what Booster had gotten right and wrong. Kind of an evil twin, good twin scenario. I was going to retitle it Busty Gold.

I wish I'd know that during Women's History Month! Can you imagine "good twin" Michelle taking Booster's place in the Justice League International?

For more gold nuggets like these, be sure to pick up your own copy of Comic Book Creator #34 at twomorrows.com.

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Look what showed up my mailbox!

Believe it or not, that's my first Dan Jurgens sketch. I wasn't expecting it — I was only expecting Dan to sign a copy of Russ Burlingame's The Gold Exchange: The Deluxe Edition, not sketch in it — and I was not emotionally prepared for how much I was going to love it.

I love the high collar. I love the shades of gray washes (the exact colors of Booster's personal ethics). I especially love how the sketchiness of it makes Booster look older, as though Booster has been growing old along with me.

So now I've got everything I want in life. It's all downhill from here.

Big thanks to Jurgens (and Russ Burlingame) for making all my previously unrecognized dreams come true.

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This week DC released The Return of Superman 30th Anniversary Special, which reunites Dan Jurgens and the other creators who made the original event such a compelling read that it's worth revisiting three decades later. I enjoyed reading it, but I am duty bound to point out that Booster Gold is not in that book.

Of course, longtime Booster boosters know that's an appropriate omission. At the time, Booster Gold's superhero career looked to be just as dead as Superman with no clear signs that he would ever be returning.

Doomsday destroyed Booster's original 25th-century powersuit in Superman #74 (written by Dan Jurgens), and Booster spent most of the 1993 summer of "Regin of the Superman" on the sidelines as the Justice League put itself back together under Wonder Woman's leadership. Superman would be back at work by October, but it would take Booster another 4 years before his powers were even close to the what they had been before. In fact, the restoration came exactly 50 months later, in Superman #124 (written by Dan Jurgens).

Which is not to say that Booster plays no role behind the scenes in The Return of Superman 30th Anniversary Special. The 2010 story "The Tomorrow Memory," beginning Booster Gold volume 2 #28 (written by guess who), establishes that Booster Gold, in his role as Time Master, was in Coast City while it was being destroyed by Cyborg Superman.... to ensure that it was destroyed.

That may not seem very "heroic," but without Booster Gold, Time Master, it's possible that no one would consider The Return of Superman worth revisiting 30 years later. Being a Time Master is a thankless job, but somebody's got to do it.

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