Customer Reviews

Jimmy Olsen: Adventures by Jack Kirby - Volume 2

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This one has a lot more Kirby concepts and the story gets rolling along a lot faster. We get to see Dracula...in this case Dragorin as an adversary against Superman. The Shield and the Newsboy Legion from Kirby's earlier works make another appearece here. I have to admit Kirby is an aquired taste.

When I was a youngster in 1970 I thought anyone could draw in the style of Kirby. It wasn't until I started creating my own art that I understood what he was trying say. It isn't the perfect anatomy that tells the story ..but the cartoony figures that are so dynamically portrayed, that do.

I wish that DC would follow Marvel's lead and put all of Kirby's greatest works on CD ROM. This could really lead to more exposure to the man who created characters for two universes..Marvel and DC.

More fun comic book stories from Jack "King" Kirby's early 1970s stint as the writer/artist of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen. In this volume, collecting issues #142-148, Kirby continues to flesh out his new Fourth World characters as they interact with Jimmy Olsen, Superman, and the revived Newsboy Legion. Crazy cool stuff! Be sure to check out Volume 1.

I am a Kirby fan and was intrigued to read this - since it marked Kirby's critical departure to DC. But it really isn't for all readers - by this time, Kirby had become an acquired taste, and in all honesty, this absurdist version of Olsen just didn't feel like the right vehicle for his ideas at the time. If you want to know what Kirby was really up to - then his New Gods series is a much better work..a classic that truly defines Kirby's vision. Jimmy Olsen was just a pitstop along the way - and such an odd comic that never quite worked. Jimmy and Superman exist in Kirbyvision - but they never feel like they quite belong there. Should you get this? Only if you're a Kirby completist I guess.

Once upon a time, there was Superman. And he wasn't invincible, he couldn't fly, and he wasn't infinitely strong. He wasn't even entirely bullet-proof, he relied more on his speed than his armored hide to keep from getting shot by... gangsters.

Yep, that's right, he wasn't always fighting bizarre aliens, giant robots, or mad scientists. He even defeated such prosaic criminals as the mastermind of a car-stealing ring. And life was good, because he was a character who could have interesting stories written about him.

Then began the superhero wars of the late 1930s when every cartoonist was trying to one up their competitors by making their superhero characters that much stronger, faster, more capable. Of course you need equally-invincible enemies to make any sort of a story, and pretty soon you end up with Utterly Invincible Being who gets trapped by a ludicrous plot device: Alien Overlord #322, Magical Substance #419, or Magical Creature #671. Boring.

And thus Superman stagnated for the next 40-50 years, with a few notable exceptions. One of which was Jack Kirby's efforts for the extremely moribund "Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen" series.

Before Jack, the series was far worse than the main Superman comic. Each issue Jimmy'd get turned into some stupid (and usually evil) monster: giant turtle, giant robot, giant Jimmy Olsen, mind-controlled Jimmy Olsen, giant ape Jimmy Olsen, Jimmy Olsen from Jupiter, combinations of all of the above, etc, etc. And it had few readers, though I'm sure they were loyal.

Fortunately, Kirby had apparently never read any issues of Superman's Pal. He started off with a remarkably strong story about a secret "D.N.A. Project" to create Mutated Humans for Good, and he tossed in some ideas he had about "The Hairies" (a bunch of techology-overequipped hippies) and superbeings from other planets (proto-New Gods) and Intergang and Morgan Edge... and knockoffs of the old 1940s Newsboy Legion cartoon series.

It had its bad points. For example, he never should've created the idea of extremely small humans; it simply opens up too many plotholes (not to mention it doesn't make any sense at all). And he still had to contend with Invincible Superman, though by giving him some genuine competition (and focusing more on Jimmy Olsen and the Newsboy Legion) he could keep things more balanced.

Started off strong... but in usual Jack Kirby fashion it deteriorated into a parody of his original ideas--and ended up looking an awful lot like the old Superman's Pal.

About halfway through he pretty much tossed out everything he'd been doing before, and started writing about vampires, the Loch Ness monster, and Victor Volcanum the fire-eating archcriminal. Those are the stories you'll find in Volume II. Frankly, they stink, and it's no wonder readership dropped back to its pre-Jack-Kirby levels.

When Jimmy gets turned into a DNA-regressed version of himself you can be sure it's all downhill from there. Morgan Edge (the evil mastermind behind Jimmy and the Newsboy Legion's investigations) makes only one appearance in Volume II, three token Intergang members are dispatched without so much as a whimper, and the Hairies make one brief appearance in a side story. The story about Supertown (something mentioned at the start of Volume I) took up maybe 3 pages and was utterly pathetic compared to what was hinted at.

Read Volume I if you want some idea of what could have been; read Volume II if you want to see the awful mess it turned into.