Jimmy Olsen: Adventures Vol. 01 by Jack Kirby (graphic novel review).
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. Tidying up my old comic collected editions, I came across this volume of Jimmy Olsen stories from 1970-71 by Jack Kirby. Issues # 131-139 and 141. 140 was a reprint. There was great excitement at the time about Kirby moving to DC to start exciting new projects.
I think ‘Jimmy Olsen’ was the first Kirby comic from his new company and, although he had no real interest in working with someone else’s characters, it started off well. I’d never heard of the Newsboy Legion before but the Whiz Wagon was a nice bit of Kirby Kit and the art was up to scratch, even inked by Vince Colletta. Olsen and his friends went to investigate the Wild Area and found Habitat, a tree house town, and a motorcycle gang called the Outsiders. Then came The Mountain of Judgement. Wow!
Or not. The Mountain of Judgement turned out to be a big vehicle inhabited by the Hairies who were super-scientific hippie geniuses working on a top-secret government project making clones. Olsen met a cloned Olsen and the Newsboy Legion saw clones of themselves, miniature Scrappers as a paratroop force, for example. This was all very clever and modern but the ethical dilemma of having yourself duplicated without permission, not to mention the problem of being a duplicate, were never explored. Did little Scrappers ever wonder why they were kept one inch tall? Plus all the clones were fully mature, without any childhood or experience. How? For Kirby the gee-whiz-wow-science factor was enough to make a story. No further thought needed. It simply never occurred to him. It also never occurred to him that Superman had a variety of powers. All he ever uses is flying and strength. Once he creates electronic energy by rubbing his hands together but that’s not one of his abilities.
Meanwhile, in the Evil Factory, Simyan and Mokkari, servants of Darkseid, grew monsters of their own to attack the Project. A big green Jimmy Olsen clone coated with Kryptonite to deal with Superman. A four-armed monster called the four-armed terror which ate radiation. I think it became obvious with the four-armed terror from the Evil Factory that Kirby wasn’t giving this comic his best. That was reserved for the proper Fourth World strips, ‘The New Gods’, ‘Mister Miracle’ and ‘The Forever People’.
The art deteriorated to space-filling splash pages, collages and four panels per page with big figures to fill them up. Not always, but too often. It was still Kirby art so it was still pretty good but the stories weren’t great and it soon became obvious that Jack needed an editor to rein in his excesses and maybe somebody to write the scripts, too. They weren’t terrible but the characters tend to tell you what they’re doing, which is quite clear from the drawings. Stan Lee let Kirby’s pictures convey most of the action and used the dialogue to add drama, emotional content and jokes. Kirby’s not that kind of writer. When DC went large and started filling the back pages with forties reprints, it became clear that Kirby’s scripting style hadn’t really changed from back then.
As a bonus, there’s a nice introduction by Mark Evanier, one of Kirby’s assistants at the time, and a few one-page essays by the man himself that featured in the issues when they came out. The first is a bit of autobiography, the second is about the Whiz Wagon and the third is about the Hairies. Kirby’s prose style is odd. Scatterbrained. But he was. Evanier has many stories about how Jack set out to draw one tale and then ended up with something completely different, including the Don Rickles yarn that concludes this issue.
There are things to enjoy. Kirby’s art always has a certain magic and his Science Fiction concepts have that sense of wonder associated with the early days of the genre, the 1930s before John W. Campbell changed the field. It fits in comics because Gardner Fox and other DC writers dabbled in Pulp SF before they went over to comics and have the same style. It’s innocent and fun but the characters aren’t real human beings who resent being one of many inch-tall clones of a New York scrapper. On the other hand, it’s meant for eleven year-olds and, when I was eleven, I thought it was okay. Not great, but okay. Even now, it’s okay. A little frisson of nostalgia and remembering days gone by.
Eamonn Murphy
November 2023
(pub: DC Comics, 2003. 160 page graphic novel softcover. Price: varies. ISBN: 978-1-56389-984-3)
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