Smallville Gives Booster Gold's Legion Ring a Super Explanation

Every so often, the nature of Smallville Season Eleven's publishing schedule throws us for a loop and we miss something. This week, though, in doing some research on our piece about Booster Gold and Doomsday's pairing in the newest issue, we stumbled across something from last week that seemed to bear repeating. In the issue--Smallville Season Eleven #48--Booster Gold's origin is repeated for the Smallville audience, with the customary minor tweaks. One of those tweaks actually resolves a decades-old question about exactly where Booster Gold's Legion of Super-Heroes flight ring came from. In the original comics, there's never been a clear explanation for how a 30th Century artifact ended up in a 25th Century museum, where it could be found and stolen by Michael Jon Carter, who would go on to use it to become Booster Gold. There was a cursory explanation given in Booster Gold Volume II, but at the time series writer Dan Jurgens hinted in a Gold Exchange interview that there was more to the story than we'd seen. In Smallville, that might be the case--one day we might find out how it got there--but there's one piece of information given that's pretty intriguing: It's Superman's ring. Apparently part of the Superman exhibit at the Space Museum where he and Skeets used to serve as security guards (and where they stole all of their gear and the Time Sphere from), the issue includes it as a casual part of the narration by Skeets, as though it's no big deal that they're explaining something that, in thirty or so years, the mainstream DC Universe has never fully dealt with.