Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen #148--"Monarch of All He Subdues!"

YOU KNOW WHAT I WOULD HAVE DONE WITH A FLYING SAUCER? LEFT THE DAMN VOLCANO SOONER.

You know, referring to a villain as “Monarch Of All He Subdues” sounds impressive until you think about it. Of course you can be monarch of stuff if you subdue it. But what if you can’t subdue anything?

Speaking of which, Superman being defeated by a cage? Lame. Almost as lame as expecting us to believe that Superman is going to face a challenge in the form of stone walls that crunched together, as he did last issue. Gee, do you think the monumentally powerful Man of Steel is going to escape?

Sure enough, he busts loose and frees Jimmy and the Newsboys within moments. No sooner has that happened than Victor Volcanum appears on the classic viewscreen to harangue the group. No supervillain’s lair is complete without one!

Volcanum is gearing up for his single-handed conquest of Earth, alluded to last issue, by changing into some Napoleonic military duds and filling them all in on his backstory. It seems he was a daring scientist and balloonist a hundred and ten years ago and crashed in this volcano while attempting an Atlantic crossing. Trapped in a burning underworld with nothing to eat, Volcanum used his scientific knowledge to extract nourishment from the volcano in the form of that flaming liquid he drinks. Hey, it’s the world’s first energy drink! And it works really well, having made him immortal, plus causing him to grow several feet over the last century.

But wait—when Jimmy and Co. first awoke last issue, Volcanum was offering them dinner. If he hasn’t left the volcano since the 19th century, where did he get that food from?

My gosh! I’ve found the tiny plot hole in this otherwise immaculately logical and plausible scenario!

Anyway, Dr. Volcanum also figured out how to build an army of robot slaves, because why the hell not? And since then he’s lived in luxury, growing slowly more isolated and paranoid, until Jimmy happened to drop in on the very day he had planned to emerge to conquer the world. Good timing, that.

On that note, Volcanum signs off and sends his robots to crush the lot of them, and again, I’m having a hard time seeing how these guys present a huge difficulty to Superman, a guy who can pretty much bench-press an asteroid. Sure enough, they go down even more easily than expected, due partly to their rather moronic decision to line up neatly s that Superman can bean them all with a single rock:



Continuing down the passageway, they face a gigantic, flaming gout of lava which presents a more believable challenge for Superman, who’s forced to rapidly gouge a fissure in the rock to divert the flow of lava. Nonetheless, it comes WAY too close to the Legion. (As movie, comic book, and video game makers don’t seem to understand, lava is melted rock, which means it’s very, very hot. Like, so hot that even standing near it would produce enough heat to fry the skin off your face. If you can see a lava flow, and you’re not in a helicopter, you’re standing way too close.)

While Superman is distracted, Jimmy and the gang encounter an unusually chatty robot, Boxxa, who feels the need to explain that he was programmed for “bouts” to amuse his master, but is currently on guard duty, before attacking. Jimmy, despite being way outmatched, puts up a heroic, desperate fight, which loses something due to the fact that he’s still wearing the dorky green robe Volcanum dressed him in, which looks more than a little like a dress. (I guess a man gets very, very lonely after spending a hundred years in a remote volcano.)



Jimmy luckily manages to put down the mechanical pugilist, by finding the button to deactivate him—which is, natch, located right on the front of his collarbone just below the neck. In other words, in about the most vulnerable spot. Good job, Dr. Volcanum.

Possibly because all these laughable threats are making them cocky, Superman and friends proceed into a tunnel, in which they’re hit by a “brain blocker” that renders them unconscious. Dr. Volcanum then packs up his flying gondola with enough fire-water to keep him going for a while, and abandons his home to greener pastures.

A mere two pages later, Jimmy has jerked himself awake to find himself in Dr. Volcanum’s inner sanctum, where Superman is already awake and tinkering with things. We see that the Doctor has yet another villainous staple ready to hand—the miniaturized model city, with accompanying model of his devastating doom weapon, which he can use to enact the destruction that he’s never going to be able to cause in real life. Sure enough, it turns out the little model gondola has a functioning hyper-sonic projector (!) that reduces the city to rubble, helpfully cluing Superman and Jimmy in on his evil plan. (So…that model was built to be used once and then self-destruct, and Dr. Volcanum never actually bothered to use it?)

Rounding the corner, Superman and Jimmy are reunited with the Newsboys, the Whiz Wagon, and Angry Charlie, who appears here in his final panel, ignominiously strapped to the Wagon’s hull once more. The whole group takes off and escapes seconds ahead of a vast explosion—not eruption, explosion—that destroys the entire volcanic island.

As the Doc approaches Metropolis, he’s engaged in a dogfight by Jimmy and the Whiz Wagon gang. Despite the fact that his “hyper-spinner” weapon is located on the bottom of his gondola, is not articulated, and seems like it would be a real bitch to aim at a moving target, V.V. somehow manages to get the drop on the Wagon and nearly get shaken to pieces until Superman saves them. Continuing with the whole recurring theme of “threats that Superman is able to deal with ridiculously quickly by virtue of the fact that he’s Superman”, this is accomplished in two panels by Supes smashing his way onto the bridge and ripping out the weaponry circuits. Superman then makes his plea to the Doc:



Wow, along with everything else, Dr. Volanum invented Objectivism back in the 1800s? No wonder he went evil.

Realizing that he’s only got a page left in the issue in which to indulge his fetish for destroying his own equipment, Volcanum hits the self-destruct button. We get the obligatory sanctimoniousness from the hero (“And so ends Volcanum’s madness!”) before the issue wraps up abruptly with the whole gang literally flying off into the sunset, and back to Metropolis:’



And…that’s it. Yep, that was the final issue of Jimmy Olsen, not just for Kirby, but for all time, as DC, feeling the beginnings of the downturn that hit comics in general and their company in particular during the 70s, cancelled the book. Unless I’m greatly mistaken, they’ve never resurrected it, either. Jimmy Olsen is one of those concepts that belongs unqualifiedly to the Silver Age, which was just ending at the very moment Kirby was producing this comic. Could Kirby’s touch have brought Jimmy Olsen into the modern era, had he been given the leeway he needed? It’s hard to say, but he gave it a good shot anyway.