Jimmy Olsen
27 years ago - Jimmy Olsen born to a single mother in Suicide Slums in Metropolis.
17 years ago - 10-year-old Jimmy Olsen begins creating content on the Daily Planet's social media site.
14 years ago - 13-year-old Jimmy Olsen participates in a work study community service project at the Daily Planet. Lois Lane sees his social media content and realizes how talented he is, and invites him to start submitting his photography to the paper.
13 years ago - 14-year-old Jimmy Olsen meets Clark Kent. He is the only photographer able to capture images of Superman, which run with Lois Lane's story, making him the youngest photographer to ever have images on the cover of the Planet.
12 years ago - 15-year-old Jimmy Olsen's online video content starts to regularly go viral as he explores the stranger parts of Metropolis. He detects a mysterious signal and is the first to meet intergalactic visitors from the Citadel, inadvertently becoming Earth's ambassador when he shares a hostess fruit pie. He disrupts an assassination attempt against the alien visitors, briefly being turned into a giant turtle kaiju monster. Superman manages to keep him contained until the effects wear off. They agree that Jimmy should have a way to call Superman, and he starts wearing his signal watch.
11 years ago - 16-year-old Jimmy Olsen finds evidence that Kobra may have planted an assassin among the students of Université Notre Dame Des Ombres to kill Sandra Knight, and goes undercover as a student to find her.
10 years ago - 17-year-old Jimmy Olsen finds his way into Gorilla City, and successfully sets up a small coffee shop there, creating his most viral content yet. The "Jimmy Olsen Fan Club" is first formed by his online followers. He works with Ralph & Sue Dibny to solve a series of impossible heists in Metropolis.
9 years ago - 18-year-old Jimmy Olsen is finally hired full time by the Daily Planet rather than just being a content creator, given creative control over their Social Media devision. He saves Superman by uncovering that Robert DuBois's brother is still alive.
7 years ago - 20-year-old Jimmy Olsen is the most-watched content creator on the Daily Planet's social media platform.
6 years ago - 21-year-old Jimmy is replicated by Rudy Jones to get into the Daily Planet to look for Superman.
5 years ago - 22-year-old Jimmy Olsen captures photos of Superman's death, winning international acclaim and a pulitzer.
4 years ago - 23-year-old Jimmy Olsen attends the wedding of Clark Kent & Lois Lane. He becomes quick friends with Pete Ross. Jimmy track's Intergang's weapon supplier with Dan Turpin, and disappears through a boom tube back to Apokolips,surviving there for several days. He sends messages back to Turpin, and Himon helps him escape to New Genesis, where he tells Highfather of the coming Parademon wave invasion, bringing the New Gods to Earth to turn back Darkseid's invasion.
3 years ago - 24-year-old Jimmy Olsen manages to avoid being killed by an assassin and stages his own death to track his potential killer. He finds that his deceased father, Mark Olsen, was the estranged son of the billionare Jacob Olsen, making him an heir to their family fortune, and the target of his half-brother, Julien Olsen. Jimmy donates his portion of the family fortune to the trusts maintaining the Daily Planet, giving controlling interest to its employees.
We had a ton of work to do adapting Jimmy to our timeline. As one of the main supporting cast for one of the most important characters in DC canon, he was added to our site really early on, but I really don't think at the time we had done the work to really look back and see everything this character represents.
Modern readers will be familiar with the character through the comics, as well as the very frequent adaptations, and it's really been a while since any of them did a very good job of capturing the fun that he represents. For a long while, the whole of the comic industry seemed to be trying to distance themselves from the silly children's entertainment they once were, but in doing so they would often cut themselves off from the whimsey that only comics can deliver. We only very recently are starting to see a return to that fun-for-funs-sake style of comics, and I personally can't get enough of it.
Modern readers will be familiar with the character through the comics, as well as the very frequent adaptations, and it's really been a while since any of them did a very good job of capturing the fun that he represents. For a long while, the whole of the comic industry seemed to be trying to distance themselves from the silly children's entertainment they once were, but in doing so they would often cut themselves off from the whimsey that only comics can deliver. We only very recently are starting to see a return to that fun-for-funs-sake style of comics, and I personally can't get enough of it.
Jimmy Olsen's Comic HistoryJimmy Olsen's first appearance is a little harder to track than normal. As far back as 1938's Action Comics #6 there was an unnamed, bow-tied office boy in the Daily Planet offices, and this character has now been retconned as the first appearance of Jimmy Olsen. This is during the time before the Superman Radio Show debuted in 1940 and introduced lots of ideas that the comics would later adapt, when the Daily Planet's editor was still George Taylor.
Jimmy Olsen was invented for the radio show, presumably because radio needs it's characters to be able to talk to each other to keep the story moving so putting another character in the room was a smart logistical decision. He was introduced to the comics in Superman #13 in 1941, an office boy that wanted to tag along after Clark & Lois who manages to get himself mixed up in their adventures. At this point Robin had been around for over a year, deliberately working as the audience surrogate over in the Batman comics, and during this time Jimmy basically filled the same role, but he wasn't really part of the power fantasy of Superman, and so he was really only making sporatic appearances in the Golden Age Superman comics. |
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Jimmy's popularity increased quite a bit in response to Jack Larsen's portrayal in the Adventures of Superman TV series, so in 1954 Jimmy actually got his own series. Even though it started years before it's technical start in 1960, Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen is often considered one of the most iconic series of the Silver Age. Jimmy had endless crazy adventures over the several decades of this series publication, often undergoing all sorts of crazy bodily transformations. He got superpowers of his own several times, most notably Plastic-Man-like stretchability as Elastic Lad, an identity he would occasionally use in the future as a member of the Legion of Superheroes. He got his stretching powers by drinking a special formula... the same power source Elongated Man would use several years later.
In the seventies when Jack Kirby came to write for DC he didn't want to displace an existing creative team from any of their books because he was an incredibly cool guy. Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen was a very popular comic and it didn't have a set creative team, so this was where Kirby's first work happened in DC... which means that this is where we first met the New Gods. Eventually Kirby left, and the series was combined with Superman's' Girlfriend Lois Lane and Supergirl into the anthology series Superman Family. During these stories we started to see an effort to modernize Jimmy's look; as apparently bowties weren't quite the height of young people fashion in the mid seventies. |
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The entire Superman mythology underwent a massive change in the mid eighties after the Crisis of Infinite Earths. John Byrne restarted the entire thing, revamping origins and characters across the board. We're all really big fans of Byrne's Superman, but it has to be said that Jimmy Olsen is one of the characters that really didn't fare well in this redesign. Comics had been shying away from the silliness of the Silver Age for a while, so it was understandable that most of Jimmy's solo adventures weren't adapted, but what was left over just seemed to be lacking the playfullness that had defined the character for so long. While he had originally been a cub reporter always looking for his own byline, the comic took the idea from the Richard Donner movies that he was instead a photographer, which meant he basically lost the impetus to go off and find his own stories. He was a sort of vestigial piece of Superman's decades-old comic origins.
Which is not to say what he wasn't still a vital part of the Superman mythology. He was of course featured in the classic Superman Animated Series, and was present for all of the major story developments of the 90s, most notably taking a photo of the exact moment Superman and Doomsday fell in their fight to the death. |
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Despite the generally watered-down Jimmy that was featured in the Post-Crisis DC, there were a few times we caught glimpses of the classic screwball-fun version of the character. In 2005 Grant Morrison wrote one of the best Superman stories ever, All-Star Superman, and their version of Jimmy was an absolute joy. Bright, brilliant, hyper-kinetic, and just brimming with a sort of retro-future cool. In 2011 we got a Jimmy Olsen one-shot by Nick Spenser that managed to capture everything great about the Silver Age Jimmy, bringing it all into the modern era in a way that would have been amazing if the New 52 hadn't completely wiped out the entire continuity a few months later.
The Jimmy of the New 52 was arguably an improvement too... if only because they really leaned into the idea that he was best friends with a much younger Clark, depicting the two of them regularly just hanging out. Any conversation about Jimmy, however, has to consider the 2019 12-issue miniseries Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen by Matt Fraction. It's a huge return to form, leaning into the wildly unpredictable antics of Silver Age Jimmy with a twisted non-linear mystery plot tying it all together. Most notably, this series introduces the notion that Jimmy is actually from a rich old-money family that has competed with the Luthor family for control of Metropolis since it's founding. This was a wildly original idea that infuses the book with all sorts of intrigue and mystery, driving a lot of the plot and giving us a whole new approach to the classic version of Jimmy... so much so that we really struggled trying to decide if it was something we should adapt to our own story. |
Our Jimmy Olsen StoryTo get Jimmy right, we wanted to create a modern interpretation of his particular Silver Age coolness. Matt Fraction opened the door by suggesting that Jimmy is basically an internet content creator. We wanted to take that a step further, suggesting that the classic "Jimmy Olsen Fan Club" is in fact his internet following, and that the Daily Planet itself is a social media platform that Jimmy has been given control over. Basically, imagine if Casey Neistat started running Youtube in 2016.
With that idea as a framework, we get to send Jimmy on lots of adventures loosely based on some if his classic Silver Age stories, whether that's visiting Gorilla City, going undercover as a woman, being turned into a kaiju turtle, or even playing a part in the introduction of the New Gods. Some more mundane events that happened in the later versions of Jimmy are included also, like him helping save Superman from Bloodsport, or him earning a Pulitzer for the photo he snapped of the death of his best friend, the one photo he wishes he never took. There was some real debate over whether we should embrace the idea of Jimmy actually coming from a rich old money family. Ultimately we decided that we could introduce the idea later on, but it was just more fun if we used the scrappy, from-the-streets-and-still-wears-a-bowtie character we all love. |
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