Why must Jimmy Olsen die? This is why.

TwilightEL

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On my birthday, my father bought me The Amazing Transformations of Jimmy Olsen TPB. This is scientific evidence that I have the best father in the history of the universe. This book made me think I was in some kind of overdose coma. It's so stupid in the best way possible. Why? Let's review:

  • Jimmy gets a toothache. He won't go to the dentist, but he accepts random pills from the crackpot old doctor whose inventions are mocked as a regular feature of the Daily Planet.
  • As part of his job, Jimmy is allowed to use the Flying Newsroom on a regular basis. It's a helicopter. Someone decided Jimmy should be allowed to pilot a helicopter alone. The first time it appears, the dumbass flies it into a storm and crashes.
  • "A famous foreign official is coming to America by ocean liner! I'll... meet him at sea...!" Jimmy crashes over the ocean. I'm telling you this because he wakes up on an island with these incredibly racist stereotypes of primitive villagers who look like stereotypical African tribesmen. A yacht also passes by the island. Is he supposed to be in the Caribbean?
  • Apparently, a concussion will make you into a developmentally retarded manchild saying things like "ME CATCH LITTLE DOLL!" At this point, Jimmy Olsen is on display as a giant in Metropolis and the little doll is Superman.
At this point, I've gone through two of the stories.
Number of times Jimmy pilots a helicopter: ONE
Number of times Jimmy crashes a helicopter: ONE
Number of times Jimmy is exposed to the one thing that can cure him due to a ridiculous deus ex machina: ONE
Number of times Jimmy and Professor Potter join forces to **** up everyone's day, proving two dumbasses are worse than one: TWO

Now it's time for the first appearance of Elastic Lad!

  • Superman finds a random lead chest floating in outer space. Clearly, the only thing to do is to bring it to Jimmy Olsen. Naturally, neither of them assume that there might be some kind of RADIOACTIVE SUBSTANCE in this LEAD BOX which someone felt the need to SHOOT INTO SPACE. Superman allows Jimmy to open and photograph the items in the box, but not touch them. Maybe this is a complicated eugenics plot to sterilize Jimmy before he breeds.
  • Jimmy sees a glowing green substance in the box and thinks it might be Kryptonite. Again, this substance is in a LEAD BOX. So what does our hero do? If you guessed "He shuts the ****ing box", you're smarter than Jimmy Olsen but not smart enough to know just how stupid everyone's favorite cub reporter is. He runs off with the bottle, trips and smashes it, and decides that since Kryptonite is only harmful to Superman, he'll just dispose of the bottle and hope that Superman doesn't notice. He soon discovers that his body is completely elastic and deduces this is an effect of absorbing the green liquid, apparently not Kryptonite. I dunno, Jimmy, no one else has been such a colossal ****up that they absorbed an entire bottle of liquid Kryptonite into their skin. Maybe that's what always happens.
  • Jimmy joins the freakshow in disgrace and hopes that none of his friends see how far he's sunk.
  • The dumbest criminal ever poses as a scientist with a cure in order to exploit Jimmy. His first trick is to have one of his cronies pose as a window-washer whose ladder is too short to reach his windows. Jimmy helpfully reaches up and scrubs the window for them. Turns out that he just used acid to wash the bulletproof coating off of the DA's window. Why couldn't they just do that with a longer ladder? "A longer ladder would have been suspicious!" Less suspicious than a man with an EXTENDABLE ARM?! I think a rag on a stick would've been less suspicious than that!
  • Next, he and Jimmy find a bomb near City Hall. The criminal has Jimmy stretch between two trees as an impromptu slingshot and flings it into a junkyard, except he actually aimed over the junkyard. The bomb blows up a bank and two criminals quickly run into the hole. Okay, even assuming this crime lord has some kind of super aim with a slingshot, how the hell was that less inconspicuous than a guy dropping a backpack or grocery bag next to the bank?
  • Then the crime lord tricks Jimmy into stretching into a vault to get Kryptonite, claiming it's the cure. Surprise surprise, it actually is, but it doesn't take effect until after Jimmy's helped Superman defeat the villain.

Number of times Jimmy pilots a helicopter: ONE
Number of times Jimmy crashes a helicopter: ONE
Number of times Jimmy is exposed to the one thing that can cure him due to a ridiculous deus ex machina: TWO
Number of times Jimmy and Professor Potter join forces to **** up everyone's day, proving two dumbasses are worse than one: TWO
Number of times Jimmy joins the circus: ONE
Number of times Jimmy is exploited by the stupidest criminals ever: ONE

  • Now it's time for Jimmy's Jovial Jovian Journey! Jovians talk to Jimmy through his TV, but he thinks it's an actor playing a prank on him and goes along, planning to turn the tables on the actor with Superman's help. The aliens talking to him through his TV thing is pretty dumb, but so far Jimmy's not looking too bad. The aliens make Jimmy build a device and he wakes up as a scaly green Jovian with mind-reading superpowers, but cleverly disguises himself by wrapping himself up like a mummy and claiming he lost a World Series bet. Eh, this story isn't as crackalicious as that summary makes it seem. Anyway, Jimmy's gone Jovian for a week, but he needs to turn back sooner than that, but fortunately it turns out the Jovian week is shorter than ours. I've decided not to count that as a deus ex machina cure.
  • OH GOD THE BAD SCIENCE. "Behold, Jimmy! If the cold fire produced by those fireflies could be converted to real fire, it would save tons of coal for heating homes!" "But how can you turn their cold fire hot, Professor?" "A special gas in the jar absorbs the heat... look out, Jimmy! Don't pick it up... it's hot!" It's like listening to Victorian doctors talk about the four humors or alchemists talking about how amazing mercury is. I expect them to start talking about how scandalous it is that Lois' dress doesn't cover her ankles. The best part of this scene is that the jar is completely normal. It's just a big glass jar with a weird fabric covering on the top (yeah, it's weird, but "I can't tell what it is" weird, not technological-lookin' weird). It's not attached to anything or being monitored. It's just a jar with fireflies inside.
  • "Ouch! I...I got burned and dropped it! The glowing gas escaped and is settling on me like... like radioactive fallout! What will it do to me?" "If my experiment is a success, you'll heat up to 587 degrees!" And the best part is? This gives him fire breathing superpowers. I could probably make this stuff up, but I'd have to spend some quality time with DiB first.
  • Jimmy burns up one thousand dollars in charity money and joins the circus to make it up. He almost gets it, too, but somehow a guy who magically breathes fire isn't worth it if he heats up the tent. I guess there's no such thing as performing outdoors in this universe.
  • Criminals kidnap Jimmy while wearing asbestos suits and the ****up melts his own signal watch (without incinerating his own hand, somehow), so they get him to melt a steel vault, then imprison him in a cabin on the outskirts of town (town? What town? Isn't this Metropolis?) with dynamite hung on the walls so he can't burn his way out. Because nobody's going to notice that. He shoots fire up the chimney to make smoke signals and spells out a message in Morse code--luckily, Superman is flying by! The message Jimmy gives is 36 characters long, so I'm not sure how long Superman just hovered there watching it. I mean, the first signal Jimmy puffed was "SOS", and you can see the dynamite on the outside of the house.
  • WHAT THE **** PLAIN WATER IS THE ANTIDOTE TO THE HUMAN FLAMETHROWER

Number of times Jimmy pilots a helicopter: ONE
Number of times Jimmy crashes a helicopter: ONE
Number of times Jimmy is exposed to the one thing that can cure him due to a ridiculous deus ex machina: THREE
Number of times Jimmy and Professor Potter join forces to **** up everyone's day, proving two dumbasses are worse than one: THREE
Number of times Jimmy joins the circus: TWO
Number of times Jimmy is exploited by the stupidest criminals ever: TWO

This post has bloated to ridiculous proportions, so I'll do a couple more of these. The next one, Octo-Jimmy, is my personal favorite. It made me notice that the art is actually pretty good, it has criminals who are even more spectacular failures than the two I already told you about, and it even has some blatant Superdickery, though Jimmy really has it coming for being a ****up.
 
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See, it's **** like this that makes me wish Superman would just vaporize Jimmy's head.
 
Wow, I didn't realize you guys would like this so much. Thanks, everyone!

I would post covers, but they're not included in the book. You can probably find most of them on Superdickery.

Nice title, Ice.
 
Yeah, that's probably the best review I've ever read.
 
Personally, I think Jimmy is the first of the New New Gods...father of the Fifth World.
 
And now it's time to learn the story of Jimmy Olsen, human octopus! Except in two separate occasions in the story, two different characters point out that he only has six arms, while octopuses have eight. I guess they're not counting his legs. Anyway!

  • Superman flies in with a bunch of space souvenirs, mounted on wood with inscriptions, for Jimmy to write about and keep as trophies. What the ****? He has mystical space technology and he decides to share it with Jimmy Olsen? Not scientists? Not Lois Lane? Hell, he could probably curb some people's suspicion if he used some robots to share it with Clark. "Superman's Pal Clark Kent" would be a great name for a TPB story arc (y'know, six issues). But I digress. I have this theory that Superman has a massive superiority complex, gained from years of just being better than everyone else. When he meets people like Batman and learns he actually can be hurt, he starts using Jimmy to stroke his own ego. He gives Jimmy methods of getting into deep trouble, laughs as Jimmy transforms himself, and patronizingly rescues him. Then Jimmy writes an article kissing his *** and Superman can just sit back and bask in the warmth of his Kryptonian superiority.
  • Anyway, Superman brought Jimmy back a space fruit from a planet where the people have six arms, because perishable items are the best trophies. Jimmy puts it down next to his pear and accidentally picks it up and eats it. Wasn't it mounted on a wooden base? Superman tells Jimmy that he may get new upper limbs, Jimmy dismisses this as a joke, and Perry says "I"m not so sure, Jimmy! Superman doesn't pull jokes!" Except for all those times he humiliated his Earth companions for his own sick amusement. Again, he should pull one of these pranks on Clark Kent to reduce suspicion.
  • For some reason, in the next panel, Jimmy is sitting alone in his trophy room watching a TV show with an octopus in the dark. I think it's in the dark, because the TV is colored in light blues and light purple, he's colored in all red, the trophies are all light blue, and the furniture is dark blue. It's a really weird panel. I guess this is what he does whenever everybody else is so sick of him that they turn all the lights off in their house when he comes to visit.
  • He wakes up with six arms and Jimmy calls Superman. I don't know why. It's not like the six arms are endangering his life. What does he think Superman is gonna do about them? As it turns out, Superman hangs around his apartment looking bored and watching Jimmy do push-ups, brush his teeth, get dressed, make and eat breakfast (in that exact order) while Jimmy monologues about how great six arms are.
  • Jimmy gets fired because the union rep wants him to be paid three times the salary since he can do three times the work. What? Okay, first of all, Jimmy is using some kind of bizarre configuration for his three typewriters where he has the bottom pair of arms on one typewriter, the two top right arms on one, and the two top left arms on the last one. I don't know how he can type while doing that. Second of all, Jimmy can barely tie his ****ing shoelaces. He doesn't have the mental coordination to write three articles at once.
  • Having been fired, Jimmy decides to take up boxing to pick up some petty cash. Oh, please. It's been scientifically proven (on TV, too, so you really know it's true!) that an experienced boxer's punch is equivalent to a sledgehammer to the face. Jimmy would be on the ground crying in the first round like the little ***** he is.
  • Jimmy goes to a carnival to meet Lucy for a date. Oh yeah, gettin' some! On the way, he passes a paper being hawked that tells the story of "HOW JIMMY OLSEN ACQUIRED SIX ARMS!" Wait... it's not the Daily Planet. How could any other paper possibly care or even find out about how he got his six arms? I guess it's run by the milk company from ASBARTBW.
  • Anyway, he's late and Lucy isn't where they agreed to meet. He comes up with a pretty good plan: he'll just wander around attracting a crowd and eventually Lucy will want to see what they're looking at. Keep in mind for later that an enormous crowd of onlookers are just staring at Jimmy like a bunch of rubes. Also, the people whose attractions he visits (a shooting range, a carnival batting cage run by a man wearing orange pants and a green fannypack) are happy that he's there because it gives them massive publicity. Okay, got that?
  • Lucy doesn't want to date a freak with six arms because they'll have ****ed up children. This confuses me because I thought she was just dating Jimmy to get to bone Superman. That's like sleeping with a greasy, drug-addicted groupie and rejecting the advances of the rock star. Also, I don't think Jimmy's gotten The Talk yet.
  • Okay, so for the past god-knows-how-long an enormous crowd of dozens of people have been following Jimmy around watching his every move. They've dispersed by the time Lucy storms out. So NOW, a couple of pickpockets force Jimmy to pick pockets at gunpoint. AND HE GETS CAUGHT. Who would've thought that a FREAKISH SIX-ARMED MAN who had NEVER PICKED A POCKET IN HIS LIFE that EVERYBODY WAS WATCHING would be unable to REACH INTO THEIR POCKETS AND REMOVE THEIR HARD-EARNED CASH. Especially since every pickpocket with two remaining brain cells have stripped everything of value from this crowd while they were watching Jimmy.
  • Superman gives Jimmy the antidote and tells Jimmy that the arms might have been hallucinations. Perry White also tells Jimmy that he was never fired and Perry never saw him with six arms. Jimmy can't tell whether or not this is a trick. For the love of... JIMMY, THERE WAS AN ENTIRE FRONT-PAGE ARTICLE ABOUT YOU AND YOUR SIX ARMS. Oh, wait, Superman (who "doesn't pull jokes") is exactly the kind of dick to super-zip around the city destroying every single copy of that newspaper. I guess that isn't such a dumb thing to think.
Next, Jimmy gets turned into a genie. Seriously.

  • Superman has located a unique, once-in-a-lifetime archaeological wonder: a tomb, full of treasure, buried under the desert sand. No one has entered it for centuries and archaeologists have been looking for it for years. Naturally, he takes Jimmy Olsen, who scoops up a big pile of treasure in his arms, drops them onto Superman's cape, ties it up into a big bundle and hauls it off to his apartment to be photographed, thus contaminating and probably ruining forever the kind of find anthropologists have wet dreams about. On this special occasion, Jimmy has worn his best suit with lavender pants, a pinstripe purple jacket, and a green-and-black diagonally striped bowtie.
  • Jimmy gets a toothache again. I wonder if it has anything to do with him brushing his teeth before he eats breakfast.
  • One of the ancient treasures Jimmy has violated is Aladdin's lamp, so he gets the genie to release his toothache and change Lucy's mind about going on a date next week. Yeah, Jimmy forces a girl to go out with him by magically manipulating her mind. What a class act.
  • Anyway, Jimmy accidentally swaps places with the genie by saying the forbidden word "kill". For some reason, the genie is wearing his purple suit and remains in it for the rest of the comic. I guess spending centuries in his lamp means he can't realize how fugly it is. The genie writes the word down on a tablet instead of saying it while he's explaining this to Jimmy, but for some reason it's A) in modern English style (I would expect the writers to go with some cheesy Arabian font, even if they didn't look up how he would actually write "kill") and B) he doesn't write down everything he says from then to eternity to ensure he doesn't lose his ultimate cosmic power. Finally, Jimmy has found an adversary that can match his mental prowess.
  • Jimmy grants Abdul's wishes in various unsatisfactory ways, but he never figures out how to specify what he wants so Jimmy can't get around it. One of Jimmy's tricks it to plant a mountain of gold in front of plane routes to the Metropolis airport, hoping they'll call Superman. Of course, if he'd been busy with something else or off-planet dozens or hundreds of people would've died horribly. In fact, he instantly sublimates the entire gold mountain with his X-ray vision FROM THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE SECONDS BEFORE A PLANE FLIES INTO IT, so if he'd obeyed the laws of physics dozens or hundreds of people would've died horribly. Actually, they probably got killed anyway due to flying through a cloud of superheated, gaseous gold the size of a mountain.
  • Jimmy brags about how Superman will foil Abdul's plots (Abdul is the name of the genie) and then tells him that even if he kills Superman, the robots at the Fortress of Solitude could beat Abdul. Abdul sends Jimmy to destroy the Fortress and all the bots inside. Jimmy's reaction to his own moronic ****up that will force him to kill the champion of good in the galaxy, his BEST FRIEND, and then lead to the world and maybe the universe being conquered and exploited by a madman? He rolls his eyes in exasperation. I can't even describe how beautiful his expression is. It must be the same face Lois and Perry make whenever Jimmy opens his mouth.
  • Superman saves the Fortress, unbeknown to Dumb and Dumber, and sends a robot proxy to attack Abdul. Jimmy 'kills' it by turning into living kryptonite and manages to trick Abdul into saying "kill", although he finds his victory hollow now that his subhuman intellect has meant the loss of Superman. Fortunately, Superman reveals his plot. I guess since he didn't know about the "kill" swap, he just was gonna lay low and hope Abdul went away. Abdul is forced to return to the lamp and lie dormant in the Fortress of Solitude. I don't know why they don't just use him to solve all their problems and write down their wishes to avoid saying "kill".
So let's tally up the score:
Number of times Jimmy pilots a helicopter: ONE
Number of times Jimmy crashes a helicopter: ONE
Number of times Jimmy is exposed to the one thing that can cure him due to a ridiculous deus ex machina: THREE
Number of times Jimmy and Professor Potter join forces to **** up everyone's day, proving two dumbasses are worse than one: THREE
Number of times Jimmy joins the circus: TWO
Number of times Jimmy is exploited by the stupidest criminals ever: THREE
Number of times Jimmy gets a toothache and ties a bandage around his head like the ghost of Marley: TWO

Remember how I said the six arms story is the best? Yeah, I lied. Wolfman is next and that's the best story. Ever.
 
Excellent.

Can't wait for the Wolfman summery.

These books are causing me to lose brain cells, and I'm not even reading them.
 

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