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Boosterrific.com: The Complete, Annotated Adventures of Booster Gold
Boosterrific.com: The Complete, Annotated Adventures of Booster Gold

It has been 129 Days since Booster Gold last appeared in an in-continuity DCU comic book.

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Showing posts 1 - 5 of 118 matching: website update

Friday, January 17, 2025

Spreading the Good Word

I have a Google Alert set up to notify me when Google finds new news about Booster Gold. If I think what Google tells me is noteworthy, I pass it along here in the Boosterrific Blog. However, among the most common alerts are social media posts along the lines of "I want to read more about Booster Gold, where should I start?" And that bothers me a little.

My first impulse when seeing these is to go tell that person about Boosterrific Dot Com. The Boosterrific Database contains all Booster Gold comic book adventures with a rating system that I think makes better books easy to identify, and I have many posts justifying my criteria for "The 12 Best Booster Gold Comics." Sure, my lists are subjective, but aren't everyone's? If nothing else, they make a pretty good introductory guide for interested readers.

Yet by nature I'm a recluse, not a salesman. I don't really want to be active on most social media, so I'm easily discouraged by sites like Reddit actively discouraging such egregious self-promotion. And I justify my anti-social behavior by telling myself that if someone was really interested in Booster Gold, there are plenty of websites with helpful information, including Wikipedia and Fandom, which are at the top of any Google Search for "Booster Gold." Boosterrific.com might not appear until the second page of links, but it really isn't so hard to find. I mean, if you're reading this, you found it.

So maybe what really bothers me is that Boosterrific.com isn't easier to find. Why should anyone seeking advice about Booster Gold comic books have to struggle to arrive here? Is it hubris on my part to think that Boosterrific.com is the best place for could-be Booster Gold fans to begin their journey? Could I be doing something more to tell people about Booster Gold? If so, what?

I can only do what I can do, but maybe I can do more than I thought I could. I just want the whole world to know...

© DC Comics
This panel is from Blue and Gold #7. It's just one of many pretty darn good Booster Gold comics you should be reading.

Comments (8) | Add a Comment | Tags: website update

Friday, January 3, 2025

Thoughts on Continuity

con•ti•nū′i•y, n
1. The state or quality of being continuous.
2. a continuous series or succession; unbroken, coherent, whole.

"Continuity." Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged Second Edition, edited by Jean L. McKechnie, Collins World, 1977, pp. 395

It's a good topic for the start of a new year.

Booster Gold being written out of DC's current "All In" era got me thinking about this.

Ever since Justice League International volume 3 #1 in late 2011, I've been chronicling new releases of Booster Gold's adventures as taking place in what I call "New 52 Continuity." That was certainly necessary at the time, as the then-continuity of the mainstream DCU in the wake of changes to history in Flashpoint was, for most characters, very different than what had come before. Since everyone's personality is heavily influenced by their experiences, and the characters in the New 52 could no longer be assumed to have the same experiences as their pre-Flashpoint selves, these characters were, to a significant degree, entirely new people (Alan Scott), even when DC pretended that they were not (Clark Kent).

Then came 2015's Convergence, which proved the New 52 Booster Gold and the post-Crisis on Infinite Earths Booster Gold (who I called "Original Gold" or "OG Booster Gold") really were two distinctly different characters living two distinctly different lives. It was like Barry Allen meeting Jay Garrick in "Flash of Two Worlds!" in 1961's The Flash #123 (arguably the single most important story in DC's history, as it first defined the DC Multiverse).

However, in 2016, Rebirth repaired Flashpoint's broken history, and in the years since, further revisions to reality following Death Metal have made it clearer that the pre- and post-Flashpoint continuities have now been fully merged (Wallace West). So which continuity are we in now?

The longest single gap between Booster Gold in-continuity appearances coincided with the Rebirth era, between Bat-Mite #4 in 2015 and Action Comics #992 in 2018. (The Booster Gold/The Flintstones Special was between those two, but it is set in the "Hanna-Barbera Beyond" universe, and it remains unclear which, if any, continuity that Booster Gold belongs to.) It seems logical in hindsight that Action Comics #992 represents the start of a new era, the first (re)appearance of a Booster Gold with a post-Crisis on Infinite Earths history.

Therefore, I think it's past time to update Boosterrific to recognize the modern era of stories as post-Rebirth continuity. I will retroactively make that change beginning with Action Comics #992.

Hopefully, Booster Gold will return to the DC Universe before it becomes necessary to recognize another fundamental change to its ongoing continuity.

Comments (3) | Add a Comment | Tags: continuity website update

Thursday, December 5, 2024

Ad Blockers

Booster booster J writes in to say:

I'm writing with additional information about the house ad memorial for Keith Giffen. This ad also appears in the issue DC's 'Twas The 'Mite Before Christmas #1.

The ad J is talking about is this one which ran in books released a year ago this week:

© DC Comics

J's tips are usually pretty reliable, but as it happens, I have the issue open in font of me right now, and it most definitely does not have the ad in it.

But I'm not calling J a liar.

What I suspect happened, and I am unable to communicate with J directly to confirm this because J never sends a reply address, but what I suspect happened is that J was looking at a digital release of the issue. DC has often had different house ads in digital releases than what they print in their books. I'm sure this is largely because they have to print physical books far in advance of publication, but digital assets can be manipulated up to the moment of release (and often after).

Because I do not trust that digital files have not been manipulated, I resist listing digital-only Booster Gold appearances in the Boosterrific Database, and I'm going to resist it in this case, too.

This is not the first time J has pointed me towards digital assets that the Boosterrific Database willfully ignores. See also: "A Thing I Do Not Know What To Do With," posted on Sept 18, 2023.

Thanks for the notes, J. Keep those corrections coming.

Comments (0) | Add a Comment | Tags: house ads j keith giffen website update

Friday, July 26, 2024

If It Ain't Broke

To make Google happy, I've been tinkering under the hood here at Boosterrific.com to change how news items are retrieved and archived. If all goes well, this should only result in some changed URLs, and the average site visitor will never notice any difference. If anyone finds anything broken, please let me know, but "I'm not expecting any trouble" are some pretty good last words. (Just ask CrowdStrike.)

Meanwhile, as a good test case for new blog posts going forward, Booster booster J has found a new "Booster Gold" appearance in a comic that isn't already in the Boosterrific Database.

I'm currently reading Volume 2 of The Flash, from 1987. I just wanted to point out that on the very last page of The Flash, Vol. 2 #2, Booster's name (together with the DC Comics logo) is advertised (in-universe!) on the side of a truck.

Here is that panel in particular, taken from The Flash: Savage Velocity collected edition:

© DC Comics
written by Mike Baron; art by Jackson Guice, Larry Mahlstedt, Carl Gafford, Steve Haynie; edited by Mike Gold

The reason this book does not appear in the Boosterrific Database is because the character of Booster Gold himself does not appear in this issue. But cases like this are a key reason why the Boosterrific Blog exists. I even have a banner and tag for it:

Talkin Booster Gold

I do not think I had posted about this before, but that's one of the reasons I'm trying to make the news archive more Google-friendly. Sometimes it's hard for even the archivist to find information buried in the dusty virtual bookshelves in Booster Cave! In any case, I have definitely blogged about it now, thanks to J.

Comments (1) | Add a Comment | Tags: flash j talking booster gold website update

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Six Boosterrific Things

An assortment of small news items about recent events here at Boosterrific.com:

1. Thanks once again to Jake J for pointing out that the Boosterrific Database was missing several reprint collections, most recently Elseworlds: Justice League Volumes One, Two, and Three. Thanks for all your help, Jake J (who has emailed reminds me that he is NOT Jake. Sorry!).

2. While trying to make sense of the timeline in "Roses Are Red, Androids Are Blue" in DC's How to Lose a Guy Gardner in 10 Days, I stumbled across a previously undocumented one-panel Booster Gold appearance in JLA #119. Every time I think I've found them all, another appearance turns up. I love it!

3. If you didn't know it, a new, 2nd edition of the 2019 25th Anniversary Zero Hour: Crisis in Time Omnibus was released this week. I haven't seen it yet, but it is advertised as collecting "every chapter in the groundbreaking saga in chronological order." Does this 2nd edition include Booster Gold #0? (To the best of my knowledge, the 2019 edition did not.) If anyone can confirm or deny, please let me know.

4. Last week DC announced that their comics will once again be released on Wednesdays instead of Tuesdays beginning in July. When that happens, I'll be moving New Release updates to Wednesdays more consistently, just as I used to do. So don't say I didn't warn you.

5. To whomever reached out via the Boosterrific Contact form and asked "is it possible to anonymously submit in this contact": I cannot respond to your request because you didn't include a reply-to address, but the answer is mostly "yes." I do get to see the IP address that generated the request (which is necessary as an anti-spam measure), so if I look into that, I can approximate where you were in the world when you sent it. But otherwise, yeah, pretty vague.

6. If you haven't noticed, I created some more ads for the top of the pages during some recent downtime. You can see all of them on the Boosterrific Ads page. (I do tag them all internally as ads, so if you have an ad-blocker running, you may need to disable it to see them.)

Comments (0) | Add a Comment | Tags: j jake new releases website update


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