Since this is a Booster Gold blog, I should mention up front that Booster Gold played only the most tangential role in this weekly series follow-up to 52, making only cameo appearances in the 2-page backmatter of issues #43, 42, 41, and 20, while the "Dark" Booster Gold of an alternate Earth (presumably Earth-3) briefly appears in issues #16 and 15 just to get his butt kicked. (If you're confused by that numbering, know that Countdown numbered its issues backwards from #51. "Count Down." Get it?)

But I don't mention Countdown today because of its Booster Gold content (or lack thereof). I mention it because this past weekend I finished reading it for the first time. For financial reasons, I chose to forgo buying most issues when they were new, and after strongly disliking Final Crisis, I never had the interest in going back. A collection I recently acquired had almost all of the outstanding issues, so I finally took the plunge. I have to say, younger me made the correct decision; it's every bit as bad as everyone said it was back in 2008.

From the very start, Countdown is a jumbled, meandering, repetitive and self-contradictory mess, badly hindered by art teams who didn't communicate and editors either unwilling or unable to rein in a series of terrible creative choices and corporate mandates. In its best moments, the story is clearly just marking time; in its worst it's wallowing in torture porn. Reading this as it was coming out must have frustrated more than a few readers away from DC Comics, necessitating the line-wide New 52 Reboot just three years later. In summary: it stinks.

The good news here, and there is good news, is that Countdown has remained unpopular with readers and creatives alike. So far as I can tell, it has been largely ignored and forgotten in the years since its release. With any luck, it remains possible that more recent DC "event" stories with significantly more Booster Gold content could experience a similar fate. Therefore, in a very accidental way, the story of Countdown is a story of hope, and a little hope is never a bad thing.

Justice League America #56, released September 17, 1991

I cannot tell you if Booster Gold appears in either issue (parts 5 and 6 respectively of the nine-part "Kingdom of Zod" story), but I can tell you that he definitely appears *on* Action Comics. Since they both fit together as part of a larger image, you'll probably want to go ahead and get both anyway.

Buy at least one of these issues and make Skeets happy.

UPDATE: Booster Gold does not appear in either of these comics. But he *is* still on the cover of Action Comics. That's not nothing.

I think I've found a new (old) Booster appearance. In Black Condor #11 (February 1993) there is an ad page titled "Great Eastern Con '92". The background of the page is some very faint line art. Booster is about two thirds of the way down the page, on the far left, peeking over Blue Beetle's shoulder. This might already be on the site somewhere, but I can't find it, so I thought I'd let you know just in case.

As it happens, Veronica, no, that was not previously on the site anywhere. But it is now:

Booster is impossible to see in that scan, so here's a closer look:

It might help if you squint.

The ad clearly credits this image as "DCU" by Phil Jimenez and George Perez. Was it drawn specifically for the January 1993 Great Eastern New York Convention? It looks a little like the Jimenez cover to 2003's JLA-Z. If anyone bumps into Phil Jimenez, we should ask if he remembers drawing this and why.

My sincerest thanks to Veronica for bringing this to our attention. Be like Veronica, Booster boosters; if you see Booster, yell "Booster!"

I don't love this story (or any of the DCU-destroying zombie or vampire stories), but I do love these panels (even if it looks in hindsight like AI drew them, which seems particularly appropriate for a universe-destroying zombie story).