JIMMY OLSEN, RED-HEADED ROMEO : DAY TWO

For the week leading up to Valentine's Day, Your Humble Editor will be presenting a selection of Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen's romantic gal pals. Today, we meet ...

Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen No.27 (March 1958) – A Date With Miss Metropolis
Never let it be said that Superman’s Pal wasn’t also painfully shallow. Given an opportunity to interview the young woman who’d recently won Miss Metropolis, Jimmy saunters over to her apartment bearing a bouquet of pink flowers and dressed like an Old West undertaker. Haha, joke’s on you Jimmy, she’s not beautiful – she’s only SMART! You didn’t know that they’d recently changed the rules for the Miss Metropolis contest to include a pub trivia segment or something, or that you got a million points for finishing a Sudoku. Jackass! Schmuck! Burn in hell stupid, you have to look at the face of a plain girl instead of the beautiful woman you expected, has any man ever survived such suffering?

Anyway, Olsen is an idiot and Gloria Mason – the girl who won the Miss Metropolis, a contest which WAS a beauty contest but is NOW an intelligence quiz, apparently? I have questions about that – is actually pretty hot, anyway, so lord knows what he’s complaining about. She looks like Geena Davis. Like, “Beetlejuice” Geena Davis, not running around in her underwear “Tootsie” Geena Davis, to be fair, but at least it’s _A_ Geena Davis. You coulda gotten JIM Davis, fella, so shut your hole.

Just ONCE, Lois!

Jimmy is SO repulsed by Gloria that he ends up accidentally proposing to her, which is exactly what happens in situations like this. Too much of a … what’s the word, coward? Idiot? Trembling man-child? … to extricate himself gracefully for the sitch, he chooses instead to find a bunch of ways to either humiliate himself or her so badly that they split up. Unfortunately for Jimmy, she’s smart – not smart enough to realize that her fiancé wants nothing to do with her, but smart nonetheless – so she consistently overcomes all of his attempts to shake her off. Along the way, she also proves herself to be a great dancer, a cunning crimefighter and a great bowler, so no wonder Jimmy can’t stand the sight of her.

Along those lines, he arranges a double-date with Clark and Lois to go bowling, and when Clark manages to score a series of strikes through the whole game, Lois begins to suspect he’s Superman. HE’s JUST HAVING A GOOD GAME, LOIS, LET IT GO FOR ONE GODDAMN NIGHT.

Anyway, we luckily learn at the penultimate page of the story that Gloria is money-hungry, and that’s enough for Jimmy to really cut loose with a flimsy disguise engineered to make her fall in love with an equally brainy, equally money-hungry doofus of his own invention. Then, once Gloria breaks off her engagement with Jim in order to pursue her new fella, Jimmy dumps the disguise in the river so Gloria will never see her new fiancé ever again, left to imagine that he maybe died or just dumped her. JIMMY OLSEN, HERO OF ROMANCE.

Jeee-sus Christ.

Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen No.44 (April 1960) – Miss Jimmy Olsen
This is probably the most reprinted-from and discussed Jimmy Olsen story in the entirety of the internet, and I’d feel better about that if I thought it was spread around so much less because folks were guffawing about Jimmy Olsen dressed up like a lady and more because they liked the part where Jimmy makes a mobster kiss a chimp.

In order to get the dirt on mobster “Big Monte” McGraw and a cache of stolen jewels, Jimmy goes undercover as “Julie Ogden”, a chorus line dancer in McGraw’s production of “Metropolis Follies”. Jimmy’s reasoning is that Superman told him to stay out of danger, and how much danger could a dancing girl be in from a mobster? History’s most chivalrous gentlemen, that’s career criminals for you!

Big Monte unsurprisingly takes an interest in Jimmy – those lips, those eyes, those mannish hands, the falsetto trill, those unmoving mounds of plaster he substituted for breasts, how could you resist? Monte sets Jimmy up in his moll’s apartment, which comes complete with pet chimp, and then all sorts of utter dumbness happens in such short order that it’s difficult to keep it straight; Jimmy makes dog food hamburgers, the chimp learns how to use a baseball bat, a desk fan with rubies stuck on the blades by way of chewed gum.

But who cares, all that matters is Jimmy Olsen has single-handedly managed to turn an entire thriving urban center simultaneously bi-curious by the end.

It's even funnier if you pretend it's jut a chimpanzee puppet and Jimmy has his dick up in there.

Yeah, they fight a lot, but the make-up sex is terrific.

Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen No.55 (September 1961) – The Monster That Loved Aqua Jimmy
There are so many qualifiers in this one! Don’t worry Jimmy, someday she may love you for the parts of you that aren’t aquatic – your land-dwelling sense of humor, your terrestrial empathy, your down-to-earth down-to-earthness.

Superman enlists Jimmy to replace Aquaman as the defender of Earth’s oceans while the King of The Seas is otherwise occupied on another planet. This is accomplished by a pair of magic salad bowls which Jim and King Fish-tits employ to transfer Aquaman’s powers to the young boy. Shit, won’t that make Aquaman kind of useless on this adventure to another world? OH GOD IS SUPERMAN GOING TO MURDER A POWERLESS AQUAMAN AND LEAVE THE BODY IN SPACE? Maybe.

So instead of enlisting any of the literally thousands of other Atlanteans who already have Aquaman’s powers into filling in for him on his powerless space-murder adventure, Superman enlists Jimmy. This may be because Atlanteans already know that replacing Aquaman is a sucker’s game. At best, you end up fighting The Fisherman.

For one thing, no one’s impressed – exotic Hollywood starlet Mari Lynn’s seaplane is stranded within towing distance of her island destination, but rather than being thankful for the underwater assist, she demands that Aqua-Jimmy use his powers to construct an “unusual” way for her to get to shore – because an amphibious boy dragging it in would suck.  Accommodating Aqua-Jimmy arranges for a walkway of sea turtles during which I’m sure a lot of them were targeted by predators. Also, when she gets to shore, she declines to give him any credit.

"Is swim-your-own-damn-self unusual enough for you?" 

For another thing, you get sea serpents to fall in love with you. While hupping-to for another random waterborne stranger’s dumb request, Aqua-Jimmy just happens to swim past a prehistoric sea monster in the middle of hatching from suspended animation inside an iceberg, which is how babies are made. Immediately, the time-tossed and lovelorn lizard falls for Aqua-Jimmy, because she can see what Hollywood starlets – and every other girl in the human race - can’t.

Her affection comes with a price, though, and attempting to show off her adoration for Aqua-Jimmy results in smashed planes, wrecked lighthouses, and is all set to murder a bathysphere diver when other giant weird sea monsters show up and put the adoring lizard back into her icy prison like a titanic, reverse Kinder Egg of the Sea. Turns out Superman’s one-time mermaid inamorata Lori Lemaris was watching Jimmy the whole time – expanded version : was watching Jimmy FUCK UP the whole time – and decided to step in to save him just as Superman returns Aquaman to Earth, proving that next time you need to replace Aquaman, just use the bulletin board in Atlantis’ rec room.

He fucks this up in literally five seconds.