After I learned that my second favorite superhero, the leader of the funny animal Zoo Crew, Captain Carrot, played a pivotal role in Harley Quinn #30 two weeks ago, I decided to look back at the previous issue to see if the good Captain was in that one, too.

Carrot wasn't. But Booster was. Or, I should say *a* Booster was.

Harley Quinn #29

There in the top left of page 30, that's the hypothetical hyena-Booster of some imaginary Earth proposed by a figment of Harley's imagination in Adam Warren's "Hyena Anxiety" backup story.

Although now that the DC Multiverse is infinite again, I guess every imaginary Earth, even the ones from dreams and trippy hyena thought experiments, have to exist somewhere. And comic books being what they are, that pretty much means a Booster Gold / hyena-Booster Gold team-up is inevitable. Does that mean I should go ahead and start a distinct continuity for hyena-Booster?

Oh, Harley. You don't need a mallet to make my head hurt.

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The previews at AIPTComics.com don't give the impression that Booster Gold will be in any of this week's new releases. That doesn't mean I didn't see Booster Gold while looking.

The plot of Multiversity: Harley Screws Up the DCU involves a time travel mishap that unintentionally allows Starro the Star Conqueror to take over the Earth. If that sounds like a familiar scenario, it's because it was also the premise of 2008's Booster Gold Vol. 2 #13.

And though modern audiences raised on Justice League Unlimited episodes and Tom King comics might be surprised to learn otherwise, it wasn't Booster's fault.

It was his 20th-century ancestor's.

Daniel's mistake allowed Starro to possess the original Time Master, Rip Hunter, himself. Two issues of hi-jinks ensued as Starro re-wrote the past and future to his own liking.

Booster ultimately solved his problem with the timely assistance of Chronos and Lady Chronos. Hopefully, Harley can find time-travelling love-interest/frenemies of her own to help. Seems to me she should give Booster Gold a call; he's not doing anything else.

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Rather than wait for Friday, I might as well tell you about this week's new release today in the hopes that maybe you haven't been to your Local Comic Shop yet. I'll plan on resuming my regular Monday/Wednesday/Friday posting schedule next week, assuming James Gunn can refrain from dropping big Booster Gold news on my off days again.

(That's ok, DC. Whenever you've got something important to say about Booster Gold, you go right ahead. I might be a Grumpy Gus, but I'm always listening.)

It warms my heart to be able to say that Booster Gold makes a cameo appearance in this week's DC's Harley Quinn Romances #1. Technically, the cameo is his dating profile in an app for superhero hook-ups (as viewed by former Justice League International teammates Fire and Ice), but that's close enough, right?

The issue is an anthology with eight different stories. That panel is from "Dating App Disaster," and all Booster boosters will be relieved to know that Booster isn't the titular disaster.

Ten dollars is a bit steep for a single panel Booster Gold cameo, but I'm a sucker for these short-story anthology issues. I can't necessarily recommend it to everyone, but I personally bought this issue and made Skeets happy.

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Since I started this week showcasing one incentive variant cover, I should keep the theme going with another incentive variant, one I've never show on Boosterrific.com before, mainly because Booster Gold isn't actually on it.

His goggles are.

That's the 1:200 Francesco Mattina cover for 2018's Heroes in Crisis #1, and as you can see, it depicts a bloody Harley Quinn wearing Booster Gold's (broken) goggles.

This cover was also used as the basis for Graphitti Designs' New York Comic Con 2018 Silver Foil Convention Exclusive. I honestly don't know which one is rarer. ComicChron.com estimated that retailers ordered approximately 140,700 first-edition copies of Heroes in Crisis #1, which implies there are fewer than 700 of the 1:200 variants in the world. How many silver foils were printed for New York Comic Con, which sold over a quarter million tickets? 500? 1000?

For what it's worth, both are available on eBay right now unslabbed for about $35-$70. In either case, that seems like a pretty good deal for such a rare book.

I mean, if you're into that sort of thing.

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Wednesday, I recalled my opinion about the short-lived Booster Gold / Harley Quinn romance. More important than my feelings about this topic, though, are the feelings of Booster Gold's creator, Dan Jurgens, who revealed them in an exclusive interview with Russ Burlingame, as quoted in The Gold Exchange: The Boosterrific Deluxe Edition pages 603-4:

Burlingame: [In an earlier interview, writer Tom King] did seem to suggest that, had he known he was doing The Gift at the same time you were doing Booster Shot over in Action Comics, he likely would have gone a different way with it, since it was so strange to see [Booster] doing two opposing things at the same time.

Jurgens: Yeah. At the same time, I do think characters have to have a little bit of elasticity to them, and it was kind of a fine line in terms of how it might have worked. I also thought that in a book like Heroes in Crisis, it was nice to have Booster included, and I thought it became a good mix of characters that way. I thought that Booster and Harley made a really interesting pairing that was interesting to read, and they played off each other very well, I thought.

Burlingame: I didn't think about it until now; I probably should have tried to talk to the Harley Quinn creators who had Booster as her boyfriend for a minute there.

Jurgens: Which I think the internet reacted to quite badly, is that right? Or at least a good portion of it?

Burlingame: I think it was less about Booster and more about the feeling that they had just set up Harley to have this amazing relationship with Poison Ivy, and they were killing her off. And then probably part of that was jettisoning a same-sex relationship for a heterosexual one.

Jurgens: Right. I think... could Booster and Harley work? Yes. Could you possibly attract fans who are interested in that relationship? Probably also yes. I don't think there's a right and wrong. I think that if you write it well, you can get people invested in it.

Burlingame: That one just didn't have time to be written well, because the blowback was so instantaneous, and DC didn't seem to see it coming.

Jurgens: Yeah, I think that's right.

Jurgens is such a nice guy. If he doesn't have a problem pairing Booster and Harley, I shouldn't have one either. I can live with that.

Thanks to Russ for asking the question and giving permission to reprint it here.

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