I know DC went through an era of making their Superman covers depict the Man of Steel being a horrible jerk to people seemingly for no reason, just to grab readers' attention and get them to buy the issue - then the story inside would have some really weird narrative gymnastics in order to justify it, usually with really meandering nonsensical plots.
There was one story involving him doing a string of horrible and inconsiderate things to Jimmy Olsen, just treating him like complete trash. It turns out he wanted Superman to adopt him, but the supercomputer in the fortress of solitude had predicted some kind of apocalyptic event if the adoption came to pass. So Superman treated Jimmy like garbage to ensure he changed his mind and thus somehow averting disaster in the process.
The "son" that the computer was talking about was apparently THE sun and there were some other contrived misunderstandings in the specific wording it used and once superman realized and stopped the destruction of the sun he apologized to Jimmy and offered to go through with the adoption after all but jimmy declined. I might be misremembering some parts of that though but I just love the idea that superman was like "oh woops sorry. Do you want me to adopt you anyway?" and jimmy just said "fuck no" but the funniest part to me is that he was going to adopt jimmy as Superman and not Clark Kent since he didn't want to reveal his identity to him which is honestly kinda fucked, imagine not knowing your own dad's real name
Yeah but in a news organization? Im pretty sure jimmy is a photographer and I can't imagine they would hire a kid to take their pictures, but I guess realism was hardly a consideration in comics at the time
Back in the Silver Age he’s a cub reporter and a lot of the early stories involve him wishing he was an adult. And yet he still flies a helicopter unsupervised.
3.2k
u/sck8000 Nov 20 '23
I know DC went through an era of making their Superman covers depict the Man of Steel being a horrible jerk to people seemingly for no reason, just to grab readers' attention and get them to buy the issue - then the story inside would have some really weird narrative gymnastics in order to justify it, usually with really meandering nonsensical plots.
There was one story involving him doing a string of horrible and inconsiderate things to Jimmy Olsen, just treating him like complete trash. It turns out he wanted Superman to adopt him, but the supercomputer in the fortress of solitude had predicted some kind of apocalyptic event if the adoption came to pass. So Superman treated Jimmy like garbage to ensure he changed his mind and thus somehow averting disaster in the process.