Matt Fraction, American Fiction, and Jimmy Olsen! (Pt. 2 of 2)

Editor’s Note: In Part 1 of this series, Ritesh explored Matt Fraction, Steve Lieber and team’s DC Comics series Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen, which led to an exploration of Fraction’s “American Fiction” trilogy released over the last few years. Today, the journey concludes with Adventureman, the Pulps, and circling back to the comedy of Jimmy Olsen! 

Adventureman and The Pulps

These pulp narratives always cherry-pick and paint a deeply caricatured and racist vision of so much that they engage with, and claim to ‘explore’ or ‘excavate’, as the white-man hero of the imperial nation of white people is applauded for his ingenuity. It’s a narrative you see repeatedly, from Doctor Strange (who prior to Lee naming him Stephen Strange was arguably coded Asian) to Iron Fist. The white-savior who engages with the ‘other’ culture is everywhere.

And the thing about Indiana Jones? It’s a film that casts an actual Indian actor of note. It’s got Amrish Puri, a man who I grew up watching in almost every classical Indian film my dad showed me as the bad guy.

The man was the go-to villain performer, and perhaps his most iconic performance was in what I can only describe as a sort of pulpy Indian superhero film: Mr. India (1987), wherein the lead character gets an Invisibility Watch from his Super-Scientist dad who’s passed away, and uses it to fight the terror of General Mogambo (played by Puri) who wants to CONQUER INDIA!

So the idea of this man showing up in a big Spielberg/Lucas Hollywood blockbuster as the villain against Harrison Ford? That’s exciting. And on some level, it still is. But alas, he plays a racist mess of a character, performing bizarre human sacrifice rituals. It’s a wholly depressing enterprise, when all is said and done.

But the other key thing about Indiana Jones? It is deeply influenced by the American pulp magazines and heroes, as well as two primary sources of pulp narratives: Tintin and Duck Comics.

Tintin, Duck Comics, & Indiana Jones

Tintin isn’t American, of course, but it is very much in the pulp space, and also has its own fair share of racist history, given its by a white man writing a white lead, from roots in right-wing papers to being produced during the Nazi occupation of Belgium. But nevertheless, it got absorbed and taken from, alongside the classic Duck Comics, which also feature tons of pulpy adventure and exploration.

From straight-up awful blackface to tons of racial caricatures, with black people as cannibalistic monsters to every other offensive and stupid thing you can imagine, it’s all there. The imagery should pop up easily enough with a single google-search, if you wish to see it, as I don’t want to re-post it here and risk hurting any POC reading this any further. Suffice to say, neither Indiana Jones, nor its influences are clean. And while Tintin isn’t American, Duck Comics are, and specifically their key character (beyond Donald), Uncle Scrooge is nothing if not American.

The archetypes all came from the world of the pulps, which encoded so much of modern superhero DNA. Even the best of them, though, can read as colonial, imperialistic, racist, sexist, and radiating a general kind of ignorance to modern eyes. So, we wanted to strip all that away, and create a cast of good guys — and bad — that looked like [they] came from the world we live in, while acknowledging how exclusionary the past material has been, to the point of calling the book “Adventureman” but having Claire, a woman, as the main character. Where his story ends, hers begins.” – Matt Fraction

It should be noted that Claire Connell, our lead, beyond what the team describes here, is also a disabled woman. The kind of character who’d be mocked or joked about or ridiculed and treated as a side-show in narratives like these. But here, she’s front and center, and her deafness isn’t treated poorly, as should be expected given Fraction’s history, portraying Clint’s deafness well in the likes of Hawkeye. Although, it also ought to be remembered that Adventureman is a project that precedes Hawkeye, and these two books come out alongside, as it’s been in slow development hell for a decade now, with Fraction only getting to it now.

Beyond Claire herself, the work is about her large family, a crew of adopted sisters from a plethora of backgrounds, to showcase racial and cultural diversity. A true family of adventurers who celebrate their rich backgrounds, who do not get ‘exoticized’ or ‘other-ed’ and are all kin.

I want to love Claire Connell, our lead, and The Connell Family, but I walk away with a sense of apathy, which I know shouldn’t! I want to love these people. But there is this weird detachment so far, as the work is so preoccupied with showing off its high-concept, dumping exposition and moving the pieces on its chess-board, maneuvering to get to a place in the plot where it actually wants to be, that I’m not getting anything meaningful out of it, despite the oversized issue format.

In a sense, a way I would describe this book, albeit reductively, is as Matt Fraction’s Tom Strong. It’s his ABC era work. It’s him tackling that fundamental root of American hero fiction, and contemporizing it and trying to de-problematize it, to the best of their ability. Which brings me to the other problem I have with the book. It strikes me as…deeply white. Yes, it’s got a potential cast of diverse WOC from varied cultural backgrounds. But they’re all on the side, as the work is squarely focused on the white mom and her son for the most part, and Fraction does his best to portray a large cast in a multicultural household, but…there’s a number of moments wherein as a POC, you’re reading the work and it’s unmistakable that a white person wrote this, regardless of how much potential consultation they may have done.

The Diwali mentioned here (if you’re unaware, it’s the Indian festival of lights), for instance, feels like a very tryhard attempt to shoehorn in a reference in a way that feels like ‘I know that thing!’ And my response when I read it is ‘Who says that?!’ which is to say, it’s technically not a wrong thing to say, but it reads more as the distant reference a white person would make than any brown person I know would. Which isn’t to say no one would or that I’m entirely right, because it’s just my perspective and experience, and we’re not a monolith and this might land entirely for someone else. But for me, it kind of rings hollow. Well-intentioned, but hollow, as I can spot lived-in vs read-up-on. And that last line more or less sums up my thoughts and relationship with the work.

Even plotting wise, it feels like a chaotic mess that lacks the finesse of Jimmy Olsen and November, and reads to me as though Fraction, a writer I quite love, is lost in the weeds. He and his collaborators are having a great deal of fun, clearly, as the Dodsons color their own work for once here, and establish a distinct look and palette for the work here, as letterer extraordinaire Clayton Cowles, who also does Jimmy Olsen, gets to try out and riff on lettering and fonts that evoke the pulp novels and magazines, and test out different tricks. But it’s not really meshing and coming together for me the way I’d like and hope, despite my interest in the team and subject matter, and my desire to enjoy the work.

Of this whole trilogy of sorts, this entire phase of trying to wrestle with popular American forms, this strikes me as the weakest entry.

Comedy is structured. It’s a fundamentally strong grasp of set-up, build-up, and pay-off. The punchline has to come, and it has to land or you’re left with nothing. Comedy is also about rhythm, from the delivery of the ideas and beats, the tone and speed, the joke has to be paced just right, never too long, never too short. You’ve also got to be able to deliver a lot, and do so consistently.

All of this is why Jimmy Olsen being what it is doesn’t surprise me. Earlier, I quoted Fraction saying November is the most formal thing he’s ever done. I agreed with the sentiment there, saying I could certainly see that. But allow me to disagree, for Matt Fraction is a liar. I am here to tell you he is wrong, folks! Dead wrong! Well, he’s right of course, but still, wrong, I say!

November is certainly an incredibly difficult and tricky formal effort, from all the composition, having to work within the strict rule-set and parameters and be fresh, from the angles of the shots chosen to making the whole disparate entity of chaos work as a cohesive larger unit of meaning. But I’m here to tell you I think Jimmy Olsen’s better. It’s the bigger, more bombastic, utterly insane effort that succeeds big time in a way November has yet to for me.

Jimmy Olsen’s a book that’s fundamentally a part of this trilogy and phase of books because it is entirely in conversation with its history. Its approach of doing the entire work as these short-stories, these vignettes, and shifting constantly to another story is a hallmark of classic DC Comics, especially from the 1950s, under Mort Weisinger. But even beyond that, they were the crucial format of a book like Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen. Each tended to have a different writer, as various folks tried their hand at Jimmy stories. And these were all separate things, making Jimmy an anthology book. And it should be noted, these Mort Weisinger era Jimmy Olsen comics…weren’t terribly good. There’s a sort of glazed look at this era, as Silver Age Nostalgia is a big thing, but they’re just plainly poor comics more often than not.

And contrary to most beliefs, ‘silly’, ‘weird’ and ‘ridiculous’ inherently don’t make a story better or good any more than ‘dark’ ‘realistic’ ‘normal’ make a story inherently good. They’re choices that either serve a story being told or don’t, not quality definers. And amidst all of those stories, there’s a lot of problematic stuff that just wouldn’t fly and work now. Lest we forget, Mort Weisinger was a child-hating, kid-abusing, wife-beating nightmare and he had control over this stuff. The man was a horror show, and there is absolutely a bizarre veneer to Jimmy during the period Weisinger was in charge. If you’ve ever seen those covers full of Superman being a dick, or read the stories of him being an even worse manipulative asshole, and witnessed all the deeply misogynistic stuff, you know these superhero comics had…a lot of problems that needed to be dealt with. These were comics made for a specific era, and they’re quite dated, with a litany of issues.

But…and this is the big question, like with November and Noirs or Adventureman and Pulps: Can we modernize it and make it work? Can we take that format, take hallmarks of that ’50s era storytelling, and do something with it, really do something with it?!
So you get this, those big wide boxes of overbearing captions, full of so many fonts and typefaces, evoking the old. But wherein those comics used those straight-faced, here the usage becomes much more ironic, much more winking. There’s a sort of…performative quality to them here. Like a loud announcer making a big scene, and it’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek and fun, and not in a ‘This is dumb!’ way but ‘Let’s revel in this!’. There’s zero shame, only a sincerity to seeing it through. Captions like this are, after all, the comic equivalent of a voice-over, and this sort of really works especially in the context of Jimmy, when you remember his roots as a Radio star. That’s where he began! So those loud, bold proclamations and announcements? Yeah, that works. That makes sense.

But what also makes sense is the way the short-vignettes approach works in contrast to many other comics.

The monthly comic, the standard 20-22 page comic is the serialized format of comics. It’s the TV, while OGNs are the big Movies. Now TV? It comes in two variants, from the 40/45-minute to an hour long episode to the 20-30 half hour episode. There are larger variations, as streaming has opened up options even more, and there’s odd exceptions like BBC’s Sherlock or FX’s Fargo (and to say nothing of the already-dead-Quibi), but that’s predominantly the basic format.

The standard is the ‘serious’ shows, usually, the dramas, if you will, run with the hour-long format, give or take, while sitcoms and comedy-focused works within that sitcom space run up to a half hour long. This isn’t as much of the norm as it once was, as you’re getting the likes of The Mandalorian now, which is a big pulpy action adventure drama that runs half an hour, but it’s still useful to keep in mind.

What Jimmy Olsen’s done, by structuring itself against one ‘full’ 20/22 page unit book like most, while placing emphasis on comedy, is basically morph into a sitcom format. You’re not getting ‘one’ thing like a one hour drama. Within that hour, you’re getting 3 separate sitcom episodes, as you can fit multiples of those 20-minute lads into a 60 minute slot. Jimmy Olsen is the length of that standard dramatic book, but is laid out like one chunky comedy for you to enjoy. And that makes sense, too, when you consider the history.

Jimmy Olsen is a work firmly about ’50s retro elements, and how you take them and make them work for the now. And the sitcom? The sitcom was born in the 1950s. But even more vitally, some of the earliest sitcoms, such as Amos ‘n’ Andy were direct adaptations of sketch-comedies from the radio! You guessed it, it all begins in radio-land! But the thing was, these sketch comedies required constant shifting sets and new things (akin to what you see in Jimmy Olsen), so the alternative of having one consistent set, which could be re-used and situations built around it was designed, giving birth to the idea of the situational-comedy as we know it. It’s then that you had iconic shows such as I Love Lucy come along, changing Television as a whole and how it got made.

So that’s an aspect I do quite adore here, but it goes even deeper, as the book evokes another iconic touchstones of the 1950s, and particularly both ’50s comedy and ’50s cartooning: Peanuts.

That said, I think that descriptor undersells what Jimmy Olsen is actually doing. It’s like describing All-Star Superman as ‘Neo-Retro Pastiche’ (and yes, Jimmy is a book worthy of earning comparison to All-Star) which would be deeply wrong and would ultimately be missing the point of it. This is a fiercely modern book. As I said in my opening statement: This is the defining superhero text of the 2010s. Let’s dig into that fully.

Despite its evocation of ’50s comics, whether it be its own relics in Weisinger stuff or Peanuts, notice what the work is actually doing:

This is very much a Neo-Retro Pastiche, at least for my money, as the homage and contrasting style shift is in and of itself the point. It’s the big statement. The conversation and interaction with the past, with the explicit acknowledgement and self-awareness, that’s the key. It’s a bit of a ‘Get it? Get it? Remember this?’ reference game, to some extent. It’s like Where’s Waldo of influence and style spotting. The work expects you to recognize all these things, because that is fundamentally the point, that’s the entire bit/joke.

And that’s not necessarily bad, and I’m not calling Dial H backwards or what have you, as I really dug the book, but what Jimmy Olsen’s doing is a bit different. It’s not the reference or allusion game, it’s not ‘Hey get this/remember this?’, there’s very little expectation for you to get that, because that’s simply not what the work is interested in. It’s the difference between Supreme and Promethea or Doc Brass (Planetary) and Tom Strong. It’s not about the old thing as much as something totally new and different. It’s not hoping you know or have read a bunch of old Weisinger Jimmy comics or are a Peanuts diehard.

Lieber’s evocation of Peanuts has more to do with the very style being something so ingrained in the cultural consciousness that when you look upon it, it instantly evokes the sense of an imagined past. A youth that may have been but is so far off and distant, this is the only real way to capture how it felt. Silly, small, petty, frustrating, angry, funny and deeply dumb. And you needn’t have the cultural touchstones to get the feeling that the bits are evoking. It’s the feeling of youth. It’s broader and bigger than the insular games of ‘get it?’.

Both are very much a clear display of modern comics evolving to acknowledge and fit into a Post-Social Media landscape full of memes. And what are memes if not a mixture of text and imagery? Is that not the fundamental basis of comics? So, in a realm where Webcomics exist, and are what they are, where memes run wild all day, the form needs to adapt, and few display what that looks like better than these two.

We live in a world of Webtoon, wherein the biggest comics publishers are not Marvel or DC, but this eastern company that is a platform for vertical-scrolling comics. We live in a world of Lore Olympus, a world with Property Of Hate and Check, Please! and those works have HUGE appeal. Check, Please! in particular has a massive audience, and these works have a readership between the traditional direct-market base that really digs superheroes. Their tastes are different, they like manga, they don’t want the same stuff a lot of the old guard readers want, and it needs acknowledging.

There’s an embrace of a certain kind of ridiculous, the kind a culture that shares around memes is going to adore and enjoy, and this isn’t a negative in the slightest, the way some might think. It’s just making mainstream comics that feel true to the modern moments we’re in. Whether it be boasting images in word-balloons like Emojis, or straight up using the IMPACT font, the go-to font for memes, the book doesn’t hide what it’s doing.

Which brings us to the biggest, and grandest reason I think Jimmy Olsen works: It’s about what living in a modern world is like. It’s about what an insane, mad, loony world feels like. It’s not Seinfeld in terms of comedic comparisons, but closer to The Good Place, in terms of approach and relevance. A world where anything happens, things don’t always get explained, and everyday is a hurricane of events. There’s a wonder to it, sure, but also, there’s this:

For all the laughs and comedy (and the above is absolutely a comedic moment), there is a weight, a gravity, as Fraction put it, to the entire affair, as dark, disturbing, and painful revelations spill, as Pepe Silvia-esque boards are constructed to make sense of nonsense. It feels like a book relevant to the audience reading it, in its own bizarrely kaleidoscopic way, set in a superhero universe.

And at the heart of all of that is Jimmy Olsen, poor Jimmy Olsen. He’s been so, so many things, and the book never tries to negate any of it, if anything, it adds to it, and tries to include as many versions of it as possible. It Grant Morrison Batmans/Hypertimes Jimmy Olsen, and then wrestles with the emotional weight of one man who has to be all of these things and has been all of these things.

There’s the idea that maybe Jimmy Olsen is all the things he is, all of these roles, because he’s running from who he is, that he doesn’t want to be…just him. And what that is, and means, and how people feel about him, all spills out in a story that is equal parts funny and meaningful, full of levity and value, with as much ur-importance as any Watchmen text will grant you.

Jimmy Olsen isn’t about the grand-plots to save the world (Although-world saving is involved, with references to Superman vs Muhammad Ali. Yeah, that’s the kind of comic this is), because no matter how many times you think you’ve ‘saved’ the world, it’s gonna need ‘saving’ in the next 5 minutes. Jimmy Olsen is about the little things, the little moments, small nuggets and vignettes that make us who we are. All the little memories, the tiny sensation you recall vividly, that one interaction you’ll never forget, it’s all these little things that make one person, used as a way to express a character study. Jimmy Olsen may not be the biggest guy (when he’s not the size of King Kong in Gorilla City), but he is a complex well as large as the universe itself, on the inside. That’s what the entire team has consistently spent all this time expressing. Jimmy Olsen holds a whole world unto himself.

That pretty much all these little vignettes and tiny moments tie together is what makes this book. It’s dense, it’s rich, and as formally bold as anything DC’s put out in the last decade. I disagreed with Fraction’s take that November was his formal enterprise because this book manages to weave together every possible nugget of detail, every lost thread, from dimensions across, beyond time and make a cohesive narrative structure, this amazing mega-monument that one can only gaze upon with awe. November is one day, and Adventureman is a few days, but Jimmy Olsen is everyday.

And more than anything, Jimmy Olsen is a book that delivers on the desire and wish of comics like Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt (2019), which asked that superhero comics should break past any and all assumptions of the ‘formal’ texts of the past, ala Watchmen and its ilk, that they should be completely different, truly new. Things the likes of which we have never seen, things with form in totally new ways, while building on the past, by drawing on ignored, forgotten influences. The paths not explored, the roads not taken, the possibilities uncharted.

Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen is a firmly Post-Peter Cannon text that you could sit down and dissect for all time, it’s the biggest success of Fraction’s current phase and obsession with firmly American Fictions, and it is, for my money, the finest thing he has ever crafted, and been part of crafting, alongside his excellent collaborative team of Lieber, the comedic genius, Fairbairn, without whom the book just wouldn’t work, and Cowles, the letterer man who hammers away to make Fraction’s ideas work visually, fitting Lieber and Fairbairn’s vision.

It’s a comic about what’s possible when you stop trying to just repeat the past and reach for the new. It’s a comic about The Most Interesting Man In The DC Universe, asking all others, by the virtue of its very existence, to be as bold, fresh, and interesting.