Superman’s pal may have been mystified about how he became a Wolf Man (Jimmy Olsen 44, April 1960), but I knew why.
Beginning in 1957, a package of Universal monster movies from the 1930s and 1940s was sold to television. By the end of the year, the films could be seen on 78 TV stations across the country, and by the next year, they had their own magazine — Famous Monsters of Filmland.
So the tragic old menaces became familiar to a new young audience, who found themselves also loving what their parents had loved.
What puzzles me, though, is how DC Comics got this past the Comics Code, which explicitly stated that “Scenes dealing with, or instruments associated with, walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolf-ism are prohibited.”
“The Code overseers probably considered Jimmy Olsen a humor comic, so let it pass,” David Blanchard speculated. “Sort of like how Harvey got by with a lineup of walking dead, spawns of Satan and witches.”
“DC even included humorous monsters in Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis in the ’60s too,” Bob Bailey noted. “Many of those 78 TV stations you mentioned were running Shock Theater or one of its generic imitators such as Creature Feature. That and Famous Monsters of Filmland and Aurora Monster Models made it a real monstrous time. Heck, even Archie began featuring monsters on many of their covers, although in a humorous way.”
“As to how DC got this through the Code, let me take you way back to my weekly exchange of notes as a kid with (DC editor) Julius Schwartz,” Michael Uslan recalled. “Starting with the Showcase Dr. Fate and Hourman through Brave & Bold’s Starman and Black Canary, I inundated Julie with annoying requests for a revival of the Spectre. Finally fed up with my persistence, he sent me a memo stating, ‘Enough! The Spectre can never be brought back because the Comics Code Authority specifically bans the walking dead.’ I wrote Julie back yet again: ‘Then what about Casper the Friendly Ghost?’ I received no response for about three weeks, then got a ‘Memo from Julius Schwartz’ that read, “You’ll be happy to learn that the Spectre will return along with Dr. Mid-Nite in an upcoming issue of Showcase.”
“When that issue finally appeared, Doctor Mid-Nite was nowhere to be seen, and I could not have been happier! I love the smell of Showcase in the morning. It smells like Victory!”
“Of course, looking to your original point, having all those movies released to TV, where anyone could watch them, sort of took the sinister out of them; if kids could see those stories on the tube anytime, there was no reason to censor tales like that,” Lisa Childress noted. “They became routine, thus de-scarified.”
That, too, is a good point and probably affected the Code’s thinking on this. The movies were often on the Late Show, and I could cajole my grandpa into staying up to watch them with me. So naturally I was intrigued when Jimmy Olsen started to resemble Larry Talbot.
“This is one of the most gripping of (writer Otto) Binder’s transformation stories,” observed comics historian Michael E. Grost. “This story recalls Binder’s earlier The Witch of Metropolis (Lois Lane 1, March-April 1958). In both stories, the protagonist undergoes a frightening transformation into a sinister mythological creature. In both stories, the transformation happens only at night, with the hero or heroine reverting to their normal selves during the day.
“There is something about becoming a wolf-man that echoes the real changes boys go through when they grow up and become men,” Grost noted. “When a boy grows up, he becomes large, hairy, and awkward — and his fate now depends on being romantically involved — all elements of Jimmy’s Wolf-Man experience. So most male readers can immediately identify with Jimmy’s transformation. It evokes all sorts of powerful and even frightening real-life emotions.”
The emphasis here though, as in so many Superman stories under editor Mort Weisinger, is really on loneliness and abandonment rather than fright. Jimmy is explicitly required to find ways to “fit in” in this story.
“I often wonder if Weisinger actually knew he had his finger on the pulse of the American youth of the time with all of those stories involving loneliness and abandonment, or if it just reflected his own psychology?” wrote Michael Fraley.
Sales must have been satisfactory, because Wolf Man Jimmy returned a year later in Jimmy Olsen 52 (April 1961).
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