Gabby
1919 - Johnny Gabrielli is born in Metropolis, Suicide Slums.
1928 - 9-year-old Johnny Gabrielli's older brothers leave Metropolis to work. He is left behind in a boarding house and becomes a newsboy for the Daily Planet. He gets the nickname 'Gabby".
1931 - 12-year-old Johnny Gabrielli and his fellow newsboys, when they are confronted for protection money by local organized crime, choose to stand up to them with all sorts of hijinks. They are assisted by the Guardian, a new vigilante, who dubs them the Newsboy Legion.
1933 - 14-year-old Johnny Gabrielli and the Newsboy Legion discover Jim Harper's identity as the Guardian, and agree to keep it secret.
1937 - 18-year-old Johnny Gabrielli and the Newsboy Legion stand up to Intergang with the help of Jim Harper.
1940 - 21-year-old Johnny Gabrielli and Tommy Thompkins are drafted. Patrick MacGuire enlists to join them in Europe.
1942 - 23-year-old Johnny Gabrielli unit enters the European Theater in North African Theater in Belfast.
1943 - 24-year-old Johnny Gabrielli, Patrick MacGuire & Anthony Rodriguez are contacted by Jim Harper to attend the ceremony posthumously awarding Tommy Thompkins the Congressional Medal of Honor. They moved to Jim's unit.
1945 - 26-year-old Johnny Gabrielli & Patrick MacGuire are killed in the urban firefighting of the Battle of Nuremberg, both earning posthumous Silver Stars.
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Gabby's StoryThe four original Newsboys were all some degree of archetypal characters from the Kirby catalog, and that includes Gabby the smaller kid that just talked all the time. It's not as common a comics trope, but if anyone could be seen doing it, it's Kirby, who would invent characters like Funky Flashman, Glorious Godfrey, or Serifan. Gabby in particular stands out in his normalcy, with a sort of gung-ho we-can-do-it attitude that kind of defined them as a group.
When we try to adapt the Newsboys, we're confronted by the fact that these characters weren't ever really intended to grow up. Even in later comics, when decades were supposed to have passed, they needed to invent identical kids to the original characters just to make sure they stayed forever youthful. We can go ahead and allow them a nice long time to be a kid gang together, but sooner or later we have to figure out some version of adulthood for them, so we made them heroes of World War II. |