Comic Book / Superman's Pal: Jimmy Olsen (2019)

"What are friends for?"

What's this?!

A description matching the comic's throwback to Silver Age title pages with exciting synopses of the issue? You guessed it!

And what comic is it?

Why it's Superman's Pal: Jimmy Olsen, of course!

In the sprawling distant year of 2019 after the fallout of Event Leviathan, writer Matt Fraction and artist Steve Lieber brings us an epic twelve-issue maxi-series about Superman's Non-Biological Brother But-Like-Really-Good-Friend Brother Jimmy Olsen that... doesn't really have much to do with the events or the fallout of Event Leviathan!

After mishaps concerning things like a HALO jump, being turned into Turtle Boy again, and a big historical lion statue, Jimmy Olsen finds himself on the run when an attempted assassination leaves the world believing he's dead! With his cub reporter senses tingling, good ol' James Bartholomew Jimberly Olsen decides to take it upon himself to find out who wants him dead and why, and it may have something to do with his family history and the wealth that's attached to the name...

...in this tale we like to call:

"The Tropes Page for Superman's Pal: Jimmy Olsen!"

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Jimmy Olsen's Tropes: Examples

• Alliterative Family: The Superman franchise has a history of this already, but the series adds the Olsen family to the mix. The three kids (Julian, Janie, and Jimmy) all have names starting with the letter J.
• Amicable Exes: Jimmy and Jix eventually make peace and divorce, resulting in her declaring that she's proud to be his ex-wife.
• Being Evil Sucks: In spite of going all out with the Timmy Olsen persona, Jimmy finds maintaining it stressful to the point of unbearable, realizing that Gotham's influence is pretty toxic on a well-meaning adventurous young man like him.
• Big Damn Heroes: Parodied in Issue #11, where various background gags and characters throughout the series join Jimmy in fighting Jix's suitor even though some of them have no real reason or business to even be there. The narration even lampshades how this is somewhat to force the message that Jimmy is "Everybody's Pal".
• Broken Pedestal: Played for Laughs; when Superman brings Jimmy to Gotham (because he's been reporting on the Toy War), Jimmy gets excited to the point of slight incoherence about meeting Batman. After Batman yells at Supes about bringing a civilian and slaps Jimmy's camera out of his hands, the young reporter calls him a jerk. Later, Bats becomes the target of a number of Timmy's mean-spirited pranks.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Jimmy is an infamous Weirdness Magnet whose inability to leave things alone leads to him doing things like getting accidentally married in Gorilla City or start a prank war with Batman. He's still ultimately a very good photojournalist and ends the story as the Daily Planet's new publisher.
• The Bus Came Back: Hun'ya and the Scrubb from Superman vs. Muhammad Ali show back up.
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: A key part of the series is Jimmy taking absolutely insane situations (including transformed into creatures) as a regular occurrence.
  • When Jix tells Jimmy to "remember the last time you were in Gorilla City" (meaning their one-night stand), Jimmy recalls him growing to giant size and naked except for Metamorpho as his underwear. When Jix snaps that never happened, Jimmy clarifies he meant the last time he was in Gorilla City as he's visited several times since that one visit with Jix.
    Jix: You've...been to Gorilla City more than once?
    Jimmy: It's a city full of gorillas, I visit all the time!
  • Likewise, Superman, Lois Lane and Perry White all accept these crazy events as just stuff that somehow keeps happening to Jimmy.
• Cain and Abel: Julian Olsen, Jimmy's more serious older brother, who's never gotten along with his chaotic younger sibling. The attempt on Jimmy's life turns out to be Julian's idea, because he's run out of money thanks to his entrepreneurial endeavors and Jimmy still has money that will revert to the family if he dies. Even when Jimmy confronts him with it, Julian's only regret is that he chose someone incapable of doing the job rather than killing his younger brother himself.
• Canon Discontinuity: When the series was being published, it was directly made out to be a spin-off of Event Leviathan and specifically Superman (Brian Michael Bendis). While the prologue alludes to its events, the trade collection excises all references to Bendis' run and Event Leviathan to completely make the series standalone.
• Cassandra Truth: Upset that his influencer date is too busy posting selfies on social media, Bruce Wayne outright admits that he's Batman to get her attention. He instantly regrets it and tries to pass it off as a joke, immediately losing his date's interest again.
• Cat Up a Tree: Implied. During an interview on his "secret superpowers", Superman disappears. A few minutes later, he reappears, holding a cat, and his only explanation is that he suddenly needed to do something unspecified.
• The Comically Serious: The series ramps Batman's tendencies for this up to eleven, giving us a rather iconic image of him stoically declaring that he is hilarious as he wears a novelty "arrow-through-the-head" prop.
• Continuity Nod: Clark Kent revealing his identity in Superman (Brian Michael Bendis) is addressed in the final issue, where Jimmy has a bit of trouble accepting it. It also references the problems the Daily Planet were having in the fall-out to this and the solution to them (Jimmy becoming the Planet's new owner) ... which wouldn't happen in the Bendis book until five months later. (Working out where this book actually fits with the Bendis book, of course, is an exercise in futility due to Rule of Funny.)
• Decon-Recon Switch: Take Jimmy's Silver Age shenanigans, apply lasting consequences to them, and what you have is the realization that Jimmy Olsen is a property-damaging nightmare. His tendencies to cause trouble, whether intentional or not, has resulted in collateral damages that could rival supervillain rampages and embarrassments for those who either employ him or are related to him. In fact, his personality, especially when juxtaposed against his siblings, is portrayed in the series as a lack of realistic ambition and drive that's been present since childhood, leading to him going on crazy adventures that, when taking continuity into account, just makes things From Bad to Worse. However, for all his faults, Jimmy is still ultimately a good person who wants to do what's right, and isn't so far into his role as a Weirdness Magnet Bunny-Ears Lawyer to not recognize when he messes up. Not to mention that a Bunny-Ears Lawyer is still competent at his job and Jimmy is still a photojournalist to be reckoned with if he finds out you've been doing something worthy of incriminating photos. True to form, everything in the series that's his fault is resolved by himself by the end and more. There's a very good reason why he's Superman's pal, after all.
• Deconstructive Parody: The series takes aspects of Batman that's been subverted and picked apart to hell and back, such as "Bruce Wayne being the mask," Batman being The Stoic and The Aloner, and being a paranoid Control Freak, and plays them all for laughs. Bruce Wayne is shown to have zero social skills due to his wealth and the time he spends as Batman, causing him to be somewhat of an Attention Whore; he loves telling jokes to his employees in a vain hope to be liked by his underlings and tries to admit he's Batman to a date that's not paying enough attention to him, only to backpedal when she genuinely tries to prod deeper. And because of his obsession with becoming The Ace, Batman also becomes obsessed with winning a prank war with Jimmy to show that he's the funnier one between the two. Overall, Batman is satirized as someone who takes himself way too seriously.
• Disney Death: Dr. Mantel is apparently super-compressed in Ultraspace...but appears unharmed later, thanks to having tethered himself to Jimmy's signal watch in case of an emergency.
• Dissonant Serenity: The "Doc Mantel's Final Theorem!" scene ends with an "Everybody Laughs" Ending where Clark and Lois have a laugh over a pun Clark makes... while Jimmy is completely and utterly traumatized about witnessing Doc Mantel being obliterated atom by atom in Ultraspace.
• Distracted by the Sexy: Julian, Jimmy's older brother, gets distracted from a conversation when a beautiful red-haired woman enters the room. He's so busy trying to put the moves on her that he doesn't even notice that she's obviously using an alias ("Sue Donym"). This ends up humiliating him when he finds out that said woman is his younger brother, who dropped in to inform him that he knows Julian put a hit on him.
• Early Personality Signs: Small moments in the comic demonstrate that Jimmy has always been an impractical dreamer, Janie has always been anti-establishment and grouchy, and Julian has always been money-obsessed to the point of unethical behavior.
  • Jimmy gives a bizarre series of responses to the standard "what do you want to be when you grow up?" and dumbfounds Julian by being more interested in accumulating butterflies than cash.
  • Janie has always been interested in doing anti-establishment plays.
  • Julian set up a "how to get rich" booth which was a front for him to bilk his customers of their money, given that all the advice they got was to do likewise to get cash out of "suckers".
• Engineered Public Confession: Jimmy gets Luthor to rant about being responsible for all the chaos that's happened currently in the city. When he threatens Jimmy, the young reporter quips that he'll have to quote him on it. He had his camera-bot, Scoop, recording the whole time.
• Evil Redhead: Julian puts a hit out on Jimmy and, failing that, attempts to kill him himself to get his money.
• Faking the Dead: After someone shoots a decoy of him, Jimmy doesn't dispute the general assumption that he's dead, instead going undercover to find out who was responsible.
• Foil: Jimmy and Julian contrast with one another quite frequently. Jimmy is chaotic, adventurous, and often unrealistic, while Julian is proper and sensible. Julian is a businessman; Jimmy hardly pays any attention to money (apparently he works for the Daily Planet for free,and has never touched his third of the family trust). All this means they don't have a positive relationship. More seriously, while Jimmy's Walking Disaster Area tendencies can become annoying, he's a friendly and honest person, while Julian's drive for success gives him Corrupt Corporate Executive tendencies, up to and including attempted murder.
• Friends Are Chosen, Family Aren't: Played with. Jimmy and his sister, Janie are on reasonably friendly terms. While she gets exasperated by his more chaotic tendencies, she seems to care about him. He also likes her and supports her avant-garde theatrical endeavors to the point of blackmailing Lex Luthor to keep them funded after discovering that their families are secretly related. However, Jimmy and Julian are usually at odds thanks to their wildly conflicting personalities. He has a much warmer relationship with Superman (who isn't even from the same planet, let alone the same family) than with his brother.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Jimmy and Superman. The two hang out together, their relationship is public knowledge, and the captions refer to Jimmy as Superman's non-biological brother and to Superman as Jimmy's "platonic plus-one" (not to mention Superman being Happily Married to Lois Lane by this point).
• Humble Hero: Superman as always, and partly Played for Laughs during his "Secret Super-Powers" interview with Jimmy. He seems to seriously think that he has an innate ability to persuade anybody to buy him a hot dog. It's more than likely that people were just willing to give Superman a free hot dog because he's—well, Superman, but the guy's got such little ego that he can only rationalize this gesture of gratitude as having a supernatural cause.
• Ignored Epiphany: Jimmy is implied to have casually figured out that Batman is Bruce Wayne, but then just as quickly forgot it. When knocked out and awakened to find a bat-themed stationery saying "Tonight -B", Jimmy "mistakes" it as being from Bruce Wayne until others around him insist that it's actually from Batman.
• Inadvertent Entrance Cue: Perry White unhappily gives the Daily Planet team the news that they don't have enough money to keep putting out the paper. He tells them that unless something incredible enters the scene right now, their next edition will be the last. Jimmy, who ends up saving the Daily Planet, arrives immediately thereafter.
• Invention Pretension: Played for Laughs. During the "secret superpowers" interview, Superman claims he invented the dodecahedron. Given that the whole interview is silly, it seems unlikely he expected anyone to believe it.
• It Always Rains at Funerals: After Jimmy's decoy gets shot, the funeral takes place on a gray, rainy day.
• In-Universe Nickname: Apparently Julian Olsen has the nickname "Mr. Metropolis".
• Joke of the Butt: Arm Fall Off Boy's family who each have their own detachable body parts includes a grandmother whose rear end can come off, which she makes good use of when several friends and acquaintances of Jimmy Olsen show up to come to his aid near the end of the maxiseries.
• Luke, You Are My Father: It's revealed that the Olsens and Luthors are related by a secret tryst between two members of the family in the early 19th Century. This allows Jimmy to blackmail Luthor into keeping the Daily Planet running and his sister's plays financed.
• Mood Whiplash: The montage of some of Jimmy's adventures has various silly Noodle Incidents... and ends with Jimmy, Lois, and Clark being extracted from covering a warzone. And rather than Amusing Injuries, Jimmy looks genuinely beaten up and bruised.
• Morphic Resonance: Due to a mix-up with a DNA injection, Jimmy gets turned into a human-sized turtle. Despite losing all other human characteristics, he keeps his red hair.
• Oh, Crap!: After phoning Luthor to inform him that Julian Olsen was the one who put the hit out on Jimmy, a corrupt detective turns away from the phone only to collide someone behind him. He initially begins to throw his weight around and threaten to spuriously arrest whoever it is for assault... only to go white when he finally notices who it actually was, and that it is someone he really is not in a position to bully:
  Superman: I think this has gone on long enough, don't you?
• Opinion Flip Flop: Perry White is irritated with Jimmy due to the chaos that tends to follow him everywhere...until someone informs him that Jimmy is the only member of the Planet staff who's actually bringing in money. (His forays into new media earn a lot more attention than the newspaper's more traditional fare.)
• Paper-Thin Disguise: Jimmy's posthumous identity is Timmy Olsen, who is literally just Jimmy with shorter hair. It's shown that he originally even had a fake mustache as part of his "disguise".
• Remember the New Guy?: Jimmy's siblings have never been mentioned before.
• The Reveal: Julian Olsen is the one who ordered the hit on Jimmy, having bankrupted himself and the family with his entrepreneurial endeavors then finding out that Jimmy still has a very large amount in his trust fund that will return to the family in the event of his death.
• Rise from Your Grave: While Jimmy's funeral is in progress, a hand claws its way up from the grave. It turns out to be Dr. Mantel, who emerged from Ultraspace in that location thanks to tethering himself to Jimmy's signal watch (which Jimmy threw into the grave so he wouldn't be tempted to use it).
• Rule of Symbolism: While Jimmy's businesslike older brother Julian is chewing him out, he shoves him, causing Jimmy to fall on Julian's table and wreck the model of the city he keeps there. It underlines his statement about his younger brother being a Walking Disaster Area. However, it also foreshadows that Julian is the worse of the two. While Jimmy is apologetic about accidentally destroying his estranged sibling's project despite being pushed into it, Julian pushes all the blame on Jimmy rather than accepting any of it himself.
• Running Gag: Jimmy's full first name being given as a variety of things that aren't James.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Jimmy has a low-key panic attack and scrams when he sees that practically everyone in Opal City dresses like him, much to Janie's chagrin.
• Serious Business: When Batman declares a prank war on you, he will go as hard as he does with crimefighting. He technically wins it by default when Jimmy is almost killed but he makes sure to get the last laugh in by legally changing Jimmy's full name to "Jimphony."
• Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing: Jimmy turns into a gigantic turtle, which naturally shreds his clothing.
• Shout-Out:
  • The title to Issue #8, "My Olsen, My Olsen, My Olsen, and Me" is a reference to My Brother, My Brother and Me.
  • Lois references the famous "your scientists were so busy thinking about whether they could that they didn't stop to think about whether they should" line when discussing Dr. Mantel's project.
  • "Timmy" yells out a Spiteful Spoiler at a line of people at a theater that Aaron Burr kills Alexander Hamilton.
  • Flashbacks to the Olsen siblings' childhoods are drawn in a similar style to Peanuts.
  • Jimmy gives a pretty familiar reaction to his brother when he drops the revelation that he knows they tried to have him killed.
    Jimmy: You broke my heart.
• Sophisticated as Hell: The Scrubb talk like this. Their syntax is that of Jack Kirby space-gods, but the actual words... aren't.
  Hun'ya: Indeed, Jimmicle Olsen of Earth. Fair is fair, and no takebacks is indeed fair. Did you perhaps call "no backsies"? Were any fingers crossed? Or was it by chance Opposite Day?
• Star-Crossed Lovers: One of Jimmy's ancestors, Jimberly, and one of Lex Luthor's, Hannah, fell in love, despite the decades-old animosity between the families. For a while, the relationship flourished in secret, driven partially by the disdain of their relatives. The relationship ended tragically with Hannah's father shooting her beau in the leg while other relatives held her back. While they married other people, their illegitimate son ended up tying the Olsen and Luthor bloodlines together.
• Starstruck Speechless: In one part of the series, Superman brings Jimmy to a patrol in Gotham City because he's been covering the situation that he and Batman plan to investigate. Jimmy, despite being a celebrity in his own right, gets so nervous/excited that Superman has to tell him to breathe out and focus on one word at a time. Batman ruins the moment by punching Jimmy's camera out of his hands.
• Strong Family Resemblance: Besides the Olsen siblings who look like each other, the series retcons Lex Luthor's red hair as a clue to his relation to them.
• Superman Stays Out of Gotham: Him actually showing up in Gotham in the comic aside, Jimmy specifically tells Superman to stay uninvolved, feeling it's his responsibility to fix whatever mess he's made this time.
• Take That!:
  • Towards online pranksters and the like when Jimmy uses his new guise Timmy Olsen to do very mean-spirited pranks for the sake of views. It broadens into an insult towards the nature of media when Jimmy says that "Timmy" and his malicious antics get more views than he does, and Lois admits she's gotten more positive reception while doing an interview in a shortened skirt.
  • Fraction also takes the piss out of Event Leviathan by having "Timmy" yell out to an audience lined up outside a theater that the traitor is Manhunter. For the collected edition, this was replaced with a Shout-Out to Hamilton.
• There Are Two Kinds of People in the World: Batman, irritated that Superman brought a civilian (even if he's an Action Survivor and Intrepid Reporter), says that only two kinds of people exist: soldiers and enemies. He strikes Jimmy's camera out of his hands and asks if he's an enemy, because he definitely doesn't look like a soldier. He swings away without giving anyone a chance to react, leaving Supes embarrassed that his attempt to introduce two of his friends went that poorly.
• Thousand-Yard Stare: Jimmy sports a rather traumatized expression during the last panel of "Doc Mantel's Final Theorem" after seeing the doctor obliterated just before the emergency mechanism yanked him back to safety.
• Title Drop: Repeatedly parodied. Some "chapters" lampooning Silver Age title pages has someone dramatically declare some kind of phrase that's formatted as the title of the comic story, along with declarations of Jimmy as something similar to Superman's Pal.
• Villainous Breakdown: Upon being caught in their murder attempt and kept from escaping, Julian Olsen begins ranting about his power, the stupidity of his siblings, and the uselessness of the underclass before pulling a gun to shoot Jimmy...and getting knocked down by Porcadillo.
• Wholesome Crossdresser: In true Jimmy Olsen fashion, Jimmy dresses himself up as a beautiful woman at Julian's party just so he can reveal himself, kiss him, and declare that he found out that he was the one who ordered the hit on him.

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