Disguise Kit

"Fifties Superman found himself domesticated at the heart of a strange nuclear family of friends, foes, and relatives. Weisinger had taken his lessons from Captain Marvel and his Family. 

Many of his favorite writers, like Otto Binder and Edmond Hamilton, had contributed to the Captain Marvel mythos and were able to adapt that style to suit a new kind of dream world that was more pointed, angular, and paranoid. This was the nuclear family glowing in the dark. 

No longer the last survivor of a lost alien civilization, Superman was joined by an entire photo album’s worth of new supercompanions. He’d already gained his own superdog, named Krypto, and now discovered that he had a pretty blond cousin named Kara Zor-El, who’d also managed to survive the destruction of Krypton, along with a supermonkey, Beppo. There were stories of Superman as a boy (Superboy) and as a comically superpowered infant (Superbaby). 

Lois Lane was popular enough to graduate to her own monthly comic book. 

So too did Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen.

  The young Olsen had no sooner installed himself within the pages of his own title than he began to experience a series of fantastic physical contortions typical of the Silver Age. A sampling of stories from Olsen’s solo title showed the results as he metamorphosed into a porcupine boy, a giant turtle, a wolfman, Elastic Lad, and a “human skyscraper,” with no pause for reflection. These transformations never produced any lasting ill effects or neuroses.

  So great was the intrusion of the fantastic into the everyday that even Superboy’s small-town sweetheart, red-haired Lana Lang, the hometown girl deluxe, began her own dual career as Insect Lass, using an “alien ring” to reorganize the slim-legged, petite figure of a Kansas homecoming queen into the bulbous abdomen and crawling feelers of a giant wasp or monster moth, with a shapely human torso and head that made it ten times more disturbing. 

Like Jimmy, Lana experienced no body horror or psychological trauma when she inflated her trim teenage stomach into a monstrous spider belly, clacked her chitinous forelegs together, and played out superhard silk from spinnerets where her normal midwestern buttocks should be. 

Had Franz Kafka’s mild-mannered accountant Gregor Samsa been born to the sunshine of the emergent DC universe, he might have pressed his incredible new cockroach powers into action in the fight against crime and injustice. 

Before too long, he would have been invited to join the Justice League. 

Kafka never once paused to consider that his outcasts could be heroic like the X-Men, freakishly glamorous like Jimmy Olsen, or as gorgeous as trendsetting Pulitzer Prize winner Lois Lane.

  When not under alien influence, Jimmy Olsen could barely stand to be himself for more than five pages and maintained a much-resorted-to “disguise kit” in times of emergency. Prefiguring David Bowie or Madonna, his life became a shifting parade of costume changes and reinventions of identity. And long before those two performers were challenging the boundaries of masculine and feminine, Olsen was deconstructing the macho stereotype in a sequence of soft-core gender-blending adventures for children that beggar belief when read today.

  The three unforgettable transvestite Olsen tales, including “Miss Jimmy Olsen,” can be summed up by the following heart-fluttering caption that opens the lead story in Jimmy Olsen no. 95:

  IF YOU EVER WONDERED TO WHAT EXTREME LENGTHS JIMMY OLSEN WOULD GO TO GET A NEWSPAPER SCOOP, WAIT TILL YOU SEE JIMMY IN OPERATION AS A MEMBER OF THE FAIR SEX! YES, READERS. SUPERMAN’S YOUNG PAL UNDERGOES A DRASTIC CHANGE OF IDENTITY AND PUTS HIS HIGH-HEELED FEET INTO A HUGE MESS OF TROUBLE WHEN HE BECOMES THE SWEETHEART OF GANGLAND.

  These words accompany a picture of Jimmy mincing past a mailbox in a green dress while a group of admiring men whoop and check out his ass.

  “HA! HA! THOSE WOLVES WOULD DROP DEAD IF THEY KNEW THAT UNDER THIS FEMALE DISGUISE BEATS THE VERY MASCULINE HEART OF PLANET REPORTER JIMMY OLSEN!” read the smirking, transvestite Olsen’s thought balloon.

  The salacious, winking quality of the phrasing suggested an immaculate deconstruction of the masculine adventure genre into the arena of showbiz, shifting identities, and anything-goes sexuality.

  Jimmy became a mobster’s moll, even joining a chorus line and proving that he could high-kick with the best of the showgirls. Bestiality reared its shaggy head when Jimmy was forced to substitute the lips of a slobbering chimp named Dora for his own during a tense romantic moment in a dimly lit apartment. Believing the mouth of the ape in question to be the fragrant glossy red lips of Jimmy Olsen, racketeer Big Monte McGraw melted into the simian’s lewd embrace while Jimmy made a hasty getaway. The level of derangement was high. These were stories that could never happen in the real world, even if there was a Superman. This was now a world all its own, living inside our own, growing, getting smarter and more elaborate.

  Artist Curt Swan drew the cub reporter as outrageously attractive in his makeup and a red wig. In heels and stockings, Olsen looked like he’d wandered in off a Pussycat Dolls video shoot. And there were a few gloriously disorienting panels where, sans wig, he was seen talking to Superman while still casually dressed in a pink dressing gown, fluffy slippers, and movie star makeup.

  And yet, if it was okay for Olsen, wasn’t it okay? I grew up with this idea of the disguise kit and the performance, the idea of both body and identity as canvas. When I adopted as a role model the shape-shifting, bisexual assassin Jerry Cornelius from Michael Moorcock’s novels, I was following in the footsteps of Jimmy Olsen. Olsen played in bands, and so did I. Olsen was freewheeling and nonjudgmental, even in the fifties, and so was I. If it was cool with Superman’s pal, it was A-OK with me. 

Clearly these stories were written by perverts with an intent to pervert the young. They were entirely successful.

  The transvestite Olsen stories seem deeply rooted in the underground world of mimeographed porn mags and the bondage comics of Eric Stanton, whose studio also employed a certain Joe Shuster, Superman creator. The language used recalls stories like Panty Raid (discussed at length by Robert J. Stoller, M.D., in his 1985 book Observing the Erotic Imagination) and other 1950s transgender tales in which hunky young jocks got more than they bargained for when a trip to the sorority house turned into a forced initiation into the pleasures of female underwear and makeup. 

The difference being that Olsen was fully in control of his transformations and could hardly wait more than a couple of pages to get them under way.”