Random Happenstance

We saw the house ad for this issue some time back, and today we'll answer the mystery of Superboy's extra candle on his birthday cake. Warning: you could come up with a better answer right now off the top of your head. From 1980, the New Adventures of Superboy #1, "The Most Important Year of Superboy's Life!" Written by Cary Bates, pencils by Kurt Schaffenberger, inks by David Hunt.

Superboy was leaving the Legion of Super-Heroes to helm their own book, and this issue starts with Clark Kent's sixteenth birthday. Pete Ross notices, his cake has seventeen candles, which Ma and Pa Kent explain as a good-luck token for the upcoming year, a tradition they had kept since Clark was eight. This triggers a flashback to that birthday, which, because comics, the Kents looked older eight years ago then they did now, due to exposure to chemicals from another dimension that made them a bit younger. Superboy had just made his first public appearance, but more than the eyes of earth were on him, as an alien ship spies on him then tries to capture him. While this is basically his second day on the job, Superboy had trained hard in the careful use of his powers, and breaks free.

Later, having cake with his parents, they watch home movies of Clark as a baby; intercut with footage and narration of the alien ship! The alien couple, Myla and Byrn, wanted to explain themselves: they were alien doctors, whose race had been killed off by a space-plague, then they had accidentally become immortal after a radiation blast. That was about a million years ago--wow, they really have gotten some mileage out of their ship!--and the ennui had definitely set in. They had seen Superboy's rocket on it's way to earth, and thought there was a possiblity for them there, but weren't able to catch it in time before getting sucked into a space-warp. It took eight years for them to find him, but their presentation was meant to show they meant no harm. In fact, they might be able to do Superboy a solid: They could extract the "aging factor" from him, so they would be mortal again, and Superboy would become an immortal eight-year-old!

The Kents try to convince Superboy that would be a terrible idea, but Superboy is at least considering it, since he feels he could handle immortality better, and he has to help Myla and Byrn. Taking a moment to consider it alone, Superboy then uses the device, which the aliens then gratefully take, already feeling themselves beginning to age normally again. Myla and Byrn then wipe a bit of Superboy's memory, taking the memory of his choice, so he wouldn't blame himself if he should eventually regret his immortality; he would just think it was a natural function of earth's yellow sun on him. They advise the wipe would take affect in five minutes, and split; with the Kents distraught but grateful he wouldn't remember his mistake. Of course, Superboy didn't actually go through with it, he only made it look like he did, since he had surmised Myla and Byrn's immortality was at least in part psycho-somatic: they thought they were immortal, so they were, they had to just be convinced otherwise. The wipe then takes his memory of the whole thing, and the grateful Kents resolve to remember it with an extra candle every year.

So I thought the extra candle was going to be that it took a year for Kal-El's rocket to get to earth, or to mark or commemorate all the time he had spent in the future with the Legion, or even just to cast doubt that Superboy and Clark Kent weren't the exact same age. Or it was a cover story for the year they forgot how old Clark was and had to backpedal, and couldn't come clean now. Make up your own answer, it's fun! We've blogged a few issues of this series, and like most solo Superboy stories, it's perfectly enjoyable fluff. I feel like the Legion would get much more characterization going forward; whereas with Superboy on the team it was limited to the couples that had been paired up for years, and the couple of members who were kind of jerks. Which we might see in a bit, when we check another Legion issue that had a big house ad.