Booster Gold's Early Adventures Are Being Released Digitally

The first two issues of the original Booster Gold monthly series from writer/artist Dan Jurgens have been released digitally, marking DC's first foray into making the character's first few years of adventures available to fans via ComiXology.

Given recent reports that a Booster Gold movie is in development at Warner Bros., and the fact that a number of pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths Supergirl stories were made available for the first time ever not long ago in preparation for the October 26 premiere of the TV series, it seems likely the release is timed to coincide with burgeoning interest in the character of Booster Gold created by either the movie rumors, the involvement of Booster's son Rip Hunter in the forthcoming DC's Legends of Tomorrow on The CW, or both.

This is the first time most of these issues have been reprinted in color, although an issue of the series which guest-starred Superman was reprinted as part of the John Byrne-era Superman: The Man of Steel series of trade paperback collections.

A volume titled Showcase Presents Booster Gold Vol. 1 was released in 2008 and had been the only focused effort to collect Booster Gold solo stories up to this point. The volume is now out of print, but is still easily available for a relatively reasonable price (currently several of them cost around $30 on Amazon). However, as with all Showcase Presents volumes, it was published in black-and-white, which creates a bit of an odd effect during a two-issue Rainbow Raider story where the villain is forcing Booster to see in black-and-white, and the art is meant to reflect the differences and does not in the reprint.

Booster Gold #1 features the first appearance of the title character. The original series, which had a significant print run in the '80s, remains fairly easy to collect inexpensively in single issues, although if eBay and Amazon are any barometer, the prices on those (particularly #1) are creeping up in response to the movie rumors, as well.