NEAR-MYTHS: "JIMMY'S INTER-DIMENSIONAL ROMANCE" (JIMMY OLSEN #73, 1963)

 In many ways "Romance" is just another of the many OLSEN stories in which Jimmy, after getting turned down by his fickle girlfriend Lucy Lane, gravitates toward another woman-- usually someone who ends up being a bad match for one reason or another. But this tale is a little more intriguing because of the way the writer-- whom I will assert to be Jerry Siegel though there's no absolute proof of this-- played with a couple of well-known mythic tales.

At the opening "Romance" makes a quick reference to Jimmy having proposed to Lucy on some previous occasion. Nothing daunted, not only does he buy an engagement ring for his next attempt, the young reporter rents a studio and plans to win Lucy over by immortalizing her in stone. There's a tossoff explanation as to how he picked up this rather demanding skill, but as he's working on the statue, a strange force takes over Jimmy's hands, so that he sculpts the image of a totally different woman. After an offended Lucy flounces off, the statue comes to life, claiming that she is Rona, inhabitant of the seventh dimension. She further claims that the stone from which Jimmy released her was a sort of an interdimensional vehicle.

Rona informs Jimmy that the two of them are now betrothed. But before the unusually dim youth even thinks to protest an engagement with a woman he doesn't know, Rona offers him the chance to compensate for his perceived lack of masculinity. She gives him a drug designed to make Jimmy as big and muscular as his idol Superman, and within about a day, it works. Lucy is terribly jealous, not just because she's losing Jimmy, but Jimmy-as-a-hunk. For his part, Jimmy's no better, rubbing salt in Lucy's wounds by asking the former girlfriend to pick out the new one's trousseau-- and he seems to be marrying Rona, whom he still barely knows, just to show off his ability to bag a hot chick.

The story then rushes to its foregone conclusion. The happy couple agree to be married before a "judge" (who wears a Catholic collar) and with only "best man" Superman in attendance. Again Rona gets Jimmy to drink some unknown potion, and again he obliges. Then cops from Rona's dimension show up, reveal that she's a female Bluebeard who kills her mates. (With possibly unintentional comedy, the cops prove what she is by showing that she has a blue tongue.) But Superman whips up a poison cure and talks the judge into keeping quiet. Jimmy reverts to his normal size but now enjoys being able to keep Lucy under his thumb-- at least until the next story reasserts the status quo.

The only thing that makes me think Jerry Siegel wrote this one is the risible term the writer gives to Rona's rocky prison: "the Stone Zone," an overt riff on The Phantom Zone. And as in some of Siegel's other stories, there's a very loose mythopoeic parallel here. This time the parallel is between how the tale begins with life arising from dead rock-- and ends with the villain's attempt to turn the rock's sculptor into lifeless matter.

LOIS, MANSPLAINED

Since I remarked in the previous essay that I thought Lois Lane was a more intrinsically "mythic" figure than Jimmy Olsen, I'll provide a little justification of that statement here.

In the first official "mythcomics" post here, I only touched upon the significance of Lois Lane in passing, but I've noted elsewhere that she's highly significant as the "chosen bride" of Jerry Siegel's "Christ with Muscles," no matter how far in the future their unison might take place. This 2014 essay provides a refutation to Noah Berlatsky's rhetoric of victimization-- i.e., that Lois was always being maltreated by the main hero-- and shows that, even though she had her share of faults, she was on the whole an admirable character, and something of a "tough cookie" for her time.

In the next day or so, I'll devote a mythcomic essay to one particular Lois tale, and it comes from DC's long-running LOIS LANE comic book, which presented a somewhat different version of the character. Whereas the comic-book Jimmy Olsen was strongly modeled on the radio/television character-- even if comics-Olsen showed some significant departures-- Lois seems to have been remodeled less with reference to the "Adventures of Superman" TV show and more in line with what editor Mort Weisinger thought would sell to his readers. There's a fair amount of anecdotal evidence to the effect that SUPERMAN'S GIRL FRIEND LOIS LANE was more oriented toward female juvenile readers, and even though all of the raconteurs on the title were male, it seems a safe bet to say that they re-modeled Lois in line with their perceptions regarding feminine soap-opera, albeit adjusted for a juvenile audience. If Lois had held on to any of her streetwise toughness and courage during the period when Jerry Siegel was drummed out of the DC ranks, that last remnant of that previous characterization was well and truly gone by 1958, when the magazine was launched (following a tryout in the SHOWCASE magazine, by the bye). Lois wasn't seen to slug anyone, as in the panel above, until about 1966.

Perhaps because Lois, unlike Jimmy, was viewed as a full adult, there are more adult concerns in the stories, albeit filtered through a juvenile lens. Many of the stories are just as silly as the ones in the JIMMY OLSEN title, but there is a greater propensity to allude to Lois as a mythic concatenation of womanly traits. This often reflected negative characterizations typical of men's humor, like accusations of overweening feminine curiosity-- but even these retain a certain larger-than-life quality. In the remainder of this essay, I'll briefly touch on some of these myth-kernels, though with the caveat that nearly none of them qualify as mythcomics.

Though the character of the Weisinger Lois was a little too hard-nosed to go in for occult matters, I find it symbolically significant that the first issue of her series attributes to her a "witchy" power. Note Superman's apparent fear of having his powers surpassed.

Here's the first of many issues in which Lois is "body-shamed" in some way. Some find these sort of tropes to be representative of the whole series, which is certainly throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Though Lois isn't really any sort of tough jungle-babe in this story, it's amusing to see her take a leaf from the book of Sheena. Some will recall that Sheena preceded Superman in being the first major comic-book character published, even though the jungle-queen's sales didn't take off until after the Man of Steel became a superstar.

One of the first stories really condemning Lois for the sin of curiosity. The big giveaway? Lois has the head of a cat, or rather, she thinks she does, having been given a post-hypnotic suggestion to punish her for an act of intrusive curiosity. It's interesting that the hypnotist in this case is female, though.

Weisinger recycles a trope used by Siegel in an earlier story, in which Lois was supposed to get powers from a super-blood transfusion.

Jimmy Olsen's relationship with Superman never lent itself to stories like this one.

Second of a two-part story in which Lois marries Luthor and spawns an evil son. However, he later marries into the family of Superman and Lana. Ah, if only Weisinger had edited Greek plays!

"The Snoopiest Girl in History" reveals that Lois traveled in time and gave rise to the legend of Pandora.

Lois again travels in time, gets stuck on Krypton, and decides it's a good idea to steal Superman's father from Superman's mother. Only at the end of the story does she realize that she might have ended up becoming the mother of the man she always wanted to marry. Writer Otto Binder must have been digging into his Freud the day he scripted this one.

Lois has the distinction of re-introducing Catwoman to the DC universe after the villainess had been exiled for eight years, probably because of her being mentioned in SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT. Sadly, no actual catfight takes place between the two Golden Age icons, though Lois does get to take a walk on the wildcat side by assuming Catwoman's identity.

"Shock story of the year," indeed. It's hard to believe no one at DC knew that Joe Shuster had done not entirely dissimilar work for a 1954 skin magazine.

Aside from a reprint issue, here's the last issue edited by Weisinger. Appropriate, since she starts off as a witch and ends up as the bride of Satan.

NEAR MYTHS: [WOLF-MAN JIMMY], (1960/1961)

In this post I wrote:

As a matter of critical process I want to specify that I'm not simply critiquing this story's presentation of Jimmy Olsen in terms of the character's verisimilitude. If it were simply a matter of the character acting atypically in different sections of the same story, that would be simply a failure of the dramatic potentiality, which deals with the interactions of conscious personalities. What I'm critiquing is the degree to which Olsen's character is put into a mythopoeic situation-- that of transgressing on the sexual hunting-grounds of a friend / father-figure-- and then fails to follow through on that mythic potential. 

I happened to re-read a couple of JIMMY OLSEN stories published about three years after "Wedding of Jimmy Olsen," and it seemed to me that these stories came closer to "following through" on what little potential one might find in the trope of a simple character like Jimmy Olsen macking on his best friend's girl (or girls).

To be sure, Jimmy-- in contrast to Lois Lane, whom I view as a character of greater mythicity-- displays a pretty low amplitude in this regard. Jimmy was introduced by name in the SUPERMAN radio show, whose basic pattern was largely imitated by the successful 1952-58 teleseries. Prior to the major film adaptations of Superman, American audiences largely knew Jimmy, if they knew him at all, from the TV show, except for kids who read the JIMMY OLSEN comic, which indubitably came about in reaction to the show.

It's important to note that the dominant image of Jimmy from the show was that of a lovable goof, and for the most part this is the image that has remained ingrained in the minds of comic-book fans. The first three issues of the character's solo feature actually started out making him fairly competent, but I would guess that some editor clamped down on that, declaring that Olsen of the comics must be just as dorky as Olsen on TV. For most of his run-- which I discussed in this essay-- Jimmy remained a lovable goof, although with an important difference from the TV version: the character had a lot more romantic encounters in his own comic book.

I don't plan to sit down and hash over Jimmy's assorted love-connections, but I do think that cumulatively they contributed to his overall personality as a story-character. Thus, by 1960, the same fellow who wrote "The Wedding of Jimmy Olsen," Otto Binder, puts Jimmy in the position of a junior-level lothario, albeit for humorous effects.

Thus in the first of the two stories, "The Wolf-Man of Metropolis," his girlfriend Lucy gives him static about his amorousness:

Later, yielding to his tendency to do stupid things like drink untested magic potions, Jimmy becomes afflicted by a curse, causing him to change into a wolf-man at night, though unlike most fictional lycanthropes, Jimmy possesses no beastly urges. In fact, he can't even take advantage of Lucy when she obligingly dresses up like Red Riding Hood.

The second Curt Swan panel is refreshingly grim given the overall light tone of the story, though of course it's very politically incorrect today for him to muse about the unattractiveness of any woman. He does have a particular reason for so doing, though, since the curse can only be reversed by the kiss of a pretty woman. (Binder was perhaps conflating his werewolf tale with both "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Frog Prince.") Still, humor takes precedence over potential tragedy, particularly when Wolf-Man Jimmy tries to proposition a hot number to kiss him-- in the park, of course.

Superman eventually solves his buddy's problem, arranging for the cursed reporter to meet an unnamed (but presumably comely) woman in a dark room and receive her kiss. The reader later learns the female is Superman's cousin Supergirl, who alone possesses enough intestinal fortitude to suck a hairy face. At this point in time, Supergirl is unknown to the public, still being kept under cover by her avunucular cousin. A few stories, particularly this one, suggest a buried incestuous vibe between the two Kryptonians. If so, then Superman is being extraordinarily generous in pimping out his cousin in this manner. As icing on the clansgressive cake, the cover above shows two women fleeing from the Wolf-Man, who are probably supposed to be Superman's regular romantic interests Lois Lane and Lana Lang: however, Lana isn't in the actual story and Lois, who is, never sees the Wolf-Boy, though she does aggravate Lucy's suspicions about Jimmy's secret shame.

The second and last story of the reporter's adventures in lycanthropy-- scripted this time by Jerry Siegel-- doesn't seem to be as popular as the first on the Internet. It's significant that again, Wolf-Jimmy is presented on the cover as scaring the bejeezus out of a group of female characters-- respectively, Lucy, Lois, and Lana-- who are all in the story this time.

This time, though, Jimmy's not to blame for his curse. Mischievous Mister Mxyzptlk pops into Metropolis, spots Jimmy squiring around Lucy, and promptly falls in love with Lucy, just as the imp had previously gone gaga over her sister. Lucy rejects Mxyzptlk's suit by protesting that she has a boyfriend. Mxyzptlk decides to get rid of the competition in the usual roudabout way of all Superman stories from this period: he inflicts the curse on Jimmy with his magic but makes him think that he's imbibed the magic potion again.

In some ways Siegel ratchets up the comic absurdity of the "Frog Prince" trope. Again Jimmy seeks his Kryptonian pal's help. But though Supergirl imparts to Jimmy the same secretive smooch she did before, the affliction doesn't go away. In short order nearly every female character of the Superman universe at the time finds out about Jimmy's hairy problem. The result that he not only gets liplocked by his girlfriend, but also by Superman's inamoratas Lois and Lana, AND by the hero's former squeeze, the mermaid Lori Lemaris. Mxyzptlk watches them all fail, confident that Lucy will desert Jimmy in due time.

Then a strange woman appears, kisses Jimmy, and instantly reverses the curse. It turns out to be Mxyptlk's own inamorata, Miss Gsptlsnz, another magical imp from the Fifth Dimension, making her first comic-book appearance. Jimmy, having been bussed by so many hot girls in the last few days, can't help thinking a rather uncomplimentary thought about his savior.

However, this touch is also a neat reversal of the original curse's parameters, since the reversal of the pesky imp's magic doesn't depend on matching the curse-victim up with a hot girl. Everything goes back to normal and the story ends with Lucy calling Jimmy a "wolf" again, this time because he got a lot of smooches from other women.

Again I'll repeat that I'm not endowing these stories with anything more than minor mythicity, the result of some clever mucking-about with fairy-tale tropes. But to the extent that Jimmy Olsen the Character possesses even a minor penchant for mythicity-- that of the young rival to his older buddy-- these stories come closer to the mark than "Wedding." I'll also observe that I wouldn't have a problem with the earlier story if I thought that the dominant character of Jimmy was that of an unromantic klutz, like say, Dilton Doiley of the ARCHIE universe, seen here in all his glory:

NULL-MYTHS: "THE WEDDING OF JIMMY OLSEN" (1957)

I settled on this story as a "opposite version" of the theme presented in "Superman's Super-Courtship," It's not exactly a well-known story even among fans of the Weisinger "Superman universe" titles, though it did rate a mention in Tony Isabella's "1000 COMIC BOOKS YOU SHOULD READ."

This story, credited to Otto Binder and Curt Swan by GCD, is one of three such tales in JIMMY OLSEN #21, It was published over four years previous to "Courtship," with which it shares a theme common to Weisinger's editorial aegis: the theme of "improbable romance." However, while the later story has some interesting psychological ramifications, "Wedding" is just a routine rendering of a situation that was old back in the days of Greek New Comedy.

Here the improbable romance comes about because of a "Basic Misunderstanding." For years, Jimmy Olsen has worked alongside Lois Lane without a hint of romantic interest between them. Then, because Lois begins showing interest in Jimmy-- she's researching him for a proposed feature article-- he immediately thinks she's smitten with him. This by itself could lead to some mildly promising comic silliness. Naturally, Jimmy has to believe himself to be a "romeo" capable of swaying a mature woman from her "best beau," Jimmy's own buddy Superman. He tries to discourage Lois by doing things that make him look like a "cad," but these forgettable antics backfire so that she thinks better of him,  But in order to justify the hype of the cover, Jimmy has to decide-- improbably, even for this silly schtick-- that the only thing a man of honor can do is to marry a woman so smitten.

In keeping with standard practice, Lois doesn't inform Jimmy of his grievlous error, but pretends to become engaged to him, with the idea of finding some way to let him down easily. She even confers with Superman, who agrees to help extricate her from these comic difficulties. The excuse Lois finds to reject Jimmy without bruising his ego isn't particularly memorable, and the only thing that makes this story inconsummate is its indeterminate treatment of Jimmy's psychological makeup. Though his age isn't stressed, obviously he's in his late teens, and is certainly old enough to have dated. Yet Binder portrays him as if he has the mentality of a small boy-child, who presumes that the only response to a mature woman's lovelorn sentiments is to marry her. There's a slightly amusing moment in which Jimmy pictures himself carrying Lois over the threshhold for their honeymoon; Jimmy looks not a little panicked at the proposition, as if he can't imagine any advantages in bedding Lois; the next panel, appropriately enough, shows him suffering as Lois leaves him to babysit their numerous children.

Since the relationship of Superman and his "pal" is an avuncular one, this concept might have been mythically interesting if Jimmy had been somewhat intrigued with the idea of making it with the girlfriend of his "big brother / uncle / father-figure." But as written, it's a pretty pale product.

ADDENDA: As a matter of critical process I want to specify that I'm not simply critiquing this story's presentation of Jimmy Olsen in terms of the character's verisimilitude. If it were simply a matter of the character acting atypically in different sections of the same story, that would be simply a failure of the dramatic potentiality, which deals with the interactions of conscious personalities. What I'm critiquing is the degree to which Olsen's character is put into a mythopoeic situation-- that of transgressing on the sexual hunting-grounds of a friend / father-figure-- and then fails to follow through on that mythic potential. The story is also a good example of the principle of a non-incestuous "clansgression."

PLAYING MERRY HOBBES WITH HEROES AND DEMIHEROES

IIn this essay I commented on my use of the terms "courage" and "endurance" to distinguish the persona-types of "hero" and "demihero:"

I still believe that Reeve's opposed categories of "courage" and "endurance" have strong applicability, though I never meant to imply that these categories summarized all distinctions between hero and demihero.
 

I'm glad I said that, given that the Hobbes comment I recently employed for the posts on goal-affects also seems to have broad applicability to personas.

So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
 

These three motives-for-violence-- which I usually summarized as "gain," "safety,"  and "passion" of a specifically thymotic type-- also apply well to the motives of heroes in fictional narratives.  Or at least the second two do; more often than not, the motive of "gain/competition" is the motive assigned to the villain.

Thus, without dismissing the applicability of the "courage/endurance" reading, I'll offer a quick look at my proposed hero/demihero distinctions using "diffidence" (aka "safety") and "glory" (aka "passion").

As an example for a hero who evinces "glory," I'll use an example of one of the most microdynamic heroes known to me.

MIGHTY MAX, a character devised to promote a toy line in a 1993 tv cartoon, was one of the oddest "heroes" I've encountered in terms of his dynamicity. Though this simple Earth-boy was frequently referred to as "the Mighty One," he had no powers whatsoever, except a magical cap that could transport him to other realms.  In the company of a chicken-like entity ("fowl, actually") who supplied information on the threat of the week and a big warrior named Norman who provided the heavy lifting, Max foiled dozens of vile villains over the course of 40 episodes.  He did so largely through neither power nor skill, but just by having the dumb luck to constantly avoid being squashed by werewolves or dragons or whatever.

And yet, weakling though he was, he was still a hero squarely in the genre of adventure, in that the stories were all about his invigorating victories over evil.  He may prove a better example of a microdynamic hero than some of those I've used before, such as Brenda Starr and Doctor Who.

In contrast, there's the character of Mrs. Brisby from Don Bluth's dramatic cartoon THE SECRET OF NIMH.  As I mention in my review of the film, I have not read the juvenile book on which the film is based, so I confine myself to the character as depicted in the Bluth film.  From what I understand, only in the film does this mouse-character demonstrate what might termed "super-powers."

These powers are entirely the gift of a magical talisman, which Mrs. Brisby can summon only because, despite her humble appearance, she possesses the necessary virtue of "courage"--which characterization is ironic to me because I would have assigned her persona the quality of "endurance."  The magic she summons isn't used in any combative scenario, but to solve a non-violent conflict: how to transport her home to a place of safety.  But even if this mousey protagonist had used her power offensively-- as does Doctor Craven, an equally mousey protagonist whom I used as one of my first examples of a "demihero" -- would she have qualified as a hero?

By my current reasoning, no.  Brisby is a good example of "instinctive will" in that although she possesses courage, as the script says, it isn't the sort of courage that distinguishes the "intellectual will"-- a will which I link to the Hobbesian concept of "glory."  Everything Brisby does in the film is motivated by the Hobbesian concept of "diffidence/ safety," which might be characterized as more "reactive" than "proactive."

I've not advanced a "proactive/reactive" dichotomy here in so many words, but it does have applicability to what I wrote here about folklorist Vladimir Propp's opposition of the "seeker" and the "victimized hero."

I would say that the qualities of "glory" and "diffidence" also seem better matches for the characters discussed in that earlier essay, with Johnny Thunder following a pattern of "glory" while Jimmy Olsen follows one of "safety" (which I find that I prefer to "diffidence," as that seems to imply a trait of the character rather than a plot-action).

More explorations of glory and safety will probably follow, though probably not until next year.

THE GREAT JIMMY JIM-JAM

In the comments-section for COMIC HERO VS. COMIC DEMIHERO, Richard Bensam provided a possible corrective:

"One quibble: starting with the issue after Kirby's departure and lasting through the end of the series a couple of years later, there was an effort to reinvent Jimmy Olsen as a crime-fighting adult reporter. This started with a short run of issues drawn by Mike Sekowsky, one of which also wrapped up a couple of dangling plot threads from the Kirby issues. This was followed by the "Mr. Action" era, which tried to marry the two-fisted investigative reporter angle with more traditional SF elements and the return of Lucy Lane. Both tries came across as an attempt to bring a contemporary TV action hero style to comics.

After that, the Superman Family book picked up the issue numbering from Jimmy Olsen and kept going for quite a few years, but I stopped reading so I don't know what happened to Jimmy after that.."

All true, but it doesn't affect my overall estimation of the JIMMY OLSEN series, because all of my speculations on characters' "mythos" or "persona" are governed by my formula of the "51 percent rule," which might need some expansion in future.

I commented in the aforesaid essay that the JIMMY OLSEN feature started off with a fairly serious "Hardy Boys" tone, portraying Jimmy as a resourceful fighter, despite the humorous-looking cover of the first issue.

Soon enough, however, the tone of the series shifted to more overt wackiness, as in #4.

DOMINANTLY, the comedic orientation continued for most of the run, up until the Kirby period.  This doesn't mean that there weren't occasionally some very adventure-oriented issues.  JO #99-- written by none other than Jim Shooter-- eschewed the usual comic mishaps and showed Olsen battling the forces of a supervillain, the Weapons Wizard, with the aid of costumes that gave him Legionnaire-powers.  Usually whenever Olsen wore a costume or assumed a tough-guy persona, there was some element of parody involved, but not here.

Nevertheless, most of the covers before Kirby depicted either sitcom-style antics or phony melodrama, such as the last issue before Kirby appeared in #133.

Kirby finished up his run in #148 (albeit a run interrupted by at least one reprint issue).  Richard is correct that during the remainder of the OLSEN run, the creators did attempt to make Olsen's adventures less comic in tone.  Here's a fairly suspenseful cover for issue #151:

However, three issues later, JO #154 gives us a return to what looks like Mort Weisinger-style sitcommery.

I confess that though I've read the remainder of the OLSEN run through its last issue in #163, I don't recall the stories well, but I'll bet the Leo Dorfman script for "Olsen the Red, Last of the Viking Warriors" was somewhat less than serious-minded.  That's essentially why I don't regard those last fifteen issues to be a "sustained" attempt to keep Olsen in the mode of a serious adventure-hero, as he was in Jack Kirby's hands.

As for the SUPERMAN FAMILY stories featuring Jimmy Olsen, I've probably read most or all of them, and one might make an argument that they were more consistent in presenting Olsen in the mold of the many forgotten crusading reporters of Golden Age Comics like "Scoop" Scanlon. Probably the melodramatic stories about Lucy Lane's return were played straight as well.  So that *might* be the only other time Olsen was consistently portrayed as a "formidable adventure-hero" in addition to the Kirby run. I'd have to do a re-read to check them out.

However, even if you take however many SF Jimmy-stories there were-- twenty? thirty?-- and add them in with the fifteen Kirby stories-- they don't outweigh the dominant image of Olsen as a comic demihero-type, more concerned with just getting by than with being a crusader-type.

So if I do a reread on the SF Olsens, I may well need to modify the statement that the Kirby run was Olsen's only sustained outing as an adventure-hero.  Time (as in, how much time I have) will tell.

COMIC HERO VS. COMIC DEMIHERO

The hero of the tale may be one of two types: (1) if a young girl is kidnapped,,,, and if Ivan goes off in search of her, then the hero of the tale is Ivan and not the kidnapped girl.  Heroes of this type may be termed seekers. (2) If a young girl or boy is seized or driven out, and the thread of the narrative is linked to his or her fate and not to those who remain behind, then the hero of the tale is the seized or banished boy or girl. There are no seekers in such tales.  Heroes of this variety may be called victimized heroes.-- Vladimir Propp, MORPHOLOGY OF THE FOLKTALE, p. 36.

"Fellow members! I vote to install Johnny [Thunder] as a member of the Justice Society!  Anybody with his luck ought to be a member!"-- Hawkman, ALL-STAR COMICS #6.

In the MORPHOLOGY Propp doesn't discuss the nature of heroes much beyond the above quote.  The Russian folklorist's sole purpose in that book was to emphasize the way different "dramatis personae" acted in terms of storytelling devices, what Propp calls "functions."  Nevertheless, though Propp doesn't apply any aspect of his function-theory to any narrative outside folklore, it has strong applicability to my own theory of literary personae.

Now, in this essay I offered one distinction between the "hero" and the "demihero" based loosely on the observations of Christopher Reeve.  To re-quote the actor:

“What is a hero? I remember how easily I’d talk about it, the glib response I repeated so many times. My answer was that a hero is someone who commits a courageous act without considering the consequences… Now my definition is completely different. I think a hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to perservere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles.”

I still believe that Reeve's opposed categories of "courage" and "endurance" have strong applicability, though I never meant to imply that these categories summarized all distinctions between hero and demihero.  It is interesting, however, that Propp's summation of his two protagonist-types also turns on a distinction between a protagonist who makes a grand gesture based in "courage"-- that of the seeker following a villain who's seized someone else-- and the survival-instincts of a "victimized hero," whose principal virtue is one of "endurance."

"Courage" and "endurance" may not adequately describe the values of Propp's protagonist-functions,though, because Propp is attempting to produce a scientific, value-free description of folklore practices.  Similarly, my Schopenhauerean distinction between "intellectual will" and "instinctive will" would probably be too value-laden for Propp.  What Propp's paradigm describes is essentially a difference between "heroism in activity" versus "heroism in passivity."  "Heroism" in this context must be divorced from the nature of any particular hero: in folklore studies it connotes simply the actions (or non-actions) of the characters with whom the audience is supposed to sympathize.  The same parallel obtains with characters who dominantly represent the forces of chaos, with villains representing a very active form of evil, while monsters tend toward greater passivity (dragons who are minding their own business guarding their hoards when knights come calling, and so on.)

I've produced a couple of essays to explicate the differences between "hero" and "demihero."  The first was DEMIHERO DELIBERATIONS,which compares a comedy demihero (Dr. Craven) with a dramatic hero (Harry Potter); the second, MORE DEMIHERO DELIBERATIONS, pursued the Craven/Potter comparison and made a brief comparison between comic demihero Craven and comic hero Ranma Saotome.

However, Craven, as a character in a stand-alone narrative, doesn't make a symmetrical comparison with characters designed for serial formats.  So for this essay, I'll focus on two serial characters from the same medium-- comic books-- and who are dominantly viewed as "comic bumblers" who, like most of their kind, tend to get by on luck (an important element in the mythos of comedy, as explicated here).

First up is Johnny Thunder, of whom I've written before:

JOHNNY THUNDER, on the other hand, frequently shows the titular hero falling afoul of hoods and gunmen, whom he usually vanquishes with the help of his magical powers. However, in his first adventure he’s unaware of the power, which is conferred on him for an hour’s time when he pronounces the holy word “Cei-U” (which Johnny only does when he accidentally uses the words “say” and “you” consecutively). The same “origin story” establishes that Johnny, though moderately skilled as a fighter, is “just an ordinary guy trying to lead an ordinary life,” which aligns him less with heroic magicians like Mandrake than with the comic protagonists of Thorne Smith.


I would grant that within the comic mythos, Johnny Thunder is, like the Inferior Five analyzed earlier, a hero who gets into a fair number of fights. But these agonic elements are subdominant to the comic elements, such as the scene where Johnny, unaware of his power, tells a man to “go jump at a duck,” which of course the fellow does. In later stories, Johnny’s power becomes embodied in a separate character, a genie called “Thunderbolt,” but the presence of this super-being never takes the focus away from Johnny’s status as a good-hearted bumbler. Even as a member of the heroic Justice Society, Johnny plays the funny sidekick to the “serious” superheroes. Thus even in this adventure-oriented feature Johnny Thunder remained a visitor from a strangely comical domain.

The only correction I'd make to this is that although Thunder does indeed have a different "mythos-stature" than a character like Mandrake, given that one belongs to the comedy and the other to adventure, in terms of "persona-stature" the two of them are closer to one another than either is to a demihero character like Thorne Smith's Topper or his comic-monster ghost-buddies.

Although Thunder is a dimwit who often survives more by luck than by skill, he does show a tendency toward the intellectual will of heroism-- which is not to say that he himself is ever intellectual-- in that he does, as shown in ALL-STAR COMICS #6, audition for and successfully join the Justice Society.  In JUSTICE SOCIETY he is, as I said earlier, a comic hero hanging out with straight adventure-heroes; in his own 1940s feature he tended to simply blunder into trouble. Yet even in the solo series he is an "active" hero in the sense that he makes it his personal business to play crimefighter.

Jimmy Olsen, in contrast, seems a more passive character, for all that he like Thunder frequently blunders into conflict with criminals, invading aliens, etc.  Olsen debuts as a minor supporting character for the SUPERMAN radio show in 1940-- though some fans have tagged an unnamed office boy from a 1938 comics-story as "Jimmy" simply because the character wore a bow-tie.  Olsen made scattered appearances in the comics, and disappeared for roughly a decade until he was revived, again as a support-character, in the 1952-58 ADVENTURES OF SUPERMAN teleseries.  Two years following the character's return, Olsen became the central character of his own comic-book series.

Strangley, though the Olsen of the teleseries was played as comic relief, the first three issues of the comic book attempted to portray him as a resourceful "Hardy Boys" type of hero, able to fight thugs with his own skills and one or two trick-weapons.  By the fourth issue of SUPERMAN'S PAL JIMMY OLSEN, Olsen started having wackier adventures, and this became the norm for the series until it was cancelled.  During those years Olsen sometimes became a "superhero manque," occasionally transforming himself into "Elastic Lad" to fight crime in Metropolis or into "Flamebird" to battle evil in the bottle city of Kandor.  But the only sustained period in which Olsen was treated as a formidable adventure-hero was during Jack Kirby's tenure on the title from 1970 to 1972.

Though Olsen blunders into trouble just as Thunder does, the similarity ends there.  While popular media had seen any number of heroic crime-busting reporters, Olsen doesn't crusade against crime in his adventures as a Daily Planet reporter.  Reporting the news is the character's first love, not fighting crime.  For all of his flirtations with heroism, Olsen is first and foremost an "ordinary guy," which allowed him to show an "endurance" sort of heroism in some stories, and to be a pure "victim" in others.  Johnny Thunder is seen with a mundane job in his first appearance, but over time he becomes a rootless do-gooder with no visible means of support, as if getting into trouble and fighting crooks has become his job in a diegetic, as well as an extra-diegetic, manner.

At present I don't plan to explore these distinctions within the mythoi of adventure and irony. I will note in closing that my persona-theory as expressed here probably necessitates a modification of this statement from this essay:

Because of the lack of spectacular violence, I see VOYAGE as a subcombative form of adventure. The heroes are perhaps a little better at combat than the average man-on-the-street, but not by much. This type of hero thus fits my definition of the mesodynamic hero from this essay as possessed of a dynamicity ranging from "good to fair," a grouping that thus far also includes the original version of Aladdin, Doctor Who and Brenda Starr, three other subcombative types analyzed here.

I haven't changed my dynamicity-ratings for any of the characters discussed here, but would probably distinguish the Seaview crew and Doctor Who as belonging to the persona-category of the hero, while Brenda Starr and the folkloric version of Aladdin belong to the persona-category of the demihero.