Reviewed by Adam Ford

Superman is a multi-media icon. By 1954 the guy had been the star of his own comic, radio show and television series. In the course of his jumps between media he had acquired a sidekick of sorts, a cub reporter called Jimmy Olsen who had originally been created so that Superman had someone that he could illuminate as to how he defeated the bad guy.

Reversing Superman's trajectory, Jimmy's existence as part of the Superman family began on radio, then jumped across to the comics as he joined Lois Lane and Clark Kent in the newsroom of the Daily Planet. Eventually he was given his own title, in which he used his keen reporter's nose to sniff out mysteries and then try to solve the crime himself, although occasionally he had to call on his pal (i.e., Superman) to bail him out of the scrapes he found himself in. To do so he would use his trademark signal watch, which emitted a hypersonic signal that only Superman's super-sensitive ears could detect. And of course Superman would pretty much drop whatever he was doing and come help his little bow-tie-clad, red-headed pal.

This, the first issue of Jimmy's comic, is a lot more down-to-earth than the comic became over time. In it, Jimmy doesn't acquire any bizarre super-powers, or turn into a giant turtle-boy or anything like that. Instead he relies on investigative skill, the services of Jumbo Jones, pilot of the "flying newsroom" (a big helicopter with a trunk full of disguises in it) and the occasional save from the big S. The stories are presented as boys'-own mysteries, with vital clues withheld until the last few panels, in which Jimmy explains (usually to Superman, another reversal of his original raison d'etre) how he worked out what the villains were up to.

"Why would they use a tuna-size hook, too big for any lake fish known, unless they wanted to drag up something like a big sack? With the heat off after six months, my hunch was they'd fish up the sunken loot, but I wasn't sure till I saw their casting rods!"

And so it goes.

The artwork duties are carried out by a young Curt Swan, who would go on to become one of the artists most frequently associated with Superman comics. Here his work is a little rougher around the edges, but not far from the polished competence that he would eventually achieve, particularly on the cover and in the opening teaser panels.

The stories are as facile as one could hope for in a comic, with obligatory cliff-hangers and fatuous solutions . In the first story, Jimmy and Jumbo Jones are tied up under a pier as the tide rises, threatening to drown them, but Jimmy manages to grab a floating clamshell (!) and cut his ropes just enough to use his signal watch to call Superman for help. In the second story, a nasty lumberjack starts a forest fire and Jimmy rolls a bunch of logs into the river so that the splash will douse the flames (of course it works - don't be so cynical). But despite the shortcomings of the stories, this comic manages to come across as somehow charming, like a backward cousin's malapropisms or the sight of two children, the older explaining in all seriousness to the younger that the tiny horses under the hood of the car make it go. It's misinformed and a little misguided, but it's kind of adorable anyway.

Tentatively Recommended

Adam Ford is based in Melbourne, Australia. He currently works as a freelance editor and is writing his debut novel, "Man Bites Dog" (due for release in early 2002). He is the editor of "Going Down Swinging" and "Overland Express" (www.overlandexpress.org), two locally-based literary magazines.