Jimmy Olsen #133 “… Brings Back The Newsboy Legion!” (October 1970)



The Story: Galaxy Broadcasting boss sends Jimmy Olsen on assignment to a dangerous “Wild Area” populated by feral bikers. First, Olsen goes to a warehouse where he meets the new Newsboy Legion, children of the Golden Age versions of themselves. Edge has somehow funded for them to have a giant, self-driving, souped-up fantasticar, the Whiz Wagon, that can roll, fly, and submerge.



Clark Kent gets overly curious about why Olsen was sent on this story instead of him. In response, Edge calls in a hit on Kent! Intergang, a heretofore unknown organized crime outfit, succeeds in running Kent over, but they don’t stop to see that he was unharmed.



Coming ashore at the Wild Area, the Newsboys immediately take fire from Iron Mask, who looks like a cross between Kang and Doctor Doom, and his minion Vudu.



Olsen is now an action star who grapples and then pummels these hardened road warriors into submission. Having defeated Iron Mask, Olsen is given sole credit (though he had lots of help from the Newsboys) and is accepted as the leader by the rest of the Outsiders biker gang.



Superman comes to the Wild Area. Although we’ve been told that no one over age 25 is accepted here, the first person he meets is a meditating man with a white beard, sitting in a nest atop a pole surrounded by annoying smoke. The scene seems inspired by Lewis Carroll’s caterpillar; Superman moves on.



Next, Superman is accosted by some hostile survivalists who are quickly cured of their assumption that he’s just some goofus in a Superman costume. Finally, Jimmy and the Outsiders find Superman and tell him to scram. When he refuses, they shoot him with a Kryptonite raygun!



Superman awakens, in the company of the Newsboy Legion, in a treetop Habitat far too ambitious to have been built by slacker bikers. Jimmy Olsen and the Outsiders are about to set out on an expedition along a racecourse called the Zoomway to find something called the Mountain of Judgement…



My Two Cents: Kirby wastes no time resurrecting legacy characters as well as throwing a whole bunch of new ones at readers, but in an easily intelligible manner, with some great splash pages. The boast “Kirby is HERE!” on the cover is a big deal – not just for DC, stealing the guy who had been so integral in Marvel’s astonishing 1960s success, but for creators in general, who were not accustomed to being a selling point for comic books. Kirby is paving the way that will be followed by superstar creators for the next fifty years, getting top billing over the characters that they write and draw.

Up until this point, the usual Jimmy Olsen story was that he gets into trouble and needs rescuing by Superman. Kirby goes the other way; Superman is a nuisance, an obstacle to young people enjoying their youth. He is The Man. The cover declares that Jimmy is now his “Ex-Pal!” Kirby is laying heavily into late 1960s Easy Rider youth culture here. Even Superman is loaded with hippie patois. There’s no discernible reason for bikers to be hanging out in a forest, but that’s the story, so we have to go with it.



Flippa Dippa is the black member of the Newsboy Legion. His character trait is that he has a scuba suit, which apparently means he is required to wear it under all circumstances, even when running toward someone who is about to shoot him.



Here’s a nice parallel panel, showing Jimmy in the same stance as Morgan Edge during a scene switch. Transitions like this were common in arty movies of the 1960s. There’s also one panel with Superman standing with both forearms tucked behind his back, as Darkseid is often seen to stand.



Jack Kirby is under the impression that “heat vision” means “the ability to discern what things look like by the heat signatures left behind long afterwards.”

Actually a much more interesting use of "heat vision" than the usual!

I too was puzzled where Forever People #1 fit into continuity since it can't come right after Jimmy Olsen #135, even though that is when it was published. I see no reason not to put it first.

According to Mark Evanier's foreword in the Fourth World Omnibus, Kirby was inspired by two things. One was The Lord of the Rings, which was selling like hotcakes to the genre crowd, despite its length. The other was the observation that people were not treating comic books like the newsprint they were printed on. People were saving their comics, cataloguing them, instead of reading and discarding them. This in part may have been due to the emphasis on continuity in 60s Marvel comics. Putting those two observations together, Kirby hit upon the idea of telling an epic mythology, serialized in comic books that could be reprinted in bound volumes and put on shelves beside Lord of the Rings. Kirby was, in essence, "writing for the trade collection" while still keeping the individual episodes action packed enough and accessible enough to stand alone if need be. The Fourth World became the blueprint for all the crossover events like COIE and the rest going forward.

What a great idea; I don't know why we haven't covered the 4th World before!

The bikers were less a product of cinema and more a product of locality. Kirby's house was near an area that was being used by motorcyclists to tear around and it drove him nuts, with the constant noise. So, he fueled his frustration into the Olsen story.

Kirby's original intent for the 4th World was the material that made it into New Gods and Mister Miracle. Jimmy Olsen was sort of forced upon Kirby and he used it to kind of introduce things, but mostly had the adventures revolve around Olsen and the Newsboys, without as much of the 4th World, except for the odd agent of Darkseid. The whole DNA Project reads fine without a connection between Darkseid and Simian and Mokari. I suspect he just decided to use Apokolips as a device to feed opponents into the story. After the earliest issues, though, the series moved more and more away from that.

Forever People was more about exploring the youth culture of the time, based on Kirby's interactions with the people who made their pilgrimages to his home, interactions at conventions and his own children and their friends. However, he does get into more of the philosophical realm of the 4th World, when he brings in Desaad and his amusement park and Glorious Godfrey and Anti-Life. My interpretation is that element of the work was a later addition, which emerged after he had conceived the basic stuff, as his character designs were all for New Gods and Mr Miracle.

Another funny thing... MUCH of The Fourth World was conceived by Kirby around 1967. He had hoped to get a contract guaranteeing him credit & pay for his writing, and use all these new concepts as a bargaining tool. But when Martin Goodman sold the company to Perfect Film, they insisted Goodman's editor be part of the deal... and NOT the guy actually creating all the characters and stories they were buying. When Perfect Film found out there were NO written contracts of any kind... they freaked out, and the result was, Goodman & his editor spent the next 3 solid years trying to "run Kirby off" (make him QUIT) in fear that he might try to SUE them for ownership of what, by rights, was HIS.

The whole "hippie" / youth culture thing really hit big during 1967 and its "summer of love", so I have no doubt that's where the inspiration for THE FOREVER PEOPLE came from.

But something else crossed my mind... and it was viewing the whole Fourth World from the possibility of how things might have gone had Kirby gotten his contract, and happily continued working for Marvel's new owners!!!

Picture THIS...

Jimmy Olsen -- Peter Parker
The Newsboy Legion -- The Fantastic Four
The Whiz Wagon -- The Fantastic-Car
Superman -- Thor
The Evil Factory -- A.I.M.'s Android Farm


Incidentally, it was MISTER MIRACLE that was originally conceived as being a totally-independant series, with the Fourth World elements being tacked on by the time Kirby got started actually doing it. If you look at the later issues... after Scott & Barda return to Apokalips to fight for the right to their freedom, you can see more of how the book was probably meant to be in the first place.

Oddly enough, the first issue after that story, where Scott & Barda run across yet another spy outfit with world-conquering ambitions, was no doubt meant to be another branch of Hydra... and the egotistical, woman-crazy secret agent they cross paths with along the way, reminds me not so much of Ralph Meeker, as he does Dean Martin's version of "Matt Helm".

Jimmy Olsen #134 “The Mountain of Judgement!” (November 1970)



The Story: Superman tries to stop Jimmy from leading the Outsiders on a race down the Zoomway to find the Mountain of Judgment. An Outsider again shoots Superman with Kryptonite; Jimmy takes it in stride. You’d think mind control must be involved, but nope; Jimmy is just that disinterested in the well-being and counsel of the dude who saved his life 132 times before Kirby got here.



The Zoomway turns out to be something of a motorized obstacle course with fake paper walls, falling rocks, chasms to be jumped, and even an underwater segment which all the bikes are somehow equipped to handle. We’re told that no one is injured, though I don’t see how that can be the case with falls like this:



Then things get really trippy in a two page photocollage said to be created by a distorting light show. This is quite avant-garde for a Superman family book in 1970.



Superman regains consciousness and flies to the Zoomway just in time to lift the Whiz Wagon out of the path of a giant battlewagon, which turns out to be the "Mountain of Judgement." A powerful magnet pulls the Whiz Wagon inside the larger vehicle, and I wonder whether this scene inspired the tractor beam sequence in Star Wars. Inside are friendly scientists, the Hairies, who find a bomb hidden in the Whiz Wagon. This was the reason that Morgan Edge sent Jimmy and the Newsboys to the Wild Area: to unwittingly blow up the Hairies’ mobile fortress/laboratory. See, Jimmy should have listened to Superman!



My Two Cents: So… Superman was right after all, and Jimmy was wrong. Jimmy almost got himself, the Newsboys, and the Hairies all killed by Morgan Edge’s bomb, and he doesn’t give the least hint of being sorry. That is, he’s sorry that he didn’t get a big story out of all this. What is up with this kid? And the Newsboy Legion are no more repentant.



The Outsider’s home and weapons were made by the Hairies, who turn out to be rather less hairy than the Outsiders. Why are the Hairies making Kryptonite weapons? Superman seems to already know them and be on their side. The Hairies also made the Zoomway but then made it a deathtrap, both for reasons unclear, just as they drive around in a giant mobile lab for “to avoid our unseen enemies,” but only within the confines of the Zoomway. Doesn’t make sense. One starts to think that Kirby was looking for something as cool as the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, and he may have just found it, or rather created it.



The Outsiders just sort of vanished from the story. One minute they were right with the Whiz Wagon; the scene cuts to Superman, and by the time Superman arrives at the Whiz Wagon, the Outsiders are both gone and forgotten, and the story is all about the Hairies now.



The final page also gives us the first-ever glimpse of Darkseid, who has been inappropriately colored in flesh tones as he chats with Morgan Edge like a CEO barking at a midlevel executive. Not his most awe-inspiring appearance, but better things are coming.