Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen
Who Killed Jimmy Olsen?
by Matt Fraction
art by Steve Lieber
2020
"Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen: Who Killed Jimmy Olsen?" collects a year-long miniseries that's like, a celebration of Silver Age comic hijinx and shenanigans. After an initial inciting incident where Jimmy gets turned into a giant turtle-man while skydiving from orbit for charity, and thus crashes into and destroys a giant lion statue built by Lex Luthor (see, it's wacky from the very start), Jimmy realizes that someone is trying to kill him, and fakes his own death so he can go into hiding and investigate his own (attempted) murder.
The plot is complex from the start, and picks up complications along the way, like a katarami ball made of chaos.
Jimmy's version of going into hiding is to ask Superman to let him figure this one out for himself, moving to Gotham, and reappearing as Irresponsible Blogger Timmy Olsen, a parody of cruel, click-hungry prank YouTubers. Ostensibly this is because the financially struggling Daily Planet is existentially dependent on Jimmy's video content for revenues, so even when he's 'dead,' he can't in good conscience be off the clock. While there's a lot that's funny in this comic, the Timmy Olsen segments were my favorites, especially when he repeatedly antagonizes Batman, for example, by seeing how many men in Joker costumes he can fit in one restaurant.
Anyway, Jimmy is pretty sure it's Lex Luthor who wants him dead. In a series of flashbacks, we see that the Olsens and Luthors have been enemies since Metropolis was just a trading outpost. They're also the two richest families in the city? But while Jimmy basically just ignores the fact that he's a billionaire, his brother Julian leans into his role as builder, donor, civic booster, font of noblesse oblige, and rival to Lex. We also get flashbacks (these ones blending the art style of Calvin & Hobbes with the story beats of Peanuts) showing the complex sibling dynamics of the lil Olsens that help make sense of their adult relationship.
In Gotham, Jimmy seeks out his sister Janie, an award-winning playwrite, and recruits her to help solve the case. While they're on the lam, they run into Jix, an alien jewel thief whom Jimmy accidentally married during a drunken night in Gorilla City (a city of sentient gorillas) on a previous wacky adventure. Jimmy was supposed to annul the marriage but forgot, which is a problem, because Jix is trying to enter into an arranged marriage / hostage situation with a demonic-looking alien warlord so that his people's conquest of hers will be like, somewhat less awful. But he's mad that he was denied his hostage-bride, so he and his robot army also show up to chase Jimmy and wreak havoc.
Phfew! And then, in the last 1-2 chapters, all the various plotlines are brought together and resolved, including solving Jimmy's (wannabe) murder and fixing the financial solvency of the Daily Planet.
The first half, roughly, of the story is told very nonlinearly, not really for any obvious reason. I might guess that Fraction either decided that a linear telling would be poorly paced, or perhaps he just wanted to jumpstart several plots simultaneously to increase the early excitement. Once the situation reaches a critical mass of complexity, he switches over to linear progression (aside from the childhood and ancestral flashbacks) for the rest of the series.
Each issue is broken into scenes, and each scene gets its own 60s style intro culminating in a character getting declared like, 'Superman's Nemesis, Lex Luthor,' or 'Jimmy Olsen's Coworker, Lois Lane,' and then the scene gets a punny title. There are also a lot of really excellent montage sequences, such as Superman looking back on the kinds of trouble Jimmy has historically gotten himself into, or a series of Timmy Olsen's irresponsible pranks.
Fraction and Lieber really dig deep into the Silver Age toolkit and pull out as many 1960s style plots, jokes, characters, and ideas as the comic can possibly hold. They're not all equally successful, but I admire the spirit. One thing I didn't love was Fraction stringing together longer and longer sequences of nicknames like Jimberly and Jimmifer and so on to call Jimmy. Overall, I would say this will appeal to fans of screwball comedy and anyone looking for an adult homage to the classic, silly Superman storylines of yore, when comics were unambiguously for kids.
The plot is complex from the start, and picks up complications along the way, like a katarami ball made of chaos.
Jimmy's version of going into hiding is to ask Superman to let him figure this one out for himself, moving to Gotham, and reappearing as Irresponsible Blogger Timmy Olsen, a parody of cruel, click-hungry prank YouTubers. Ostensibly this is because the financially struggling Daily Planet is existentially dependent on Jimmy's video content for revenues, so even when he's 'dead,' he can't in good conscience be off the clock. While there's a lot that's funny in this comic, the Timmy Olsen segments were my favorites, especially when he repeatedly antagonizes Batman, for example, by seeing how many men in Joker costumes he can fit in one restaurant.
Anyway, Jimmy is pretty sure it's Lex Luthor who wants him dead. In a series of flashbacks, we see that the Olsens and Luthors have been enemies since Metropolis was just a trading outpost. They're also the two richest families in the city? But while Jimmy basically just ignores the fact that he's a billionaire, his brother Julian leans into his role as builder, donor, civic booster, font of noblesse oblige, and rival to Lex. We also get flashbacks (these ones blending the art style of Calvin & Hobbes with the story beats of Peanuts) showing the complex sibling dynamics of the lil Olsens that help make sense of their adult relationship.
In Gotham, Jimmy seeks out his sister Janie, an award-winning playwrite, and recruits her to help solve the case. While they're on the lam, they run into Jix, an alien jewel thief whom Jimmy accidentally married during a drunken night in Gorilla City (a city of sentient gorillas) on a previous wacky adventure. Jimmy was supposed to annul the marriage but forgot, which is a problem, because Jix is trying to enter into an arranged marriage / hostage situation with a demonic-looking alien warlord so that his people's conquest of hers will be like, somewhat less awful. But he's mad that he was denied his hostage-bride, so he and his robot army also show up to chase Jimmy and wreak havoc.
Phfew! And then, in the last 1-2 chapters, all the various plotlines are brought together and resolved, including solving Jimmy's (wannabe) murder and fixing the financial solvency of the Daily Planet.
The first half, roughly, of the story is told very nonlinearly, not really for any obvious reason. I might guess that Fraction either decided that a linear telling would be poorly paced, or perhaps he just wanted to jumpstart several plots simultaneously to increase the early excitement. Once the situation reaches a critical mass of complexity, he switches over to linear progression (aside from the childhood and ancestral flashbacks) for the rest of the series.
Each issue is broken into scenes, and each scene gets its own 60s style intro culminating in a character getting declared like, 'Superman's Nemesis, Lex Luthor,' or 'Jimmy Olsen's Coworker, Lois Lane,' and then the scene gets a punny title. There are also a lot of really excellent montage sequences, such as Superman looking back on the kinds of trouble Jimmy has historically gotten himself into, or a series of Timmy Olsen's irresponsible pranks.
Fraction and Lieber really dig deep into the Silver Age toolkit and pull out as many 1960s style plots, jokes, characters, and ideas as the comic can possibly hold. They're not all equally successful, but I admire the spirit. One thing I didn't love was Fraction stringing together longer and longer sequences of nicknames like Jimberly and Jimmifer and so on to call Jimmy. Overall, I would say this will appeal to fans of screwball comedy and anyone looking for an adult homage to the classic, silly Superman storylines of yore, when comics were unambiguously for kids.
I suspect the nonlinear narrative in the early chapters was to make it more interesting on an issue by issue basis, as that's how it was presented, but it's been a while since I read it, so I could be wrong.
ReplyDeleteI think that's a pretty good guess! Fraction gets to have much more control over the pacing this way, for sure.
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