Look, I'm getting old. I know it. And because I'm old, I sometimes get nostalgic for giant shoulder pads, Marlboro cigarette ads in print magazines, and giant overblown hairstyles on dudes. And boy, does this page from Justice League America #63 hit that sweet spot!

Looking back on this 1992 issue from the distant future of 2025, I'm struck by just how of its era it really was. Way too much arguing about interpersonal relations (which was all the rage in the best-selling X-Men comics of its day) and the wisdom of military interventionism (a la "Operation Desert Storm" in Kuwait that brought with it heated discussions of a new draft).

Cap it all off with Fire's new very 90's — dare I say "extreme"? — costume. Chef's kiss!

Bea sewed a whole new costume in just 6 pages? Now that's a super power!

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Justice League America #62 is another one of those cases where it's hard for me to pick a single favorite page, in part because I don't think Jackson Guice's finishes are a good match to Dan Jurgens' pencils or Gene D'Angelo's colors.

That said, the finished art is a reason I'm picking page 16. Pay careful attention to the duplication of the inks for panel 2 reproduced inside panel 3:

"Space babe"?

There comes a time in the life of every fan of comic book super-heroes that you realize that the "costumed" characters are really mostly nudes disguised under garish colors. On this page, that's made extra explicit. In addition to the usual suspects, there's Bloodwynd's white costume and "KiKi" as seen on Guy Gardner's television with her purple coloring removed!

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Oh, shoot. I almost forgot to post something today. See, I was writing a script to help me identify where the current drought of new Booster Gold adventures sits historically* — I had an old script that did this years ago, but DC continuity has only gotten more convoluted since then and so has how the Boosterrific Database tracks it — and I lost track of time.

The good news is that Rob Snow has me covered. Or at least he tried to.

Earlier this week, to counter the lack of official Booster Gold art coming from DC, Rob forwarded me a picture of the JLI drawn as tweenagers that has been making the rounds on a particular website. But try as I might, I cannot identify the artist, and that anti-social media site won't even let me see the posts unless I log in. And since I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to share the art here at this time. (If you ever identify that artist, let me know, Rob.)

The good news is that while I was trying to identify the artist for that, I found this, a totally awesome color wheel by Melonnabar at Between Two Worlds on Tumblr.com (which still seems quite happy to share):

Pretty awesome, right? Yeah, I'd say that all worked out.

*For the record, "175 days" is 11th on the all-time list and only two weeks from breaking into the top ten. But let's not focus on the negative today, okay? Color Wheel!

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Justice League America #61 officially kicked off the Dan Jurgens era of the Justice League International. And it has a lot of fun moments, from villains and weapons originally appearing in the Silver Age Justice League of America, to the opening panel callback to the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League #1, to having Booster Gold return to the team full time, to seeing Superman put Maxwell Lord in his place, to reading Blue Beetle accuse Weapons Master of pulling "a big boner."

Choosing a single favorite page in this one was especially difficult because while I enjoyed many of the panels and bits of dialogue, they are pretty evenly distributed, meaning few pages stand out as a whole. So I ultimately settled on page 3, which introduces Maxima, mostly because I like the flow of the art from panel to panel, especially how Maxima's hair meanders through those last two panels.

I also like that Booster Gold comes across as the rational one on this new team. Someone's got to be the adult in the room (at least when Superman isn't around).

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The 15-part "Breakdowns" storyline that ran through late 1991 into 1992 of the Justice League titles spelled the end of the heyday of the Justice League International's very popular "Bwah-Ha-Ha" era.

The letter column of Justice League America #55 (Breakdowns Part 5) made the announcement that a new team lineup would coming in issue #61 and gave fans a ballot to vote for the heroes they most wanted to see on the team.

According to the letter column in Justice League Spectacular #1 (which I recently re-read while preparing for last week's "My Favorite Pages" feature), DC received more than 6 million total votes!

To be fair, many of those votes were duplicate ballots that were not double counted, but it's not clear whether any of the votes received made any actual difference on which characters were chosen for the new team. After all, the poll was published only six months before issue #61 was to released and the production of a DC comic book generally takes about three months, meaning there was only a small window for voters to influence any decisions made by editors or writers.

The full results of the poll were not made public, but Justice League editor Kevin Dooley did reveal that the top vote-getter was J'ohn J'onzz, who pointedly was not on the new team. Dooley also explicitly named Peacemaker as the character with the fewest votes, and to no great surprise, Peacemaker wasn't on the team, either.

Of course, this being a Booster Gold blog, we'd be most interested to know how many votes Booster got. All we can know for sure was that it was more than three. Dooley listed all the characters, mostly write-ins, who got three or fewer votes, and Skeets got two votes! (Other two-vote getters were Angel and the Ape, Arisia, Beefeater, Brother Power the Geek, Catwoman, Deadman, Sue Dibny, Dove, Lady Flash, Maser, Mera, Nuklon, Peter Canon, Praxis, The Question, Red Star, Sandman, Snapper Carr, Valor, Wildcat, and the Wonder Twins. That some pretty good company, Skeets!)

However many votes Booster Gold got, the important takeaway is that he made the team. Maybe one day, Skeets will, too.

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