We’re at Day 11 of the sec­ond annu­al Jack Kir­by Trib­ute Month, start­ing the sec­ond full week of the month. A new week means a new over­all theme: D.N.Aliens (from the DNA Project and the Evil Fac­to­ry in Jim­my Olsen). Today’s prompt is the Giant Jim­my Olsen.

When Jack Kir­by decid­ed it was time to leave Mar­vel for green­er pas­tures and jumped over to DC, it was a Big Deal! Report­ed­ly, Jack was offered his pick of any DC book he want­ed. Jack though was very much a work­ing man at heart; while he was an artist, he was also very con­scious of the fact he was work­ing hard to pro­vide for his fam­i­ly as best he could. And he was mind­ful that oth­er artists were in the same boat, so he was ret­i­cent to get any­one boot­ed from a reg­u­lar assign­ment that helped to pay their bills. As a result, when offered his choice of any book in the DC line, Jack said, “Give me your worst-sell­ing title,” since he would­n’t be putting any­one out of work by doing that. This is how Jim­my Olsen (of all books) wound up being an inte­gral part of Jack­’s Fourth World Saga at DC.

I’m sure that any reg­u­lar Jim­my Olsen fans’ heads were prob­a­bly spin­ning, over all the wild, crazy action and con­cepts Jack threw at them. DNA? Cloning? The Hairies? The Moun­tain of Judg­ment? In some ways, Jack was prob­a­bly a bit too far ahead of his time for DC, or for most read­ers then. It was­n’t until years lat­er that sub­se­quent Super­man cre­ative staff seemed to final­ly catch up with Jack and revis­it­ed some of his concepts.

Even before Jack took on the book though, there was some­thing of a tra­di­tion of Jim­my Olsen under­go­ing strange changes or trans­for­ma­tions from time to time (look up Giant Tur­tle Boy, for exam­ple). Bring­ing DNA into the sto­ry­telling mix allowed Jack to put a fresh spin on this idea. The Giant Jim­my Olsen was genet­i­cal­ly engi­neered from DNA sam­ples tak­en from Jim­my by the Evil Fac­to­ry. He was cre­at­ed to break into the DNA Project , kill Super­man and destroy the Project.

I don’t know if Jack was respon­si­ble for his col­oration, but some­one must have amused them­selves by col­or­ing Giant Jim­my green, which gave him some­thing in com­mon with a cer­tain big, strong, rag­ing (ahem!) Incred­i­ble char­ac­ter at anoth­er company.

Hope you enjoy, and tune in again tomor­row to see the next D.N.Alien!