If you visit your Local Comic Shop today, you'll see that tradition holds true, with releases of books like Grayson Annual and Wonder Woman '77 Special. That's because today is the fifth comic-book release day in the month of September. DC has traditionally reserved these "fifth week" dates for the release of annuals and specials.

One such example is JLA In Crisis Secret Files, released on this date in 1998. Booster Gold doesn't play a very big part of this special. The late '90s were a fallow period for our hero. But any retrospective of Justice League history cannot help but include some Gold, even if only in a background role.

See anything funny about that panel? Booster looks like he's wearing swim briefs!

It's common for characters appearing in one-shot issues to look a little off-model. After all, the artists on these things wouldn't always be familiar with the characters they were drawing.

Prior to this panel, Darryl Banks had only drawn Booster as part of the large crowd attending the funeral of Green Lantern Hal Jordan. In that issue, Booster wore his Mark X armored power-suit.

We'll give Banks a pass for this snafu. Besides, the inker he was working with certainly had no idea what he was doing. It was the first time he'd ever worked on Booster Gold for DC Comics. His name was Norm Rapmund. I wonder whatever happened to that guy?

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While Booster Gold has certainly gone through a dry spell in recent years, it's not the first time in his career he's been kept out of the limelight. The late 90s were also a dark time. So dark, in fact, that the Justice League made him into a museum exhibit.

On this day in 1998, Zauriel treated readers of JLA Secret Files #2 to a guided tour of the Justice League's trophy room. Among the relics of defeated villains and fallen heroes rests Booster Gold's original, 25th-century costume. Its strength-enhancing microweave and force-field generator were destroyed by Doomsday six years earlier, forcing Booster into a series of increasingly ugly and unwieldy twentieth-century battle suits.

That's what happens when a member is no longer fit for service in the League. They box up all the old gear and put it in their private museum. It's kind of a morbid way to look at heroics, but no one fights crime forever.

Speaking of which, has anyone seen Zauriel lately?

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A few weeks back, Booster booster Eyzmaster and Waezi2 got together over at Comics In 5 Panels to discuss Justice League : Generation Lost. The premise of the site is to use 5 panels to recap a single series, but it's impossible to talk about the impact of Generation Lost without mentioning the New 52.

Waezi2: Even weirder is that despite Booster Gold being pretty popular the last couple of years before the Nu52, Johns made him... disappear. LITERATELY!

Granted, JLI was apparently not a big success, and Johns has a reputation for using C-List characters as canon-fodder to make them seem important, but when Frankenstein was cancelled, he was at least made part of Justice League Dark(can you believe how cheap DC is today?). So that's actually n52 in a nutshell: "Hey, kids! Sorry that you will never read about Booster Gold again, but it was SO important to make it clear how BIG an impact Superman and Wonder Woman making out has."

Bottom-line: third-stringers has no place in n52.

You can find the whole article at comicsin5panels.blogspot.dk.

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Russ Burlingame has already seen Justice League: War, the animated movie based on the first story arc of the "New 52" Justice League title. (His first report on that movie is online at comicbook.com.)

But what should interest Booster Gold fans isn't the movie itself, but the extras. The Blu-Ray includes the bonus documentary Creating Heroes: The Life and Art of Jim Lee. The documentary shows some quick shots of sketches that Jim Lee drew in preparation for the launch of the New 52. And one of those sketches is this:

This is presumably Jim Lee's vision of Booster Gold's New 52 costume. It's mostly similar to what saw print in Justice League International, with two significant differences.

1: Head. Although Booster projected holographic panels as early as issue #2, they weren't curved. Note also that the helmet looks almost boxy, more Tron Legacy and Iron Man than ski mask. Was that intentional or was it another unintended effect of so much piping, a pervasive aspect of all of Lee's New 52 designs?

2: Stripes. As you can see from the sketch of the back, Lee considered linking the blue stripes on the biceps to the blue "w" on the chest. That little detail did not make it into the final New 52 design, where they are very definitely two separate lines.

If you want a better look at this and Lee's other sketches, get you hands on Justice League: War, out today.

Thanks to Russ for sharing this with us.

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We interrupt today's regularly scheduled Thursday poll to continue "Year In Review" Week. The poll will resume next week.

The second most-viewed post of 2013 was actually posted on December 31, 2012.

Booster Gold's classic powersuit was item 13 of the 45 items in this contest originally presented in Wizard's JLA Special in 1999. I challenged you, my readers, to name the other 44 items and post your answers in the Boosterrific Forum. I'm still waiting to give out the prize of an original Booster Gold sketch drawn by me!

Number 1 tomorrow.

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