Kirb Your Enthusiasm (17)

By: Mark Newgarden
March 3, 2011

Seventeenth in a series of posts, each one analyzing a single panel from a Jack Kirby-drawn comic book.

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kirby-jimmy-550 — Click on image for larger size. Click on that image to zoom in.

James Finlayson??

I recently revisited a couple of issues of Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen “edited, written and drawn by Jack Kirby” that I first (and last) read in 1971, at the age of 12. I’m not sure how important that is for you to know, but I just don’t quite know how else to talk about Kirby except as an ex-adolescent.

As I dimly recalled, the story involves Jimmy Olsen and The Newsboy Legion on assignment in Scotland. As I failed to recall “The New” Jimmy Olsen‘s boy reporter testicles appear to have finally descended, here he is all muscles, sideburns and square-jawed swagger. And those “newsboys” bear a passing resemblance to the haggard old men of abbreviated stature who dispensed news (and comic books) at the Staten Island ferry terminal of my youth.

Amid the many predictable panels of giant monsters, inky explosions and fantasy chrome (all awash in an embarrassingly studied grooviness) what I remembered most naggingly and accurately remains as ineffable to me now as it was on first encounter.

Ex-Keystone Kop James Finlayson (1887-1953) is best remembered as a recurring recipient of Laurel and Hardy’s negative attention — and best forgotten for bequeathing Homer Simpson (and the world) his sputtering trademark: “D’Ohhh!”.

Though I gathered that Jack Kirby was no hippy I well understood why the psychedelia was being juiced in these comic books. Kids invariably discern when they are being marketed to. And the monsters and explosions just seemed to go with the territory. But Finlayson? This was the kind of historical figure my personal perverse 12-year-old radar was keenly tuned toward but he was certainly no marketing strategy in 1971, nor in his lifetime, nor today. And in my compartmentalized worldview Finlayson had about as little to do with Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen as Vegas insult comic Don Rickles (whose leering headshot had graced the cover a few issues previously). But evidently not to Jack Kirby.

I was consuming numerous superhero comic books around this time and badly wanting to like (or simply understand) any of them. That was sadly never to be. However those “Kirby is Back!” titles that DC hawked in the early 1970s were easily more tantalizing than the rest — if ultimately more inaccessible. Aside from trying to figure out why everything kept exploding, what all those shiny machines were actually supposed to do and why the word “doom” appeared on nearly every page I had encounters like this — from Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #144 (December 1971) — to contend with.

Here is our face-to-face with the assassin MacFinney who has just been grazed by the protagonist’s “Whiz Wagon.” The exasperated one-eyed grimace was the comedian’s squinty signature turn and seems to be the only expression that the cartoonist possessed reference material for — it is used again and again throughout the story until the villain is eventually offed by a Loch monster from central casting.

I still don’t quite understand what Kirby was up to by recontextualizing beloved comedians as comic book bad guys. I know these cameos weren’t funny and I know they weren’t exactly serious either. And as far as I know this was the end of the line for that particular gambit of his. But whatever his motivation (or lack thereof) Jack Kirby, the absurdist, got me this time: this panel stopped me dead in my tracks with a “D’Ohhh!” moment that has been lodged in my memory for 40 years.

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ALSO ON HILOBROW: Joe Alterio’s Cablegate Comix | HiLobrow posts about comics and cartoonists | HiLobrow posts about science fiction | The New Gods generation

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Kirb Your Enthusiasm (17)

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