Like yesterday, this is another two-for-one post.

And like yesterday, this one is kind of weird.

According to the 1976 DC Calendar, May 12th marks the day that Lex Luthor first tried to kill Superboy.

At the risk of repeating myself, I’m into niche facts about comics, especially niche Superman facts, but unlike nice cubed, which is how I referred to the Batman Annual #14 ad I posted yesterday, this is more like niche to the twenty-fifth power.

I’m not saying that to be snarky. This isn’t me trying to go for the “lols”. I don’t even begrudge the fact that someone, probably E Nelson Bridwell, figured out exactly what day Lex tried to murder Superboy for the first time. It’s just a weird thing to include in that calendar.

The house ad I posted is for Superman: The Secret Years, which was a four issue mini-series showing the untold story of exactly how Kal-El of Earth-1 went from being Superboy to Superman. The series, which came out from November of 1984 to February of 1985, was written by Bob Rozakis with art by Curt Swan and Kurt Schaffenberger and I really like this story. It was a continuation of the eighties update to the idea of Superboy that Paul Kupperberg was doing in the New Adventures of Superboy, which wrapped up earlier in 1984. Issue 51 can be seen as a sort of prelude to this series.

Fun fact, Frank Miller did the covers.

I like this series quite a bit, hence me tying it to today’s This Day In DC History post. There is a certain amount of…not irony, but maybe bad timing that this story came out a year before DC got rid of the pre-Crisis continuity for Superman. It’s always kind of weird when you come across a series that is designed to tell an important part of a character’s, especially Superman’s, backstory and then find out it was five minutes before all of that changed.

Kind of like Superman: Secret Origin, now that I think about it.

More to follow…