One of the things I intend to do with these Superman Thoughts is to talk at length about the supporting cast of the franchise. As I complained last time, the supporting cast is often the first thing writers cut out to fit in DC Universe Guest Stars and stuff that I don’t care about. So, if we are going to make the franchise the way I think it should be, getting the supporting cast working correctly is basically my top priority.

I’m going to get pretty darn obscure with these later, but not today. Today I am going to talk about possibly the least obscure member of the cast with the obvious exception of Lois Lane. Today I need to talk about Superman’s pal, James Bartholomew Olsen.

Jimmy Olsen’s deal is thus: He is a younger coworker of Lois and Clark at the Daily Planet newspaper, and frequently gets caught up in the various adventures and weirdness and Supermanning that happens there. It is hard to believe in today’s comics industry, but this character starred in a series that ran for over a hundred issues. There was a time when Jimmy was considered to potentially star in a television series, and that would have been before even Batman got one. Once upon a time, Jimmy Olsen used to be a big deal. Not lately, though.

As far as I can tell, nobody likes poor Jimmy anymore. Even among Superman fans I see on the Internet, Jimmy is mocked as a loser. And, sure enough, he is kind of a putz most of the time. But then, when he isn’t, such as on the currently-running Supergirl, where he is a successful photojournalist (and handsome as heck), a vocal number of people on the Internet saw it as being wrong for the character*. But, as with all things, I think it’s more complicated than people give it credit for. Neither putz nor pro is completely right or wrong for Jimmy.

When I read through the entire run of Jimmy Olsen’s comic, I particularly enjoyed the way he changed over the course of the series. In the beginning he’s a kid, kind of a sweet kid, but kind of an idiot. Superman always has to get him out of trouble and teach him lessons in bizarre ways. By the end, Jimmy is a legitimate photojournalist and bonafide action hero in his own right. If we think Superman should be about inspiring people to become better and step up to be good people, Jimmy was, in that era, an in-text example of that happening.

I contrasted that with a more modern retelling of Superman’s arrival in Metropolis, I think it was Superman: Secret Origin but it could have been Birthright, in which Jimmy was practically an action hero even before meeting Superman, and read the writer’s thoughts that they wanted to show why people like Jimmy (and Lois) were people Superman could be friends with. I can see that argument for Lois, but I feel like it takes away Jimmy’s most useful role in the franchise. Anyway, Superman can be friends with a chump like Jimmy. He’s Superman, after all. And Jimmy takes that friendship as a motivation toward self-improvement.

The problem is, I think, that no status quo in comics will ever again last long enough for that amount of growth to happen naturally. In my dream world, we would have a long-form telling of the Superman story that follows the cast for decades of their lives without interruption, but the odds of that happening aren’t great. So, if we’re only ever going to get glimpses of Jimmy in the process of his journey from chump to champ, I think the writers need to be more conscious of that fact. If you’re telling a tale set early in Superman’s career, let Jimmy be simultaneously a lovable doofus and an unlovable jerk. If your Jimmy has known Superman for longer, let him be on his way to being an actual hero, but not quite there. If you’re writing Jimmy who has been through it all and is now a true hero, you should emphasize how far he’s come, and how much work it was.

If I were writing a Jimmy in the middle of his transformation, I think I’d treat him like a Spider-Man type hero (minus the powers and costume, of course). He’s the kind of hero who can and frequently does make mistakes, but maybe we’ll believe he can learn from them, preferably being amusing on the way.

Anyway, I swear these were supposed to get shorter as I went. I had better sum up:

Jimmy Olsen, as a character, is about the way he is transformed by being friends with Superman.

And I didn’t even really get into why that concept is so appropriate for him.

*And let’s be truthful, they were also complaining that he’s black on the show, but that’s not actually a valid concern to me, so I’m not gonna bother with it.

In a world where superheroes are fairly commonplace, there are bound to be more loser ones than good ones. This is a sitcom about a handful of heroes of lesser renown who keep stumbling across one another in their attempts to fight crime. None of them are really friends and they only tolerate each other in the name of fighting for justice, or as close as they can manage.

Secret Sword

Our point-of-view character, the Secret Sword is a young lady who found a sword that gives her magic powers. Having recently been fired, she decided to fight crime. She is immediately in over her head, and gets beat up repeatedly, and sticks with it only to show up the other heroes, who think she can’t make it.

Flasher

A prominent hero who has been active for decades, the light-powered Flasher is so very tired. He puts on a brave face for his fans, but he really thought that punching bad guys would have made a difference by now. He can only open up about his cynicism around the younger generation of heroes, who he wants to talk out of even trying, but also hates because they haven’t made everything great yet either.

Big Beetle

A teenager who accidentally got trapped in a superhero costume created by a rich scientist, Big Beetle has to fight crime to the scientist’s liking in order to get out of the costume for temporary spells and have a normal life. He doesn’t actually care about heroing, but the scientist sure does.

Techbelly

By eating metal or plastic or other such things, Techbelly’s powerful high-tech belly can rearrange them to create devices and gizmos that do all sorts of cool sci-fi stuff. Using these gizmos, Techbelly works to take down the criminals who run the illegal weapons rings in town. After all, he could make a lot of money selling high-tech stuff if they weren’t around.

Watchful Eye

Stuck by lightning, a young man found he suddenly gained a peak-human fitness level and no longer required sleep. Deciding to use these powers to benefit humanity, he became the Watchful Eye, a hero who prowls the streets and, when he sees danger, calls the appropriate authorities to the scene. All the other heroes find this incredibly lame and mock him mercilessly.

Steel Owl

The mysterious Steel Owl is a vigilante of the night wearing high tech armour that provides awesome powers and hides the wearer’s identity. There are rumours that the Steel Owl is actually a rich playboy who hates crime, but the truth is that the Steel Owl suit is worn by a high-ranking police officer. She knows that what she is doing is very illegal, but just enjoys it too much. It isn’t even an “I hate crime so much” thing. She really just finds superheroing fun. The rest of the cast are in awe of the Steel Owl who seems so cool and aloof and driven, but the Steel Owl is just extremely desperate to not mess up in any way and give away her secret identity.

Superhero sitcoms have been done well and done poorly. This, I think, would be one of the latter. I don’t think this show even gets to air all the episodes that are produced before it is cancelled. I would try to avoid the “superheroes hanging out in their downtime” thing that is most common. These guys all run into each other while working, but never in their downtime. It would only be Seinfeld-grade sitcom coincidence logic that makes them have to endure each other. That amuses me, at least.

I just shovelled a bunch of characters from loose sketches into this. At some point I was half-jokingly dared myself to create ANOTHER superhero universe so, while these would fit into one of the many I have already created, instead I declare this Yet Another Universe. Try and stop me.

Flasher is meant to be a superhero whose name would be seen as terrible by people who think about it more than he does (see the Whizzer, for example) and, in case it isn’t clear, I absolutely think the Watchful Eye is the most sensible person in this cast.

Superman and Batman gotta stop hanging out. I expect, if I were in charge of the Superman books, this would be my single most controversial decree. And that’s saying something, considering that given the opportunity, I’d write Superman as bisexual*, but I still think this would be more hated. Entire generations of fans would be against me on this. I wholly believe that Superman would be better if his stories weren’t a part of the DC Universe.

It’s not just the fact that I don’t care about the DC Universe that makes me feel that way. I mean, it is absolutely true that I don’t care about the DC Universe. I’m not going to offend you all by pretending otherwise, but it isn’t just that. In fact, I think I actually first came to this conclusion from the other direction, because I like Batman. I don’t love him, but I like him fine. He’s got fun villains, Gotham is a decent setting for those kinds of stories, and I enjoyed 60s show and 90s cartoon as a kid. But whenever I encountered stories about Batman among the other DC heroes, it wasn’t the same. It wasn’t what I wanted from Batman stories. I pretty quickly decided I’d like Batman more if his franchise was a standalone thing.

It took me longer to decide that about Superman, but only because my interest in Superman took longer to grow. My primary introductions to Superman as a kid were the Reeve movies and the Lois and Clark show. Neither of those had other DC properties forced in. Let’s say that at that point in my development, I was a casual Superman fan, mostly because I liked goody-two-shoes heroes in general. In my twenties I remember checking out the first season of Smallville, but dropped out not long after that, so I encountered no real big DC elements (it wouldn’t be until I was obsessed that I suffered through the rest of that show). Also in my early twenties, I was drawn to the Silver Age of Superman, when the comics got really weird. That appealed to me and, I’d say, brought me from casual fan to actual fan. There were minor elements from DC, Superman would occasionally hang out with Batman or race against the Flash, but there was so much Superman-specific world building that the DC stuff was easily overlooked. From there, I slipped backward into the Golden Age of the character, when his social crusader nature was at its sharpest and his DC connections were absolutely minimal. That’s the point when I became an obsessed fan of the franchise. I had grown to love Superman, the supporting cast, and even the villains. I made my journey from casual to obsessed all without any real influence from the DC Universe showing in the stories. I don’t know that a fan could do that these days, given that there is no outlet for Superman family characters (or for Batman or, I assume, Wonder Woman or the Flash or whatever else) which is not strongly integrated into a universe of other heroes. Anyone who has become a fan more recently will think that a Superman/Batman relationship is a requirement.

After becoming obsessed, I finally got around to reading the Death and Return story from the 90s. Here I was introduced to still more great cast members and I loved it. But then the DC heroes came along. The collection I was reading included some Green Lantern issues, relevant to the overall plot, but with a focus on Lantern and his stories. I actively did not care about Green Lantern’s stories and had to slog through wishing we could get back to the people I actually wanted to read about. And that’s the exact problem I still have to this day. Any time I’m reading a Superman story and Batman or someone shows up, all I can think about is how many pages I have to flip through that could have been used for Lois or Jimmy. Imagine if every time someone was watching Game of Thrones (or whatever else is popular and people watch these days), they had to sit through fifteen minutes of each episode watching the cast of CSI: Miami or whatever. It’d be amusing once or twice, but every episode? Nobody wants that.

But even beyond DC’s other characters eating up precious page-space, the DC Universe is constantly exerting itself on the stories. For those who are lucky enough to not know, DC has had, for decades, a problem with wanting to maintain a continuity of all the stories that have ever come before, but also want to reboot and change things to constantly keep them fresh. They frequently come up with vast cosmic plotlines to explain why things have changed. So, instead of getting stories about Superman Supermanning, we get endless plots that do nothing but explain the latest status quo that last almost until the next big event changes things again. It’s like if Game of Thrones dropped all their plots for a season to explain how CSI: Miami characters came to be in their world, then the next season did a story arc about why the CSI: Miami characters weren’t around anymore. And so on. I might be rambling.

Unfortunately, Superman’s stories these days have no room for even the basic cast of Lois, Jimmy, and Perry, let alone the rich beyond them (whom I hope to cover in future weeks). The only way I can see to improve this is to cut out the characters who already have their own books and, presumably, their own overlooked supporting casts.

*This would, unfortunately, not be so radical as it sounds because I have no interest in any romantic relationship for Superman except that with Lois Lane. It’d be an informed attribute at best. But that’s a topic for another day.