I don't know which page I would have picked as a favorite from Justice League America Annual #7 when I first read it in 1993.

I like the Hitchcockian horror-influenced sequences of Booster Gold's talking head running through pages 5, 6, 7, and 9, but none of those pages quite come together as a whole for me. Gene D'Angelo's garish colors combine with Greg LaRocque's loose layouts to create an almost hallucinogenic environment which bothers me more the longer I look at them.

So instead I think I'll choose page 16, where a powerless, line-swinging Fire saves the JLA's resident idiot, Guy Gardner, on the world's largest jungle gym:

I cannot deny it: I enjoy cheesecake "Good Girl" images of Fire. But I also think this example of lurid, sexually suggestive posing works particularly well, thematically, in this dark horror story in which the alien parasites use lust to manipulate their prey, like a page from Dracula, and the protagonist's runaway id creates monsters, like scenes from Forbidden Planet. Cheesecake images here can inspire similar feelings in the viewer, deepening a connection with the story.

(Unfortunately, this particular issue meanders too much to really take advantage of such atmosphere. Too many subplots, too many pages to fill, too many inkers. But still. It's nice to know that Greg LaRocque was trying.)

Horror and sex, working together since man first discovered Fire.

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Rob Snow alerts me that Booster Gold is in today's Justice League Unlimited #18. And if you recall, two weeks ago, Tony alerted us that Booster Gold also appears in a background panel in today's Superman #37 (or "Legacy 879" if you've been collecting since 1939).

Now, I haven't yet seen the panels from JLU #18, but the Superman panel in question is included in the issue preview at BleedingCool.com, but the important part is this:

Hmm. That looks familiar. Where have I seen that before? Ah, yes, Batman/Superman: World's Finest #20, also drawn by Dan Mora.

I hope this means Mora will be sneaking Booster into the background of more comics. Keep your eyes peeled, Booster boosters!

Thanks, Rob and Tony.

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DC's July solicitations came out late last week, and as Rob Snow wrote to me, tongue firmly in cheek, "still no Absolute Booster." Phew.

But there's not much run-of-the-mill Booster Gold, either, except for his inclusion in a couple of collections, including the inevitable Absolute Power Omnibus and another collection featuring selected stories by Keith Giffen, appropriately titled The DC Universe by Keith Giffen.

The Giffen volume will reprint just a small sample of contributions the prolific writer/artist made through the decades, and it is unclear at this time how much Booster Gold will be in it. If the solicitation is accurate, the answer is a little but not much, which also describes how much of our hero will be on the cover reusing Kevin Maguire's art from the "Remembering Keith Giffen" ad that ran in DC Comics in November 2023:

Keep an eye out for that in September.

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