I pretty much established from day one that Silver Age comics can be extremely silly. As far as I’ve been able to tell, no hero was immune from the ridiculousness—they adopted improbable animal sidekicks, got turned into improbable animal sidekicks, turned evil, turned their improbable animal sidekicks evil, got turned evil by their improbable animal sidekicks… everybody was having their share of crazy, cracky goodness, but out of all the characters to have stupid adventures in the 1960s, the Idiot Supreme Award probably has to go to Jimmy Olsen. Dude got into so much trouble I’m surprised he didn’t get a restraining order against Superman just so he could stop turning into a werewolf every other week. (No, seriously, he got turned into a werewolf. Twice. That I know of.)
Jimmy’s inane adventures began in 1954 with Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #1 and lasted an impressive twenty years before being folded into the Superman Family comic—a fate shared by the equally silly Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane. The comic we’re discussing today is the fourth-to-last issue ever published under the Jimmy Olsen solo title and to be honest, we aren’t discussing the entire comic. We’re just discussing a story that appeared in this issue because I found it on the internet (full credit given at the end). Which kind of stinks because, just judging by the cover, the entire issue was full of cross-dressing goodness.
Yeah, apparently
Jimmy had his own not-secret secret identity at some point. I guess being Superman’s pal and a
photographer for the Daily Planet wasn’t enough for the guy and now he has to
go around training a special police division called the Masquerade Squad in the
art of disguise and getting plaques for it, the show-off.
The ceremony is
rudely interrupted by the police commissioner, who demands Olsen be arrested
for selling police secrets to criminals.
How does he know Jimmy’s been doing this? I don’t know.
You tell me. In the
commissioner’s favor, Jimmy does respond in the least suspicious manner
possible: self-defenestration! The commissioner
orders the Masquerade Squad to comb the area for Olsen, but the police chief,
in an exposition dump that I’m sure will in no way impact the rest of the
story, insists that his men are too busy hunting down criminal
master-of-disguise “Max the Actor.” But
the commissioner cares not and his orders are carried out.
Jimmy, meanwhile, attempts to hide from “the fuzz” (oh, the seventies!). Along the way, he spots several of the Masquerade Squad in disguise, e.g. one is posing as a gas station attendant. And how does Jimmy know he’s a fake? Because the guy is pumping gas WHILE SMOKING A CIGARETTE.
WOW. That goes way beyond not knowing how a gas station attendant is supposed to act, that is… that is just WOW, dude. I imagine that after Jimmy left, the officer unwittingly recreated that scene from The Birds where some random idiot tries to smoke a cigar around gasoline and ends up setting half the town on fire.
And that, boys and girls, is how smoking kills.
Jimmy finally comes to an abandoned building, but it turns out a bunch of crooks that Jimmy once helped to put in jail are already hiding there and toss Jimmy out on his bellbottom-clad… bottom. And for some reason Jimmy is disappointed by this.
“Why don’t the evil scumbags LIKE ME???”
Y’know, there must be about a hundred abandoned buildings in Metropolis. What makes this one so popular with the criminal element? Is it within walking distance of all the good banks?
With nowhere else to go, Jimmy makes his way to a used clothing store and picks out some women’s clothes. He then wears said clothes as a disguise to prevent the cops from finding him. And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for—just how convincing a woman is Mister James Bartholomew Olsen?
Meh. He looks okay, but when it comes to the whole bouffant-and-miniskirt combo, we all know that nobody can touch Freddie Mercury. Not even real women. Sorry, ladies.
The disguise works pretty well until Jimmy gets a hankering for a hot dog and goes to buy one, even though he KNOWS that the vendor is actually an incognito member of the Masquerade Squad. And it ends about as well as you’d expect, with a whole mess of police officers spontaneously appearing from thin air to arrest him. When Jimmy asks the hot dog vendor/officer how he knew it was him, this happens:
Oh, so sorry, Gonzo’s Immediate Female Relatives. Guess you’re dudes. Seriously, I know this is old, but for crying out loud, I expect this brand of stupid from romance comics, not Superman’s pal. Guess I was being foolishly optimistic. Plus, we don’t even need the nail polish excuse because as you can see in the very next sentence, we learn that Jimmy forgot to take off the distinctive signal watch gifted to him by Superman. That by itself would have been enough to bust him, so why bring in the random sexism? And I count this as two flavors of sexism, by the way—one for implying that all women wear nail polish, and another for implying that only women wear nail polish.
Freddie Mercury would not approve of these shenanigans.
…That was the last Queen reference, I swear. At least as far as this review is concerned.
Just as Jimmy’s about to be taken to the slammer, the commissioner shows up and admits that the whole let’s-kill-Jimmy thing was just a hoax to test the Masquerade Squad’s talents, and Jimmy announces that they all passed “with flying colors.” Soooo why couldn’t finding Max the Actor have served as the test? As opposed to coming up with this convoluted plot that takes time and energy away from capturing the real criminal? By the same token, Jimmy was easily able to pick every member of the Masquerade Squad out of a crowd. How does this allow them to pass and graduate to actual police work? Well, that’s what they get for hiring an untrained newspaper photographer to teach them how to do undercover work, I suppose.
And then things take a turn for the absurd, if you can believe that. As the commissioner is complaining about how Max the Actor is still at large, Jimmy announces that he himself has already located Max and could easily apprehend him at that very moment, “even with these cuffs on!”
(Have Max's hands been ripped off? What is going on in that second panel? How hard did Jimmy hit that guy?!!)
As you can see, Max has been hiding in plain sight this whole time and only gave himself away when he failed to cuff Olsen’s hands behind his back. Though I have to wonder—if Max didn’t even know how to cuff people properly, how did he manage to successfully pose as a police officer for so long? On the other hand, these are the people who are easily fooled by a pair of glasses and a spit curl, so it stands to reason they can’t tell the difference between proper and improper cuffing techniques. The comic ends with the commissioner lamenting how Jimmy works for the Daily Planet instead of the police department.
So yeah, congratulations, Olsen’s Masquerade Squad, you found drag queen Jimmy. While a wanted criminal has been hiding under your very noses. If I had the power to fire that commissioner—not to mention that idiot Jimmy—they’d be selling apples on street corners by now. Or whatever it is that unemployed people did in the seventies.
…oh, right, I promised no more Queen. In that case, I’ll just say that, as far as unashamed goofiness was concerned, it was time for the hammer to…
…well what I
mean is, the old Silver Age titles could no longer keep themselves…
Oh, screw it. Since DC could no longer find somebody to love reading comics that made them feel as though they were going slightly mad, the company was under pressure to modernize because otherwise, Jimmy Olsen and other titles would soon be all dead, all dead. DC finally achieved a breakthru by realizing that if you can’t beat them, join them, and did so literally by joining all of their Superman-related titles in the hopes that the Superman Family would have more staying power than when the characters weren’t in such good company. Evidently, the new title had a kind of magic, because they were doing all right for the next seven years before proving to be a loser in the end, but who wants to live forever anyway? The end. Bohemian rhapsody.
Next Time: Time to break out the conga drums
and the henna rinse: we’ve got a birthday party to crash!
Images from Jimmy Olsen #159 (by way of tgfa.org), The Birds, I Want
to Break Free, Killer Queen, Another One Bites the Dust, Hammer to Fall, and Keep
Yourself Alive
No comments:
Post a Comment