Dan Jurgens recently spoke to Russ Burlingame about the 25th anniversary of the release of Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey. Booster Gold played no role in that series, yet according to Jurgens, he sort of does.

Burlingame: It feels like, even though this is a very stand-alone book, the Waverider stuff plays into the bigger theme of the Linear Men at that time in the books, which is, "Do something, you jerks."

Jurgens: Right. It's weird, I think I probably didn't realize it at the time, but I look back at this now, and realize that what I was doing, I should say, was assembling a group of characters that I created that would function in that world. I think Jim Starlin did a great job of this. When he was doing Captain Marvel, when he was doing Warlock, he created all these characters. They became very much a part of his writing language, and his visual language. All that stuff existed to the extent that it was Jim Starlin-world. Now we see that times 5,000 on the screen. I think what I was doing was a lot of the same thing, which is I said that I have all these characters that interact and they make sense to me. They don't just have to interact once in November of 1992 and then we never see them again. We can use them to address different ideas and different topics.

They became very much a part of -- this is going to sound real egotistical, and I don't want it to-- it becomes part of like "Jurgensverse," as far as I was approaching Superman a little bit. It made sense to me. Whereas at that time, it might have been [convenience], I look back on it now a little differently. It made sense in a lot of different ways. These are the characters I wanted to continue to explore, and there was no reason they had to interact once and then not interact again.

Burlingame: And a lot of these characters and ideas you would continue to work with all the way up through the mid-2000s with your Booster Gold run.

Jurgens: Also, if you look at Waverider, which was a co-creation with Archie Goodwin, you have all these things that fit together and work. think it's a group of concepts that have been probably under-used by DC. I think there's a lot more than could have been done with it, and fortunately that stuff is still out there, so there's a lot more that can be done with it. I think concepts like the Linear Men, like Vanishing Point, and all that stuff, I think that's the kind of thing that has a place in comics. I think there's some cool things there that can still be exploited, still be used.

There's a lot to unpack in just those few paragraphs, and that's only a tiny snippet of the interview. (By all means, read the whole thing on ComicBook.com.)

The most important thing there, obviously, is that we should be calling Jurgens' oeuvre "The Jurgensverse," and that all the characters in it always were, and always will be, connected. That somewhere in 2019, Trixie Collins could pass Mitchell Anderson in the produce aisle of their local supermarket and give him advice on the best way to pick out a grapefruit, that thought makes me very happy.

It's also worth noting that Jurgens believes that Time Masters and their story-telling conceit of policing history remains an untapped source for future stories in the DCrU. That should be encouraging to fans of Booster (and Jurgens' work), as it means that the possibility still exists to revisit the characters and concepts (and unanswered mysteries) of Booster Gold Volume 2.

Here's to the future!

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Booster Gold fans will recognize actor Eric Martsolf as the first (and so far only) actor to play our hero in a live action production. (For the record, that was on the Smallville episode "Booster" airing April 22, 2011 as the 18th episode of the series' 10th season. Remember this?)

Martsolf is still acting on daytime television and was recently interviewed by Michael Maloney for TV Insider during which he reminisced about his Smallville days.

TV Insider: You got to play humor when you played Booster Gold on Smallville. How much fun was that?

Martsolf: That was my favorite role to date. It was funny, heroic, a comic book come to life; I loved getting to play someone who's completely larger than life. I got credit from my kids for playing a character who's a member of the Justice League. I still have [fans] from the DC Universe and the Smallville world hit me up on social media, trying to get a Booster Gold movie going on, but now I may have to settle for playing his dad. Then again, he is a time traveler.

TV Insider: Was there anything from the Smallville episode you got to keep? Probably not the Booster Gold costume!

Martsolf: No, that custom-made to my body leather outfit, I think, was more expensive more than my first house was! I did get to keep several of the Booster Gold fan club shirts [that were in the show as a story point]. At the end of the episode, I, as Booster, throw one to Clark (Tom Welling) and say, 'You're an XL, right, Clark?' I remember after the scene I gave Tom a hug [goodbye] and he said take as many of those shirts as you want.

Booster's dad, Jonar Carter, is a thoroughly bad seed. If When Booster ever returns to the screen, Jonar would make a great antagonist. And Martsolf would get another shot at keeping his own "body leather outfit," this time as the masked Supernova. Yes, I would definitely watch that.

(The t-shirt Martsolf mentions seen in the episode, by the way, was the Booster Gold Fan Club t-shirt released in 2009 by Graphitti Designs under license of DC Comics with art by Dan Jurgens.)

You can read the whole article, mostly about Martsolf's experiences on the soap operas Days of Our Lives and Passions, at TVInsider.com.

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