Hey, you! If you aren't reading this on Boosterrific.com, please go there and tell me where you came from!

In an attempt to take Booster Gold to the masses, I push content to the Boosterrific.com, Facebook, and Twitter. Each of these content platforms provide user analytics data about how many people I'm reaching. Those numbers are all fine and good in helping me determine where my audience is, but the various metrics used by the platforms aren't exactly comparable. Therefore, today, I'm asking you for an old-fashioned head count. Thanks for your support.

This week's poll question: Where do you regularly get your Boosterrific.com content? Please visit the Boosterrific Polls page to view results for this week's poll.

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Things have been changing in America lately, and not necessarily for the better. Not so many years ago, many DC Comics super hero bloggers and I participated in semi-regular crossover events. Now very few of us are still posting.

Both FirestormFan.com and AquamanShrine.net have stopped blogging to focus their efforts on podcasting (fireandwaterpodcast.com). The Martian Manhunter blog, The Idol-Head of Diabolu, has likewise gone silent as its creator also seems to be concentrating on podcasts for his other blogs (DC Bloodlines and Wonder Woman: Diana Prince). So too, Splitting Atoms is now more podcast than blog. Others that have fallen completely silent (like Tower of Fate and Being Carter Hall). Some stalwarts soldier on, including SpeedForce.org and Kord Industres. We seem to be the exception rather than the rule.

Once again, this has made me return to a question I've asked myself from time to time since Booster Gold disappeared from the pages of DC Comics: Has the time for websites dedicated to super hero blogging passed us by? Would comics fans rather listen to a podcast than read a website? Is the problem the characters or the bloggers or just shifting demographics?

Like so many of those now-defunct sites, Boosterrific.com is first and foremost a hobby. I started working on it nine years ago, and I keep it running because I want to. Personally, I have no interest in phone apps, wikis, or podcasting. If that's the future of Booster Gold fandom, I'll leave it to someone else. (The Silver and Gold podcast — now a whole network — seems to be doing just fine without me.)

Don't worry, this post isn't a lead up to the retirement of Boosterrific.com. I'm only committing my rambling grumpy old man thoughts to electronic paper. I'm not going anywhere anytime soon. It's just that I'm starting to feel kind of lonely out here all by myself. I sure would like some new Booster Gold comics to keep me company.

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Boosterrific.com tracks a lot of things about Booster Gold. Most of the things it tracks (if not all the things it tracks) are trivial. Some of them aren't even directly about Booster Gold but how his fans interact with him.

Among the many things Boosterrific.com keeps its eye on is the list of characters in the DCU who have crossed paths with our hero. The site tracks how many "clicks" those character links get in a 30-day span. You can see the most popular in the "SITE INFORMATION & STATISTICS" box on the home page. Since I started tracking this in 2012, one unusual name in particular has almost always been at or near the top of this list. Kilg%re.

For those of you who don't know, Kilg%re is a minor Flash villain (debuting in 1987's Flash #3), an alien artificial intelligence determined to make the Earth safe for machine kind by exterminating humanity. Kilg%re was retroactively integrated into the biography of Maxwell Lord in Justice League International #12 in 1988.

Kilg%re has only a tangential relationship with Booster Gold. So why does he keep topping my click-through list? Is it because people see the name "Kilg%re" and wonder who that could be? Is there a huge Kilg%re fan group following Kilg%re's adventures online? Is it because Kilg%re has infiltrated the Internet and keeps Googling itself? I have no idea.

Every once in a while, I clear my history table, yet Kilg%re always finds his way back. Forget Lex Luthor, Joker, and Darkseid. For my money, Kilg%re is the one villain that just won't stay down.

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Booster booster Logan wrote me last week to ask if I'd seen the latest (and final) issue of Justice League 3001. He wanted to know if I'd seen this:

That sure looks like Booster Gold's body in the rubble beside Ice. However, it doesn't make any sense for Booster to be there.

Booster and his pal, Blue Beetle, disappeared from the series after the evil Lady Styx took over the universe in issue #7. The climactic battle, which Booster didn't participate in, took place on Paradise Island, a secret location Booster couldn't have reached. So how could that be him on the ground?

My theory is that's not Booster, but the body of the evil clone of Wildfire of the Legion of Super-Heroes. Wildfire also has a star on his chest, and appears throughout the issue. (You can see him at the bottom center of the cover above.) I suspect that the issue inker or colorist saw Wildfire's body on the ground surrounded by the reincarnated JLI and mistakenly detailed it as Booster Gold.

I reached out on Twitter to issue writer J.M. DeMatteis to ask if he'd intended to show a dead Booster Gold. This was his response:

So there we have it. It may look like Booster Gold's costume, but it's not Booster Gold.

Whew.

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Have you seen this comic?

According to the DC Comics Database wiki, Booster Gold appears in this British reprint of Adventures of Superman #463. Despite that fact, this book does not appear in the Boosterrific database.

While I do make every effort to be complete, there are some things I don't track. Although I do generally include reprints, I limit those to American reprints published by DC Comics.

There are many countries where someone has released licensed reprints of DC Comics' publications. Many of those reprints have been translated into the readers native languages, such as the Italian release of Booster Gold. It's great that DC is expanding their audience across the globe, and I love to know about them. However, those comics are outside the scope of this website.

So if you happen to come across a Booster Gold reprint in a "foreign" language — including The Queens' English — and you're wondering why you don't see it listed here, now you know.

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