Olsen Vs. Superman Week--When the Covers Are Lies

Earlier during Olsen Vs. Superman Week I discussed how, despite being "pals," a healthy percentage of stories turned out to be Jimmy Olsen trying to bring down Superman, or Superman trying to punish Jimmy. These two characters constantly expressed a fair amount of resentment towards each other, and I wondered if maybe this was a very real "other side of the same coin" to the reader identification character Jimmy is.

Sure, every reader wanted to be Superman's pal. But, apparently, a substantial number also felt that one or the other needed to be taken down a peg; either Superman was too perfect or Jimmy too obnoxious. Why else would the editors keep running these stories, and keep making them the cover stories?

In fact, even when the stories involved NO Olsen vs. Superman at all, DC still ran covers portraying the stories as such. That must mean these covers moved issues, right?

Example one: Jimmy Olsen #135, January 1971.


Great cover. But the flipping scene never happens...not even close!!

This was one of the earliest of the Kirby issues, the one that introduced Cadmus, and maybe the editors had no earthly idea how to market such oddness. But the cover is so completely unrepresentative that I had to read it twice to make sure I hadn't missed something. Specifically:

• There is no Jimmy attacking Superman, at all



• The title of the story is the "Evil Factory," but it's not Jimmy's; it's talking about Cadmus



• We do see some miniature-clone type Supermen (along with Olsens and Newsboy Legionnaires), but they're controlled by Darkseid's droogs, and they never attack Superman.
  

In other words, the cover is almost as large a lie as possible while still maintaining some shred of connection to the story. When they don't know how to sell it, the editors default to convincing the public that it's an Olsen Vs. Superman story.

Example two: Jimmy Olsen #109, March 1968.

What the cover bills as a "shockumentary" is really an imaginary story. Sigh. But even worse, the scene the cover depicts doesn't actually happen! It's just a dream that the imaginary Luthor has!! A dream in an imaginary story. This is an extra silly story. Basically, "several years ago," Luthor uses a time viewer to see that Jimmy Olsen will become Superman's pal, and instead he contrives to rescue Jimmy from an accident so Olsen will become Luthor's pal, and help him to unknowingly destroy Superman. This involves hypothetical identical twins, sisters with psychic powers, and both Luthor and Jimmy behaving so stupidly that you hope that this was the first universe consumed in the original Crisis.

But in the story, Jimmy never turns on Superman, never schemes to unmask him, never becomes evil. Luthor just tries to arrange it so Jimmy unknowingly and accidentally kills Kal-El. Only in Luthor's odd three-panel extraneous nightmare does Olsen turn to evil. SO it was an even more imaginary bit in an imaginary story!!

So of course, since those are the panels that are least representative of the story, one of them is chosen for cover glory. Because apparently, kids loved to read about Olsen Vs. Superman.

By the way, they're both great covers, but LIARS!! LIARS!!

Bonus panel: this is only an imaginary story, I know, but what exactly is Lex revealing to us here? Too much information....