Oh Jimmy Olsen, You So Abusive

 

(click to enlarge)

 

Jimmy Olsen is such a wife beater that it wasn't enough for HIM to beat up the poor girl, he even got a boxing kangaroo to take a few rounds out of her. Holy Crap. What kind of freakin' issues were going on at DC Comics when this issue came out? The Kangaroo smacking around a blindfolded girl is just amazing to see in a comic book. I want this comic now just for the sheer bizarreness of it all.

 

I just had to share the commentary that went with these images on the Tumblr. It says all the same things I am thinking upon seeing these panels.

 

Over the weekend, I acquired a couple of Jimmy Olsen comics, including this issue - no.61 - which satisfies Chris Sims’ deepest fantasies by having Jimmy (and, additionally, a kangaroo) beat the holy living spit out of Lois Lane’s sister, his on-again off-again girlfriend and generally awful human being Lucy.

Despite some pretty strong feelings about depictions of violence against women, this whole story - maybe because of the cognitive dissonance of the violence, maybe because Lucy Lane really is just the worst - had me laughing (I should have included the scene where, after suckerpunching a blindfolded Lucy Lane, the kangaroo guiltily escapes via the fire escape, which is … hi, I have written a brand-new sentence, no one has ever written that sentence before). To be fair, I had to show this to my wife and she laughed too, considering how the extent to which they go to get Lucy Lane slapped is insane. “Oh no, the jack-in-the-box with a miniature likeness of me inside has slapped my stewardess girlfriend!” There, I wrote another brand-new sentence.

The only panel I couldn’t quite get over was the introductory panel, above, wherein Superman can’t hardly shackle his amusement as he witnesses a scene of apparent domestic violence between his best pal and his girlfriend’s sister. As always with the chuckling, normative depictions of spousal violence which permeated the cultural media of the time, I can’t help but imagine how additionally helpless and alone so many of the kids who witnessed the real-life equivalents of these scenes in their own homes must have been made to feel. Imagine some poor kid who was witness to terrible violence in his or her own home, but then looked out through the portal of television, film and comics to see the adults just winking at the whole thing like it was just good fun. Poor miserable tykes.

Just thought I’d end on a downer. I don’t think it detracts from Lucy Lane being slugged by a kangaroo one iota.