For most fans of DC Comics and its various media spinoffs, it’s just about superheroes being cool. They want watch Batman skulk from the shadows, Wonder Woman deflect bullets with her bracelets, and Superman lift planets. But there are other DC Comics fans; fans who thrill to the musings of Brother Power the Geek, fans who have a favorite member of the Metal Men, fans who think no Doom Patrol story is complete without Danny the Street. These fans don’t care about the Justice League fighting Darkseid. They just want to see a cub reporter match wits with a telepathic criminal from a hidden city of intelligent gorillas.
And those fans are thrilled right now, because James Gunn and Peter Safran are making a show just for them. We’ve known for a while now that Skyler Gisondo would reprise his role as Jimmy Olsen for a Superman spinoff show about the Daily Planet reporter. And we’ve known that the Flash villain Gorilla Grodd would be involved somehow. But Gunn has taken to Threads to confirm that Grodd and Jimmy would be the co-leads of the series, answering the prayers of DC weirdos everywhere.
The decision might come as a surprise to people who only know Jimmy from various movies and TV shows. The affable guy played by Marc McClure in the Christopher Reeve movies, the handsome cool guy played by Mehcad Brooks in Supergirl, the dude who gets shot in the face in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice—all of these Jimmies were more or less normal guys, who simply had to deal with super stuff going on around them.
However, the excitable nerd played by Ishmel Sahid in My Adventures With Superman comes closer to the character from the comics, a good-hearted dork who throws himself into oddities and his own absurd escapades. In the ongoing series Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen, which ran from 1954 to 1974, the reporter found himself gaining rubber powers, turning into a werewolf, becoming a turtle boy, and marrying a chimpanzee—sometimes on Superman’s orders. Jimmy was even the first to come into contact with the New Gods, discovering Jack Kirby‘s Fourth World via space hippies and cosmic bikers.
Gorilla Grodd, however, has the opposite reputation. Grodd came from the goofiest part of the Silver Age, debuting in 1959’s The Flash #106 by John Broome and Carmine Infantino. A super-intelligent gorilla with psychic powers from a crashed spaceship, Grodd is one of the Flash’s greatest villains. As such, Grodd has often appeared outside of the comics, including a memorable run in Justice League Unlimited and especially a story on Legends of Tomorrow, when he went back in time to kill a young Barack Obama.
If the HBO series treats Jimmy as a more or less normal guy, as he’s been portrayed in most non-comic appearances, then the show will surely fail to realize its potential. But if we get the wacky Jimmy from the comics, if the show can give us something akin to a psychic gorilla killing a future president, then the series will be something special—at least to the DC weirdos who love this crazy stuff.
