RKMBs Forums .::Robegories::. Comic Books Jimmy Olsen: "One of the greatest characters in comics history"?

He was also Marco Polo in a past life. Seriously: Jimmy Olsen had a lot going on in the '60s, and that adaptability is another thing that makes him so great.

Which brings us back around to the idea that Olsen is a character that could only exist in super-hero comics. That might seem obvious, what with the fact that he's a supporting cast member in a super-hero comic, but other prominent characters aren't quite as tied to the medium. Superman didn't need super-hero comics, as evidenced by the fact that super-hero comics didn't actually exist when he was created. Batman and Robin were directly descended from the pulps, and probably would've worked just as well there if Bob Kane had actually been able to string enough words together to form a dime novel.

Olsen, however, is one of the earliest characters who emerged into a fully-formed universe, and experienced that universe by the rules that weren't created for him. He's a normal guy who operates in a world built for Superman, and the way that all plays out is fascinating.

But more than that, he had to exist not just in comics, but in Silver Age comics specifically. He needed to be shaped by a world that had that kind of, for lack of a better word, purity in its intentions and boundless imagination that still rigorously adhered to its own bizarre logic. I won't say that Jimmy Olsen stories are the best of the Silver Age, or even the most evocative of what made storytelling in that era so distinct -- the Weisinger era of Superman and those early Legion of Super-Heroes stories are both more likely candidates for that -- but as a character, he's certainly the most pure product of his time.

You can see how those ideas all fit together in the way that Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen plays out as a series. At first, there's an attempt to build Jimmy as a standard hero. He's essentially played as "What if Clark Kent didn't have super-powers," to the point where he's even given his own sidekick: Jumbo Jones, the portly pilot of the Daily Planet's Flying Newsroom:



But as the series goes on and Otto Binder replaces Jack Schiff as the go-to Olsen writer and infuses the series with more of that Captain Marvel-style weirdness, things take off. Jimmy becomes a character unto himself, and Superman starts taking more of that authoritarian role. You even start to get beautiful metaphors that blend with the tapestry of the larger Superman mythos.

The very idea of Jimmy's famous Signal Watch, for instance, isn't just a nice storytelling tool to bring Superman in at a moment's notice (though it certainly makes things more convenient). It's also a powerful metaphor that shows the modern Lex Luthor argument about how Superman's presence on Earth is stunting humanity's growth as a species to be the lie that it is. The watch gives Jimmy Olsen the ability to literally summon Superman to solve any of his problems, but he doesn't rely on it for the simple reason that if he does, we get a boring story. Instead, Jimmy is built to understand, as we all should, that Superman is there to do the things we can't, and with that understanding, he's inspired to do his best to solve everything, pushing humanity to the limits of what it can achieve, before Superman gets called in.

That's a beautiful aspect of Superman's character, the inspirational aspect of his role as an authority figure, that's often lost in more recent attempts to make him "relatable" or "less perfect" or "f***ing unreadable," which unfortunately seems to be the goal most of the time. And it's one that Jimmy, as a stand in for the reader, brings out in a way that's both easy to understand and fun to read.

In a lot of ways, Jimmy Olsen is the Silver Age, all of its excesses and strange rules and metaphors and inspirations brought together in a perfect snapshot of the time. And that might be why creators in other eras have such a hard time working with him, even in a genre that's steeped in nostalgia.





You can see a lot of that evidenced by Jack Kirby's run on the book. I was talking to Benito Cereno the other day about where to draw the line between the various ages of comics, and I told him that for me, you can make a clean break between the Silver Age and the Bronze Age right there in October of 1970 and Kirby's debut in Jimmy Olsen #133.

Don't get me wrong: I like those comics a lot, but they're not really Jimmy Olsen stories. They're Kirby stories, and Kirby seems supremely unconcerned with Jimmy Olsen as a character and far more interested in those big ideas that dominate his work. As a result, Jimmy's barely more than a background character to the adventures of the Newsboy Legion clones, the Hairies, the Weirdies, the Wild Area, Transilvane (the planet so evil that it has devil horns), Darkseid and, of course, Goody Rickels. Jimmy's just sort of along for the ride, a bit player whose name just happens to be on the cover because Kirby told DC he'd take their worst-selling book and make it their best.

And the thing is, as soon as Kirby's pencil touches the paper, the Jimmy that was is pretty much done. Even after he leaves and Jimmy goes back to adventuring in the days of Marco Polo, he feels like a different character, existing in a different kind of world. Once Kirby has arrived, there's just no going back to the Silver Age.

In that respect, Jimmy Olsen works as a microcosm of comics as a whole. Kirby (and Stan Lee, and Steve Ditko, and John Romita, and so on) changed super-hero storytelling on a fundamental level with what they did at Marvel in the '60s, and after Kirby's arrival, DC pretty much spent the rest of the '70s catching up. That's kind of what DC does.
O'Neil, Adams, Englehart and Rogers restructured Batman into the form that we know him today, O'Neil and Bates took Superman into different kinds of stories, the Justice League's adventures got bigger and more threatening under Conway, Dillin and Perez, and so on. By the time they restructured the universe in an attempt to make it more modern in Crisis on Infinite Earths, Jimmy Olsen was basically tossed out of comics with the exception of an occasional IP-servicing appearance; he didn't have the romance aspect that kept Lois Lane as a thriving character, and everything that made him great didn't fit with attempts for more "realistic" stories.

And why should they? He doesn't live in the real world. He lives in a world where his best friend is a flying alien who can juggle cars. He lives in a world where lightning strikes and nuclear meltdowns tend to create wisecracking do-gooders and not just third-degree burns. And for a world like that, no matter what era those stories are set, he's the perfect character for it.
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