World of Metropolis #4 (November 1988)
World of Metropolis #4 (November 1988)
This origin story for Jimmy Olsen’s Superman-calling signal watch is cleverly titled “SUICIDE WATCH” because Jimmy invented the thing to prevent a suicide. That explains why Superman still answers the thing, despite commenting multiple times how much it bugs him: there’s always the possibility that Jimmy is using it to save the life of someone less annoying than him.
As we saw in Man of Steel #2, Jimmy has been working at the Daily Planet since he was a baby, basically. A baby with a bowtie. One day little Jimmy comes home from work and gets a visit from his friend Chrissie, who has swallowed a bottle full of pills in an attempt to kill herself. Due to a series of wacky misunderstandings (the 911 operators are busy, Jimmy accidentally breaks the phone), Jimmy decides he has no other way to help Chrissie but to create a machine that sends out a frequency which only Superman can hear. Superman arrives and saves Chrissie, and is so impressed by Jimmy’s invention that he lets him keep it in the form of a pocket watch.
Later, Superman has a talk with Chrissie as she recovers in the hospital. It’s not quite “YOU’RE MUCH STRONGER THAN YOU THINK YOU ARE” but it’s still a nice moment.
(Then Randy Newman comes out and they start singing.)
The comic ends exactly like the previous issue did: the protagonist (this time Jimmy instead of Clark) visits his gal pal in the present day to show that they’re still close friends, even though she Never Showed Up Again.
Character-Watch:
It turns out that Jimmy’s hot mom has been on his case about not working for the Planet for most of his life, but clearly he doesn’t pay a lot of attention to what she says. We also see Lois Lane again, obviously, since this miniseries is secretly all about her: she was an adorable little kid in issue 1, a nosy teen in 2, a young reporter in 3 and finally the Planet’s biggest hot shot reporter here. At one point Jimmy calls her to ask if she knows how to contact Superman (before he breaks the phone), but she’s like “LOL, no, good luck with the dying kid.”
Plotline-Watch:
This ends World of Metropolis, the last of the World of miniseries. It’s definitely better than World of Smallville, but nowhere near the epicness of World of Krypton (the only one that’s been collected by DC, incidentally). A better strategy would have been to start with Metropolis, lower our expectations with Smallville and then blow everyone away with Krypton. I also wonder if Byrne would have kept doing these if he hadn’t left – maybe a World of Pocket Universe mini that’s just images of deserted landscapes?
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