Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #53-56

 Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #53-56

Originally released in 1961

Written by Jerry Siegel (#53, 56), Robert Bernstein (#54)

Art by Curt Swan (#53-54), Al Plastino (#55), Kurt Schaffenberger (#56)

When I read Jack Kirby's run on Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen, there weren't as many Silver Age shenanigans as I was hoping for - time travel, random one-issue superpowers, Jimmy turning into a gorilla, that sort of thing.  Thankfully, this group of issues makes up for it and then some.

I feel like trying to summarize these issues or write my opinions on them is going to be difficult, as the plots are hilariously bizarre.  For example, one of the stories in an issue goes from this:

...to this:

Trying to summarize what happens runs the risk of making me sound insane.  For example, in the story where Jimmy Olsen becomes the Giant Turtle-Man, he finds a helpfully labelled growth ray washed up on the beach.  As one does, he tests it out on the local wildlife.

When setting it down, the ray accidentally goes off, passing through Lois's newly-bought pet turtle before hitting Jimmy.  This turns him Godzilla-sized and gives him a turtle-like body, while taking away his ability to communicate.

Shortly after doing this, he begins destroying bridges and submarines, gathering large quantities of metal and stuffing it into a volcano.  Thankfully, Superman's ex-girlfriend (a mermaid named Lori Lemaris) arrives to explain what happened.

As it turns out, an Atlantean criminal developed the growth ray, and made it so if anyone uses it on themselves, they would become hypnotized to follow his commands.  Threatened with exile, he decided to use whoever he hypnotized to cause a volcanic eruption on an island that was about to undergo a geological survey, as he knew that there was buried treasure on it and he didn't want them to find it. (he did all of this instead of, for example, finding a sunken galleon with treasure onboard in the ocean's depths)

Speaking of Atlanteans, Jimmy gets Aquaman's powers for a short time.  A giant sea creature is unfrozen from a glacier, falls in love with him, and for that heinous crime (and for trying to help only to cause more trouble), she is cryogenically frozen forever.

Also, Jimmy Olsen travels back in time multiple times.  As one does, on both occasions, he angers a wizard.

One of those time travel escapades takes him back to the era of the Vikings, where he meets Thor and battles Loki.  Thor is treated as though he's just like Superman to the point where, if not for the fact that Journey Into Mystery 83 came out about a year after this issue, I would have assumed it was a dig at Marvel.

In both cases, Jimmy comes to the conclusion that, as there's no such thing as magic, both wizards have to be related to Mister Mxyzptlk, so he has them say their own names backwards to send them back to the fifth dimension.  Given that Zatara and Dr. Fate both exist (among other characters, in all likelihood), and Superman is vulnerable to magic, Jimmy's logic doesn't seem sound here.

Going back to the story where Jimmy Olsen becomes king of the giant ants (I'd say that's not a sentence fragment that I thought I'd ever type, but it's Jimmy Olsen; I wouldn't be surprised if he became a substitute rail conductor only for it to turn out that the train that he's conducting is actually a trio of alien criminals), Jimmy finds Mr. Mxyzptlk's hat after it fell into a box of hats that he was getting for his disguise kit.  He quickly learns that it grants wishes, using it to gain all of Superman's powers minus his weakness to green Kryptonite.

He wishes that his clothes were resistant to friction from flying super fast, but for whatever reason, that wish doesn't include his hat, so he can't make any more wishes.  Still, when a professor was studying a region only to be attacked by giant ants and Superman is nowhere to be found, it's up to James Bartholomew Jimberly Olsen to save the day!

Or get hypnotized by giant ants; one or the other.  Using Jimmy's superpowers and knowledge of the outside world, along with a cache of Kryptonite that they found, the ants combine their ruthless homicidal nature, instinct to build colonies, and natural telepathy (?) to conquer the planet!

Jimmy has bad luck with his relationship with Lucy Lane, Lois's younger sister; she's always brushing him off and he tries to find ways to get her attention, with little success. (and earning him a black eye in one case, which seems like a gigantic red flag)

The story shows one alternate future where they do get married, though, and their son, Jimmy Olsen Jr., falls in love with Lola Kent, who is secretly Supermaid. (it's a rocky road to get there, as Jimmy Jr. is extremely unsubtle about his dislike of Lola)

The two of them are kept apart by Lola's father, Clark Kent, who doesn't want Jimmy Jr. to get in danger in case people try to get to her through Jimmy Jr., as he's spent his entire married life with Lois worried that people will do the same with her.  The hypocrisy isn't really addressed, and one thing that goes completely unaddressed is that Jimmy Jr. and Lola are cousins. (Lois is Jimmy Jr.'s aunt)  I don't think the view on that was that much different in the 60s, and it's not like the writer forgot about Lois and Lucy being sisters.

The series has plenty of examples of criminals being extremely short-sighted with the insane technology of the DC universe.  One issue has a criminal disguising as a professor (the real professor is out of town) in order to give Jimmy a horseshoe-like device that repels anything away from whoever's holding it.  It seems like there's a ton of applications for this, but the criminals use it to... hide a radio transceiver so they can learn what Superman knows about their actions.

Though Jimmy isn't much better, as he uses it to make ten whole dollars.

Speaking of Jimmy picking up random pieces of technology that play havoc with his life, he's doing a story on Smallville when he finds a device with a gem inside buried near where Superman's rocket landed.  As a result, he starts breaking most metallic devices that come near him and gets seen as a jinx among the Daily Planet staff.

Eventually, Superman uses his super-memory to recall that, when he was a toddler and his dad was preparing to send him away from Krypton, Jor-El included that device to destroy the iron in any meteors that would approach Clark's ship, rendering them harmless.  With that mystery sorted out, Superman takes the iron-destroying device to the one person that he can trust to handle such technology: President John F. Kennedy.

This whole thing was insane, and brilliant, and exactly what I wanted from silver age Superman comics.