As all Booster boosters know by now, DC has announced a new Blue Beetle/Booster Gold mini-series coming in July 2021. What you may not know is just how long it has taken to get to this blessed event. On Twitter, Dan Jurgens wrote:

To be clear, this is the third, maybe even fourth time this project has been on my board, the first in '88or '89. Nice to have it become a reality and even better to have the incredible Ryan Sook drawing it. So good! (@thedanjurgens, Twitter.com, Apr 21, 2021)

I can attest that 1988 is the date that fans first learned about it. What follows is the first in a series of three posts that originally appeared here on Boosterrific in June 2011:

In Boosterrific.com's never-ending quest to catalog every Booster Gold appearance in a DC publication, I recently perused several issues of DC's pre-Previews solicitations, Direct Currents. Many of the early issues include interviews with DC artists. The artist interviewed for the "People At Work" column in issue #8 (August, 1988) is Dan Jurgens.

The article -- presumably written by Paul Kupperberg -- includes a brief biography, including the facts that Jurgens was inspired to read comics by the 1966 Batman television show, and that his first work for DC on Warlord resulted from a chance meeting with Mike Grell at a comic book convention. It even contains a bit about the origin of Booster Gold. But the part I found most interesting was this paragraph:

"Then there's next year's ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN ANNUAL, which I'm co-writing with Jerry Ordway and pencilling. And, of course, the one project I'm really excited about is something that DC's still got in the planning stages, called THE BLUE AND THE GOLD, a new series starring Booster Gold with the Blue Beetle. They've gotten real popular as buddies in Justice League International, so I think a book co-starring the two of them is a natural. It's going to have that unique JLI flavor to it."

We know it was never released, but how close did DC come to publishing The Blue and the Gold series teaming Booster Gold and Blue Beetle?

It's worth noting that there was no Adventures of Superman Annual released in 1989, and that no Adventures of Superman Annual shares writing credit between Dan Jurgens and Jerry Ordway (though both contributed to Action Comics Annual in 1989 and several issues of Adventures of Superman). So it seems that DC was being very flexible with their schedule in the late 1980s.

Next time, we'll look for more clues about the series that almost never was in Justice League letter columns from the 1990s.

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"BREAKING NEWS" is not something that a Booster Gold blog has much opportunity to say, but I think this counts.

DCComics.com has just posted... well, here it is in its entirety:

DC Comics Proudly Presents 'Blue & Gold' by Dan Jurgens and Ryan Sook!
DC's two favorite underdogs (Blue Beetle and Booster Gold, not Dan and Ryan) launch their own eight-issue miniseries!

Michael Carter, aka Booster Gold. A scoundrel from the future armed with stolen technology, a time machine and a robot pal named Skeets, is intent on making a name for himself in the past!

Ted Kord, aka Blue Beetle. The inheritor of a proud legacy of crimefighting who had no powers to speak of, but who carried on the Blue Beetle legacy with just his wits and his fists...is armed with a whole lot of gadgets and a sharp sense of humor!

Together, they're going to make headlines in DC Comics' Blue & Gold, a limited eight-issue miniseries by Dan Jurgens and Ryan Sook launching this July!

Desperate to regain the spotlight, Booster Gold looks to attract the public's (and Justice League's) attention the same way any washed-up, second-rate hero would—social media. The not-so-tech-savvy hero from the 25th century enlists the help of his best friend, Blue Beetle, who possesses both the money and the brains to help his old pal navigate the scary world of internet influencers.

Watch out, evildoers, our heroes are live and online!

Don't miss Dan Jurgens's triumphant return to Booster Gold, teaming with all-star artist Ryan Sook (Legion of Super-Heroes), telling a tale filled with heart...and maybe even redemption for DC's two favorite underdogs!

Blue & Gold #1 (of 8) by Dan Jurgens and Ryan Sook arrives on July 20 with a cover by Sook ($3.99) and a card stock variant cover by Dave Johnson ($4.99).

For more information on Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Skeets, Time Travel, the DC Multiverse and the World's Greatest Super Heroes, visit http://www.dccomics.com, and follow DC on social media at @DCComics and @thedcnation.

(I apologize for reposting the entire solicitation in full, but it feels like a special occasion, like the announcement of an armistice treaty. The original text is posted at https://www.dccomics.com/blog/2021/04/21/dc-comics-proudly-presents-blue-gold-by-dan-jurgens-and-ryan-sook)

If that doesn't make your 2021, Booster boosters, nothing will! (Thanks to all who made sure I saw the news.)

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I'm back! And so is Booster Gold!

Booster booster Logan spotted our hero in the pages of today's The Other History of the DC Universe #3. It's a sight you may recognize.

Befitting its premise, The Other History of the DC Universe uses a lot of art from a lot of sources representing the history of the DC Universe. However, this panel isn't actually historical; it's allegorical. Blue Beetle, Mon-el, Darkseid, and many others weren't actually present for Superman's funeral.

This was the poster by Dan Jurgens and Brett Breeding released with Superman #75. It's meant to represent the entire DC Universe. To writer John Ridley's credit, that's how it is used in this issue.

When you head to your Local Comic Shop to pick up this cameo appearance, you may want to be aware that elsewhere, Gold Beetle is in Flash #768. Cameo appearances for everyone!

Skeets thanks you for your support.

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GamesRadar.com has the list of DC's June 2021 solicitations... and it seems slim. Counting reprint collections and hard covers, it looks like DC is planning to release only 73 total books in the entire month. (Eighteen of those — nearly 25% — have "Batman" or "Detective Comics" in their title.)

So setting aside previously announced trades (we're currently still expecting a Superman reprint collection in June), the bad news for Booster Gold is that there is no sign of our hero in the solicitations through the end of spring. Has our hero gone AWOL? What will we read in the meantime?

Also missing is Dan Jurgens, who hasn't had his name publicly attached to anything at DC since the cover to Infinite Frontier. (He's drawing the Heroes Reborn: Marvel Double Action due in June for Marvel.) Since Booster historically is most likely to show up in Jurgens' work, this bodes ill for our hero in the short-term future at least.

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You may recall that this time last week, I asked whether the "Linearverse" introduced in Generations Shattered and Generations Forged should count as continuity. That question got answered (in a roundabout way) when earlier this week Russ Burlingame took a break from writing books about movies to interview Generations writers Dan Jurgens, Robert Venditti, and Andy Schmidt in a spiritual successor to his old "Gold Exchange" column for ComicBook.com.

ComicBook: The idea that realities have always been there, just out of sight, rather than actually being destroyed, is a revelation to the characters here -- but is that how you view the worlds that are destroyed in each subsequent Crisis event? Certainly it's how The CW explicitly dealt with their post-Crisis multiverse.

Dan Jurgens: I hadn't thought about it that way, but I certainly see your point!

For me, on a personal level, I find it harder to accept the notion of entire planes of reality being destroyed, only to be recreated again. "Hiding" them or making them inaccessible actually seems much more believable. The amount of energy required to destroy and recreate universes is tremendous, after all.

Plus, we weren't going to change anything. The Linearverse was meant to stay much the way it had been, which is a place that is belt around DC's published history.

Robert Venditti: To steal from Dan a bit, I hadn't really thought of that. I don't know if it's important to me that definitive explanations are made. Mostly, I want to leave toys in the sandbox for other creative teams to play with. I think we've done that.

Andy Schmidt: One of the things that I generally want to shy away from as a creator is writing over someone else's work or saying that it never happened. Because it happened for the reader and for the creators who put those stories together. They're real and they're important to someone.

Most of the comics I grew up reading that got me into comics in the first place have been retconned so they never happened, but they're still what made me fans of those characters in the first place. So, for me, it's just kind of a respect thing for fans and creators both. If it's real to you — I should treat it as such. Generations Shattered and Forged gave us a platform to re-validate those "hidden" stories as you called them. To let readers and creators know we remember, and we still love those stories, while also crafting something new to introduce those takes on characters to new fans. It's challenging and it's fun and I think it's upbeat in the approach and hopefully in its execution.

I like the "it is what you want it to be" approach to the DC Universe — which in the past has made such titles as Formerly Known As The Justice League possible — so I'll choose to consider the story canon. Thanks, guys! I think I'm going to like this Linearverse.

Elsewhere in the interview, the creators also talk about why they chose the characters they chose to include in the story, as well as the long shadow Zero Hour cast on Generations. I recommend you read the whole article yourself at ComicBook.com.

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