After Booster Gold was portrayed so heroically in his first issue, Booster Gold volume 1, number 2 really delivers the gut punch that maybe he's not really all that he's pretending to be. He starts face down in the gutter, his friends chew him out for his failures, it becomes clear his family is lost to him forever, and the issue ends with the death of his sidekick. What a downer!

Yet, in the midst of all that, we get one of the best Booster Gold pages in the character's history:

If you don't love that, you're reading the wrong blog!

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By my count, Booster Gold has appeared in over 770 comics. That's a lot of pages!

I think it'll be fun — and maybe even enlightening — to give them another look, one page per book, in chronological order of publication, in a new series I'm calling:

There's no better place to start than where it all started, on the first page of Booster Gold volume 1, number 1, released on October 29, 1985.

You might be surprised that I chose as my favorite page from his first appearance one that has so little actual Booster Gold in it. What can I say? I'm a sucker for metatextuality in fiction.

From the moment I picked this issue out of a convenience store magazine rack in early 1986, I've always loved that the first Booster Gold comic book opens on the idea of a Booster Gold comic book, specifically a comic book that publisher Skip Blaze hopes will save his entire company. Though I didn't realize it at the time, that's an especially bold start for a character designed to break the mold of what DC Comics was known for producing.

Fortunately for Booster boosters everywhere, Skip Andrews' (and Dan Jurgens') big gamble in 1985 sure has paid off.

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