Last week's featured book, Booster Gold #23, was just one of three comics with significant Booster Gold content released on September 15, 1987.

The second is Millennium #1, the first entry in a months-long event that would span the entire DC Universe. If you are familiar with Millennium, you are probably aware that it is... not especially beloved, largely because of the editorial mandate that each series being published had to tie-in, often in the most ham-fisted ways possible.

Especially in relation to Booster Gold.

But that's not the topic at hand. Even misguided comics can have fun pages. A highlight of events like these is always seeing all the heroes milling around as though they were regular partygoers at a costume party, like this crowd scene from page 14.

It's actually kind of difficult to make these overcrowded group shots work as anything other than a class photo, but here artist Joe Staton and letterer Bob Lappan manage to give the scene some life as the dialog trickles back and forth down the page. Each snippet of conversation gives the impression that we're eavesdropping on natural dialog just as the camera comes to focus on the talker (or thinker, as the case may be).

Most importantly, Booster boosters are guaranteed to enjoy a callback to the running joke of people calling our hero "Buster." It's a classic!

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Though he has drawn almost everything over the course of his incredible career in funny books, I most associate artist Joe Staton with the Green Lantern Corps (especially Guy Gardner).

And, of course, with 1988's Millennium mini-series.

Millennium promo from DC Focus, summer 1987. Art by Joe Staton

Say what you will about Millennium and its place in DC's steady parade of "no really, this one's important!" events, but at least Millennium reserved a prominent role for Booster Gold in his first big company-wide event. (And then was used as an excuse to cancel his series. So a mixed bag there overall.)

Thanks for helping introduce Booster Gold to the masses, Joe.

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So Convergence is now over, and it represents a paradigm shift for our hero. We shouldn't be surprised; the first time DC tried a weekly, eight-issue event series, it, too, rewrote the book for Booster Gold.

By the conclusion to 1988's Millennium, Booster Gold was penniless and disgraced thanks to the machinations of his manager, Dirk Davis. It was revealed that Davis had all along been a sleeper agent for the evil Manhunters, and he had manipulated our hero into a corner. As a result, Booster lost his solo series and very nearly quit adventuring altogether.

Davis' personality was hard to nail down throughout Booster Gold volume 1. Some issues he was Booster's friend, and some issues he was in league with Booster's enemy or trying to steal Booster's girl. That might make readers wonder what creator Dan Jurgens might have intended for Davis if Millennium hadn't resulted in the series' cancellation.

Naturally, I put the question to Jurgens himself.

I was merely trying to write Dirk as a more complicated individual-- multifaceted, as so many people are. So, yes, he was a huckster. The MILLENNIUM crossover came somewhat out of nowhere and we were encouraged to use important characters as Manhunters. I plugged Dirk into that role as part of the story, but was never really thrilled with the concept of doing so.

In this case, it was more about the general notion that we use fairly important characters as the Manhunters. It was also thought that it would be more effective that we use someone who'd been there from issue #1, and I wasn't about to use Trixie.

When I would have started the series, there was no plan for Davis or anyone else to be a Manhunter because MILLENNIUM didn't even exist. All of it came later and in a situation like that, you do what you can do make things work.

Nearly 30 years later, Convergence reveals that DC is still flying by the seat of its pants. Would we want our comics any other way?

As always, thanks to Dan Jurgens.

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In a recent peek through my long boxes, I found two issues that I had failed to put into the Booster Gold non-chronological appearances database here at Boosterrific.com.

Those are the covers to Independent Comic Group's Millennium Index. Those two issues were published in 1988 to catalog the comics and characters appearing in DC's Millennium event. (ICG must have licensed the use of the "Millennum" masthead.) In many ways, like DC's Who's Who, those comics were the pre-World Wide Web equivalent of websites like Boosterrific.com.

I'm sure I originally overlooked these because they weren't published by DC Comics. However, as you can see, Booster Gold appears on Joe Stanton's cover of Millennium Index #1. As you can't see, Dan Jurgen's cover to Booster Gold, Volume 1, #25, appears inside Millennium Index #2. These two issues are chock-full of Booster Gold references.

Anyway, I've finally added these to the more-complete-than-ever Boosterrific comic book index. Could there be other books out there that I'm still missing? If you come across one, please let me know.

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Believe it or not, there are several comics websites I enjoy that have nothing to do with Booster Gold. (Hard to believe, I know, but they do exist.) When those sites veer into Booster territory, no matter how tangentially, I'd be remiss not to promote them here. Today's link falls into that category.

Bully the Little Stuffed Bull spends a great deal of time entertaining the web on his website, Bully Says: Comics Oughta Be Fun. One of his regular weekly features is "Ten of a Kind," in which he posts 10 comic book covers sharing a common theme. This week, the theme is anger, and -- guess who? -- Booster Gold is included from the cover of Extreme Justice #6.

This issue, you'll recall, is the one in which Booster reclaims what was left of the fortune stolen from him by the Manhunters in Millennium. This comic is also the last recorded appearance of Dirk Davis, Booster's former manager and among the first character casualties of DC's emerging, line-wide annual crossovers strategy. DC editorial mandated turning established supporting characters into sleeper-agent villains for Millennium, resulting in some very confusing continuity and permanently truncated story lines. Good to see that DC has learned their lesson on that front (he says, sarcastically).

So go, enjoy Bully's gentle, loving mockery of comic books. I know I do.

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