Fredric Dannen has a little to say about Kinney in Hit Men, his book on crime in the music industry, but he doesn't mention the mob. Here's the longest section about Kinney and its boss Steve Ross. He's mentioned sporadically afterward in relation to his role as chairman of Time-Warner.

"Warner Bros. Records had begun inauspiciously. From 1958 to 1962, it lost an estimated $3 million a year... Then, in 1963, Warner signed comedian Allen Sherman and folk trio Peter, Paul, and Mary. Hit albums by Bill Cosby completed the turnaround. Meanwhile (sister label) Reprise began to score middle-of-the-road hits with Dean Martin, Nancy Sinatra, and Trini Lopez... (With the signing of the Grateful Dead,) Warner was on its way to becoming a rock company. Meanwhile, Seven Arts, a small film producer and distributor, acquired all of Warner Bros. - films and records - in 1966. The purchase encumbered Seven Arts with debt, and it resolved to sell the Warner holdings, but not before adding Atlantic Records to the fold in 1967. That year, the Warner movie and music operations found a stable owner in the Kinney Corporation.

"Kinney must have seemed an unlikely parent. It was run by Steve Ross, an ambitious young man from Flatbush. He had taken his then-wife's family business, funeral parlors, and expanded into car-rental agencies and parking lots. In 1967 he exchanged $10 million in preferred stock for the Ashley Famous talent agency. Entranced by the entertainment business, Ross soon took over Warner-Seven Arts, as it was then called... Ross proved a good manager of creative people and well suited for the entertainmenet business. The film and record companies outgrew Kinney's core business so quickly that in 1971 Ross renamed it Warner Communications." (p.121-122)

There are some concepts-- MOST, probably-- that should only be done by their original creators.

Kirby often based characters on real people-- sometimes amalgamations of real people. Like, the personality of one, the physical image of another.


His face was JACK PALANCE.

actor Milton Johns

Doing some more reading... although Abner Zwillman, "The Al Capone of New Jersey," was a part owner of Kinney, he seems to have been a silent partner, and he died in 1959 before Steve Ross entered the picture. There doesn't appear to have been an odor of underworld about Kinney by the time they bought Warner, and Ross became highly respected throughout Warner's innovations in cable TV, their merger with Time, Inc., etc. Steven Speilberg dedicated the film Schindler's List to Ross and encouraged actor Liam Neeson to base his business mannerisms on videos of Ross.

Jimmy Olsen #137 “The Four-Armed Terror!” (May 1971)



The Story: The D.N.Alien monster that hatched in the Evil Factory is somehow now prowling the Zoomway. It runs across two of the biker Outsiders who are riding around looking for their leader Jimmy Olsen. The creature destroys their motorcycles, and they flee on foot. How far is it back to Habitat? As I recall there was a water hazard and a huge pit blocking the way back.



Meanwhile in The Project, Superman and the rest of our heroes take some time out to listen to the Music of the Spheres on a “solar phone” which gives them a communal psychedelic experience which goes on for several splash pages. Groooovy.



The evil creature starts feeding off of the power lines connecting The Project to its nuclear power plant. This leads to damaging explosions in both The Project and The Habitat. Superman says “Leave it to me,” which causes resentment in Jimmy Olsen and the Newsboy Legion. They follow him anyway. Check out how everyone has their knees bent, ready to pounce in classic Kirby style.



During a big fight, the D.N.Alien entraps Superman, Jimmy, and the Newsboys in an elastic cocoon which he tosses away. He continues his march to the nuclear plant itself. When he reaches it, he will cause an explosion which will destroy Metropolis. Worse still, more of his kind (which Mokkari and Simyan dub “Homo Usurpus”) are hatching at the Evil Factory…



My Two Cents: This story feels, dare I say it, decompressed. As is often the case in pre-planned story arcs, the issue-ending beats are planned as an over-arching story structure. But there may not be enough plot detail between them, resulting in lots of big panels. The whole Solar Phone sequence could have been one page instead of several.



Kirby’s plots were the comic book equivalent of punk rock: high energy, imaginative, and lacking in elegance and details. For instance, when Jimmy and the Newsboys first came to the Wild Area and the Habitat, they were gliding along a river near Metropolis. But now we’re told that this whole story takes place in a giant cavern underneath Metropolis. Even the forested Wild Area is underground apparently. It doesn’t make sense, and it also contradicts what we were shown back in #133.



Second, Kirby would not be the first write to treat a nuclear reactor pile like a nuclear bomb that might explode in a mushroom cloud. I doubt that. There could be some explosion related to a nuclear meltdown, but a nuclear bomb requires a carefully managed explosion triggered by shaped charges. A meltdown beneath Metropolis could have disastrous consequences including poisoning of the water supply, but a mushroom cloud would not be among them, especially for a nuclear meltdown starting deep underground. Still, the image of a mushroom cloud was a powerful symbol of nuclear holocaust in the Cold War area, so it’s understandable that Kirby would appeal to it.

This issue of Jimmy Olsen has almost no Jimmy Olsen. He just gets a couple of panels in which he shoots ineffectively at the D.N.Alien with a sound wave pistol he acquired at The Project. Where was The Guardian in this issue? Last issue made a big deal about what an effective monster fighter he is, but he’s simply missing for now.

“Homo Usurpus” is a little too obviously lifted from Kirby’s work on X-Men, which had “Homo Superior” threatening to usurp mankind. But he’s his own editor, so there’s no one to tell him “No.”