Superman loses all sense of right and wrong
(JIMMY OLSEN# 135, January 1971)
Honestly! When Jimmy Olsen of all people brings up questions of ethics and morality, Superman should be ashamed of himself. And the way he just dismisses Jimmy's concern makes matters worse.The background here is that Kirby was increasingly unhappy toward the end of his time at Marvel and grew reluctant to just keep giving them one new character after another (most of which are still in heavy use today). So when he jumped to DC in 1970, he opened the floodgates and just poured out one character and concept after another (again, most of them saw a lot of use by DC over the decades... how many stories has Darkseid been in?). Kirby took over JIMMY OLSEN, a lackluster title at best, and immediately revitalized it. I personally think editors like Carmine infantino sabotaged Kirby in many ways,including having Murphy Anderson redraw the heads of Superman and Olsen in an attempt to keep the house style consistent but which just jarred. They wanted Kirby because he had made Marvel successful, but he was too wild and raw for stodgy old DC.
But this storyline involved a top-secret government project which had unlocked the secrets of DNA (a new hot buzzword in 1970) and gone nuts over cloning. The project grew its own staff, all clones. I found this nightmarish and still do. These clones of the Newboy Legion and Jimmy Olsen aren't organic robots or anything, they are living human beings with presumably free will. Do any of them ever decide they don't want to spend their lives slaving away in a secret facility? Do any want to escape, see the world, get lives of their own? Maybe even blow the whistle and expose the project to world attention? This vision of workers being bred and used without any choice unsettles me.
And Superman doesn't seem to have any problem with this. If this was a Mad Science scheme by Luthor or Brainiac, you can bet he would smash it and free the clones, liberating them from serfdom. But because it has the authorities behind it, it all seems fine. And why doesn't Jimmy Olsen blow up when he discovers his own cells were taken without his knowledge (and therefore stolen) in order to breed dozens or hundreds of clone Jimmies? You'd think he'd explode with outrage. But he just goes, "Huh, well that's interesting." And has Superman lost all sense of prudent judgement? He allows his own cells to experimented on... that's like passing out nuclear bombs to children.
I think Jack Kirby got so caught up in the excitement of his concepts that he didn't give them enough thought, and overlooked how people would actually react to the situation.
statistics: Posted by doctorhermes428 — 6:26 PM - 1 day ago — Replies 2 — Views 362