The bizarre image above is from a battered copy Of Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen No. 131 published by DC Comics in 1970. The book was filled with a bunch of reprint material, but it’s hard to tell being that DC maintained that house style they seemed to have had since the early 1950s.
Men wore suits and hats. Women wore skirts, hats and gloves. Jimmy always had his bow tie.
None of the panels were very dynamic. Most of the stories look and felt like storyboards for The Adventures of Superman television show which I watched in reruns and tried to like, but I could never really get into them. They were too stage-bound, and the limited budget was never going to allow for a proper display of Superman’s might
An adult must have bought me this comic to shut me up. I remember not liking it because of it’s lightly humorous tone. Goofy Jimmy Olsen would get into a bunch of screwball situations that Superman would extricate him from. Where were the cops and robbers? Where were the super-villains? Giant robots? Death beams? This particular comic book is probably one of the reasons why I ended up firmly planted into the Marvel Comics camp when I started spending my own dough on comics.
I appreciate it more now in it’s very goofiness. Superman was big enough to float spin-offs featuring his girlfriend, his cousin and that loser kid from work.
