Superman: The Amazing Transformations of Jimmy Olsen
In the 1950s and 1960s, the popularity of Superman was so massive that even peripheral cast members received their own titles. To ratchet up the Man of Steel's cub reporter pal Jimmy Olsen's appeal to young readers, writers frequently made Jimmy the victim of bizarre transformations that turned him into a King Kong–size turtle-man, a six-armed human octopus, a werewolf, a wish-granting genie, a giant-brained man of the future, or a human porcupine. Many metamorphoses were the outcomes of experiments by dotty scientist Professor Potter; others resulted from magic potions, interplanetary technology, and that old standby of fifties horror flicks, radiation. The best of the 17 stories collected here were drawn by Curt Swan, whose artistic approach defined the look of Superman in the 1960s and 1970s. Today's younger readers, accustomed to more polished fare, are likely to find Jimmy's travails formulaic and fatuous. Boomers who remember them fondly, however, might get bigger kicks rereading them with a knowing eye than they did the first time around. Flagg, Gordon