Jimmy Olsen: Adventures by Jack Kirby - Volume One

In the first place, this is not the volume to give to someone you're trying to coach on the New Mature Graphic Storytelling. No, this is a book for someone so enmeshed in the givens of old school comic books that they reflexively refer to its greatest superhero artist as Jack "King" Kirby.

Jimmy Olsen: Adventures by Jack Kirby (DC) is the first of two volumes of Kirby work done on the Superman series. Originally produced in the early seventies, after the artist had acrimoniously fled the comics company where he'd co-created many of its most enduring characters (Fantastic Four, the Hulk, X-Men, et al), the Olsen stories were some of the first works fans would get to see of this comics legend on his own. Unlike the Marvel books, where Kirby's name was more consistently aligned with Stan Lee - or even the Golden Age of Comics, where he collaborated with Joe Simon on works like the WWII Captain America - this was All Kirby. In addition to penciling the books, the King also plotted and scripted the material.

In the case of Jimmy Olsen, the results were decidedly mixed. There are all sorts of stories on the reasons Kirby debuted on this decidedly minor DC title (some of which are recounted by onetime Kirby employee Mark Evanier in the collection's intro), but whatever the behind-the-scenes, the end product was undeniably strange. DC was so provincially protective of its Superman cast that when they saw the first results, they pulled in some of their regular artists (Murphy Anderson most consistently) to redo the Man of Steel and cub reporter Olsen’s faces. The images aren't as awkward as they could've been, but you can still tell the difference.

In approaching his first DC title, Kirby the scriptwriter essentially tossed Jimmy's longstanding characterization as a callow, egocentric youth and remade him as action guy. All the comic relief (something fans expected from a Jimmy Olsen title more than they did, say, Batman) was provided by the Newsboy Legion, an updated second-generation version of Simon & Kirby characters whose heyday was the forties. The original Newsboys were a quartet of street urchins, modeled after the Dead End Kids, who battled Nazis on the streets of New York. Of course, each of the New Newsies was a duplicate of his father (Gabby, Big Words, Tommy and Scrapper - you can already tell what each one did in the group, can't you?) In addition to this foursome, the culturally sensitive creator added a fifth: a black kid named Flipper Dipper (or alternately: Flippa Dippa), who was obsessed with scuba diving. You get a lot of panels with poor ol' Flip, standing around awkwardly in his wet suit, lamenting the fact that they're nowhere near the water.

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is the Comics & Graphic Novels review editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy size acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

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