Sunday, July 08, 2007

Jimmy, the Job Stealer

Those FA readers enamored of old superhero comic book stories centering around weight gain (like the Lois Lane misadventure, “The Fattest Girl in Metropolis”) should be pleased to learn that a new trade paperback of Jimmy Olsen stories, The Amazing Transformations of Jimmy Olsen (DC), has just been published. Amongst the many and diverse amazing transformations that Superman’s pal experiences is a sudden fattening in “The Fattest Boy in Metropolis.” Written by Silver Age comic book scribe George Klein and illustrated by Curt Swan, the story describes the young reporter’s travails after he is “mistakenly” given a weight gain formula during a visit to a daffy scientist’s lab. In the most memorable moment (at least from a male FA perspective), Jimmy is spotted by a carnival fat lady who is worried that Olsen has come to replace her fat man husband in the side show. Pretending to be an old girlfriend, she lures him into a diner where she keeps him occupied with an ice cream sundae until she sees the carnie manager driving off. The manager out of the way, she pushes him off his chair, dumping the rest of the sundae on top of his head and shouts, “Get lost, fat stuff!” Waste of a perfectly good ice cream sundae, if ya ask me . . .


(Fat Jimmy Olsen also shows up in a later tale in this collection devoted to a planet comprised entirely of transformed Jimmys; at one point in "The Planet of 1,000 Jimmy Olsens," our hero even impersonates his fat self with cheek pads and an inflato-suit to escape captivity.)

1 Comments:

Blogger Dee Fish said...

Yeesh, it seems that you couldn't go ten feet in the Silver Age without seeing SOMEONE mysteriously fattened. Of course, while the frequency may have changed, but this kind of stuff still peeks it's way into the occasional comic and cartoon.

After a lifetime of noticing these kinds of transformation stories, I've come to the conclusion that there are a LOT of closet FA's out there in the art world looking for loopholes to draw this stuff without "outing" themselves.

6:17 PM  

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