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Saturday, January 07, 2012

Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen #55 - Sept. 1961

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Comics Weekend "The Monster That Loved Aqua-Jimmy!" by Unknown and Al Plastino.

Aquaman didn't just get involved with Lois Lane and her adventures--no, sir! He also had time to help out Superman's best pal (which says more about Superman than anything else) Jimmy Olsen, in the cub reporter's kookiest adventure yet:
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Aqua-Jimmy sees a prehistoric creature trapped in a ice block, which has started to crack. Within moments the creature is free, but its not angry. Quite the contrary, it takes an immediate liking to Jimmy and starts following him around like a puppy.

After the creature sees some flying fish leap out of the sea to eat some insects, it copies that behavior, only with a low-flying plane! After Jimmy helps rescue the pilot, Aqua-Jimmy scolds the beast, which hurts its feelings.

Suddenly a bolt of lightning strikes a nearby island, causing a fire. Jimmy commands some swordfish to help put out the blaze, which causes the creature to follow suit again, creating more havoc!
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Clearly, this little story is not one of Aquaman's all-time greatest moments. He appears in all of two panels, and in both of those he looks like a complete dork: first wearing the same helmet the Ghostbusters put on Louis Tully, the second being carried around by Superman the same way he did for Lois. But hey, they call can't be Justice League #4.

I discovered this story while doing research on what guest appearances Aquaman made in other DC books (here's video of me, hard at work), and I'm really quite impressed how many times Aquaman showed up in the Superman Family of books. Sure, most of those appearances were pretty goofy, but then so were most of the Superman comics of the 50s and 60s!

2 comments:

Anthony said...

Jimmy Olsen standing in for Aquaman... guess we're lucky the story doesn't end with Supes and Arthur returning to Earth to find some newly-created Earth-1 version of Black Jack having conquered Hawaii or something. ;-)

Joseph Brian Scott said...

Always impressed with your ability to get your hands on these color scans of silver age comics, Rob.

Yeah, the "power transfer helmet" looks like Supes just raided Lois' kitchen cabinets or something. Fun story, though, and the panel of Lori at the end is cool; I like the burry, indistinct shapes suggesting the murk of the depths.