Part of the problem with Jimmy is that he doesn’t really make sense. They say that he’s “Superman’s Pal” any time he gets kidnapped, but do the two of them actually hang out? With all the time that Superman spends with other super heroes, does it even feel like Superman *needs* a buddy?

Jimmy Olsen was a character that made sense decades ago but doesn’t really add anything to the books now. We’re long past the time when every super hero book needed a young character for the 8 year old readers to relate to. We don’t need the hero to have a sidekick to explain the plot to, and we don’t believe that the non-powered Jimmy would tag along on all of Superman’s missions.

There’s just no point in the character anymore. He’s there because he’s always been there. Having Jimmy Olsen in the Superman books is tradition. People expect him to be there, even if they don’t expect him to add anything to the story. He’s clutter.

Does the thought that Superman never executed the Phantom Zoners come from Superman #666′s dialogue that he’s never killed? I thought it went back a little farther than that (maybe to the start of Johns/Donner’s “Last Son?”).

Anyway, I don’t think the PAD-Supergirl’s existence necessarily depends on Superman having executed the pocket-Phantom Zoners. She got along fine even without the original Superboy/Legion story which established the Pocket U. Superman could have taken away the PUPhZos’ powers with Gold K and just left them stranded. (Maybe Tommy Monaghan found out about ‘em and finished the job himself!)

In one form or another, Matrix/Supergirl was part of the DC universe for a good long while, so I think it would cause all kinds of headaches to retcon her away. Not that it would make a difference, I know….

Despte being a long-time Superman fan, I’ve never had much use for the Jimmy Olsen character. I think his heyday was his 1960′s spin-off series, which really seemed to connect well with the audience of that era (generally younger boys). As time went on, and newspapers diminished in their role as some sort of central hub or heartbeat of society, Jimmy and the rest of the Daily Planet gang (with the exception of Lois) don’t really have much relevance anymore….which might explain why their portrayal is so consistently INconsistent. It’s like everybody knows they’re all supposed to be there…but nobody seems to care enough to really definie who any of them are, how old they are, what their personal lives are like, etc. Frankly, the Daily Planet cast (specifically Jimmy and Perry White) are little more than cyphers who are molded to fit whatever story they appear in. A dorky Jimmy who looks to be 14 years old can be mature Jimmy a month later (or sometimes the same month) in another Superman title. Perry White can be gruff and no-nonsense one month, and wise and soft-spoken in another.

Now, if DC had anything resembling an editorial presence in their books, that might change. Say what you want about the Weisinger and Schwartz-era Superman books, but at least the cast seemed like the same characters from month to month, year to year…due primarily to tight editorial oversight.

Until that happens, and editors move beyond merely being traffic managers and creator-coddlers, expect much more incoherent, wildly inconsistant takes on supporting casts (or even main characters).

* (Of course, many are also Above The Law, Hard To Kill, Under Siege, Out For Justice, and probably some other Steven Seagal movies I’m not remembering.)

That’s just brilliant! And also true.

As someone else said, I have no use for Jimmy Olsen either. To me, he’s just a minor, generally pointless character. If he shows up now and then, and generally has little to do, fine with me.

I haven’t followed Countdown at all (sorry, I hate mega-crossover events, and I’m not fond of DC’s reviving the multiverse and a number of other Silver Age trappings either), but just to confuse the issue of Jimmy’s age even further… How about the first story arc in Superman: Confidential?

Yeah, I know, the book sucks. Hard. Terrible all the way around, even before the last issue in the arc was delayed until who-knows-when. I actually stopped with issue #1, but I did read subsequent issues at the shop before putting them back. But anyhow, Tim Sale chose to draw Jimmy as though he were one of the Little Rascals. I know it was early in Supes’ career, but was Jimmy honestly working at eight years old?? Sure looked that way. Even if he was supposed to be twice that age, I wasn’t buying into it.

Shaun, I don’t have either issue in front of me, but compare Sale’s Jimmy to John Byrne’s in Man Of Steel #2. If memory serves, that Jimmy looked about twelve.

Rich wrote:

Hey Tom, apparently Kurt Busiek has confirmed that Superman hadn’t killed following Superman #666 but yes, I think the roots for that had been sewn earlier – need to dig some back issues out.

I don’t think Kurt confirmed that, Rich. I recall him being pressed on the point on the DC boards and dodging the question, saying that it hasn’t been revealed how or if that particular episode played out on New Earth.

Also, he stressed that even if it didn’t happen, that various things that stemmed from it were not necessarily moot. For instance, it was the stress resulting from the killing that led to his Gangbuster identity, which later led to his going into space and encountering the Eradicator. But on New Earth, something else may have exiled him into space instead, if the killing of the PZ villains didn’t happen as told in the Byrne continuity. Rather than a continuity hole having a “butterfly effect,” changing everything that comes after it, the gaps are often filled with a smaller change, letting most of the structure stand. (As you yourself posit with your proposed J’onn J’onnz band-aid.)

I could be completely off-base on this — given his online presence, it’s not unlikely Kurt will drop by to correct one of us, at least.

i remember the superman:metropolis miniseries (which i only got half of because they switched from danijel zezelj to teddy christianson on art and i needed to cut spending) that was the version of jimmy i choose to stand by. conifident but clumsy. and if the artists draw him yuonger looking it is not necessary that he is actually younger but many people suffer from not looking there age.

“It just feels to me like Jimmy’s regressing unnecessarily, when the story might have been better served by a Jimmy who could draw on his third-gen experiences.”

I think it’s cute you people all think DC cares about characterization at all anymore. This goes back 5 years ago when Cassie Sandsmark was de-matured by Judd Winick and Geoff Johns just to serve their purposes. DC’s policy since then has been “Don’t worry about came before, just look at the pretty pictures”. They’re the comic book company equivalent of a politician.

The sooner the current crop at DC (with the exceptions of Waid, Busiek and Dini) are gone from that company the better. Editorial has no clue how to handle any of these characters outside of the latest t-shirt possibility.

*I think it’s cute you people all think DC cares about characterization at all anymore. This goes back 5 years ago when Cassie Sandsmark was de-matured by Judd Winick and Geoff Johns just to serve their purposes. DC’s policy since then has been “Don’t worry about came before, just look at the pretty pictures”. They’re the comic book company equivalent of a politician.*

Hmm, as opposed to Marvel, with their treatment of Iron Man – Their current diagnosis is ‘Hey, don’t worry, it’ll all come out in the wash, circa mid-2008. He’ll be fine’.

But seriously, if we start ageing Jimmy, what of other peripheral characters – Your Commissioner Gordons, your Alfreds, your Perry Whites, etc? If we start ageing one character, we’re gonna have to start ageing them all. I can understand the basis of the argument, suggesting that Jimmy should act older because of the generation he belongs to, but..

Eh, I’m kinda lost in my own argument, but essentially, no, Jimmy shouldn’t be constantly deaged to keep with the current ‘teen generation’, but at the same time, if he’s gonna act older, what of everyone else in his generation in the DCU?

I’m currently rereading Kirby’s Fourth World saga, and in one of the books Jimmy and the newsboy legion complain about the generation gap between them and superman, and jimmy mentions that he’s an adult now, as he’s ‘older than 21′. It was weird.

Hey — interesting post! (And thanks for name-dropping my Chronology site — with a link, no less! Some of the details are up in the air now that we’re on “New Earth,” yeach, but I still think the overall historical structure fits…)

Anyway, the real shame here is that a mishmash like Countdown is seen as a marker for how *any* character(s) should be portrayed in the DCU. You touch on an interesting common thread between the Countdown characters, the generational connection, and it’s a shame neither Dini nor Didio nor anyone else seems to have thought of it.

Meanwhile, Jimmy is indeed once again acting less mature (as Mark Engblom points out, no one’s bothered to define either him or Perry in recent years, and I’d say the same even applies to Lois as well — more’s the pity, since they all got much more thoughtful treatment in the early post-Crisis years). However, that can’t really be seen as a sign of his age, since Kurt Busiek has (finally!) given him an origin in the recent Superman #665, which potrays Jimmy as at least 10-12 early in Superman’s career, back when the JLA was still new.

And the very least we as rational readers should expect is that, as Tom Bondurant put it, “his age has to match up with his history, and vice versa.” Given that, we’re still left with Jimmy as roughly a contemporary of the original Titans.

Yeah, Checkmate seems to have been throwing in occasional “real time” references, oddly, even when the stories don’t call for it. As far as this goes, we know from 52 #24-25 that Checkmate was disbanded, and then re-created by the UN, in October of whatever year that was — i.e., about 7 months before the end of 52/beginning of OYL… and it sure hasn’t been a year and a half since then, so the reference seems off, even if Sasha was Black Queen from day one. OTOH, we could be into the second *calendar* year since then, allowing her to be accurate in a more casual sense…

Yeesh, I thought the editors were supposed to be more attentive to continuity after IC. Why do I ever believe them when they promise things like that?…