Jimmy Olsen: The Mightiest Superhero of Them All

I will try to explain to you, but I have little hope that I can make you see. Jimmy Olsen was a great and true hero. There was a time when his fame covered the land like dead leaves in the fall. All knew him. All loved him. But that time is gone. His signal watch is rusted and broken. His fan club is disbanded; no trace of their clubhouse remains. His former fans are old now. Their arthritic fingers can no longer knot their green bow ties. His trophy collection was pillaged and scattered long ago; its surviving wonders are presently in private and unknown places and hands.

Now when the young speak his name, and rarely, they snigger. They guffaw.

I haven’t the heart to speak of Lucy Lane, her once-golden beauty, her irresistible arrogance, her capricious and enchanting moodiness… It is better to imagine her somewhere in the sky, still serving champagne to celebrities and VIPs in first class, pursued and desired by all.

But for a time, long ago in another age, when each day the sun rose two hours earlier, and twice as large as today, when summers commenced in April and blazed until November, his wondrous vitality placed all other superheroes in the shade. They were established institutions. Days were named for them, they carried government credentials, the president pled for their help in saving the earth every third week in the month. They were static, they were done.

And Jimmy was, at all times, in the dizzying tumult of becoming. Jimmy enjoyed the most glorious and exalted late-adolescence imaginable. No, not imaginable, no one could dream up the endless variety of roles, of powers, of adventures that Olsen experienced. It was beyond imagining. Therefore, it had to have really happened.

You know the roster of Superman’s powers. Jimmy Olsen got to be Super- Olsen many times, at least twice a year, every year, through every conceivable means: An alien superpowertransfer machine that Olsen and Supes blundered into, or a mystic serum, or magic, or the rays of a purple sun in a faraway solar system, or whatever. He would, in turn, be the fastest boy in town, or Aqua Jimmy, Elastic Lad, Giant Jimmy, Tom Thumb Olsen, a member of the Legion of Superheroes… He would travel to the biblical past and fill in for David and kill Goliath (or was it all a dream?), become monsters (Wolfboy Jimmy, the Human Pincushion, Malevolent Giant Brain Jimmy, Turtleboy Jimmy, the Genie of the Lamp)… He had a robot lookalike, became a witch doctor, a movie star, a ventriloquist, a magician…

He loved his friends, his pal Superman, his girl, his profession, his town, and his country, and they loved him back. Destiny gave him a leash as long as the universe in which he roamed during his initiation into manhood. He was a young American at the peak of the country’s greatness and could dare anything. Then, nothing was impossible, while, today… well,

today

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