For what it's worth, Booster will be making a cameo appearance in several trade collections coming in January and February:

• JLA Book Four (reprinting JLA #27)
• Superman Vol. 7: Reign of the Superboys — Prime Time (reprinting "Kingdom of Zod," including Action Comics #1101)
• Superman by Phillip Kennedy Johnson Omnibus Vol. 2 (reprinting Superman: Kal-El Returns Special #1)
• Welcome to Hollywood, Green Lantern! (reprinting Green Lantern #37).

I'm disappointed, but after DC K.O. and "Kingdom of Zod," Booster Gold deserves a winter break. Kick back and enjoy the R&R, Booster.

I could give up, but instead I'll take a page from our favorite hero, put on a brave face, and press on despite the adversity (partially of my own making).

We skip ahead to Justice League Task Force #13. You know, the one were Booster Gold dies!

Dies for the first time, I mean. Depending on how you're counting, there's also 52 and Convergence and Death Metal and DC K.O., of course. But it all starts here!

Booster dying is not my favorite part of this issue. I much prefer the very first page of the issue where we get a look inside Booster's delusional (and, yes, dying) head. Sal Velluto's layouts are a big improvement over recent issues of Justice League America, but note especially Glenn Whitmore's color-negative secondary color scheme for the environment, a not-so-subtle indication that the situation is the opposite of what it appears to be for our usually primary-colored hero. It's a nice touch.

"The best-laid schemes of mice and men," eh, Booster?

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get back to work. (Man, a time machine really would come in handy right now.)

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.