Jimmy Olsen - Powers, Abilities, and Equipment

Powers, Abilities, and Equipment

Jimmy possesses a watch which emits a high-pitched signal only Superman can hear. Recently he claimed it stopped working some time in the past, never worked particularly well in the first place, and contacted Superman through Morse code now, anyway, but still wore it for show.

Mostly during the Silver Age, Jimmy would find himself temporarily transformed, for better or worse, or undergo a disguise for various purposes. The variety of transformations Jimmy received during the Silver Age is often homaged or parodied in later comics and adaptations featuring the character — for instance, in JLA: The Nail, Jimmy cites three of these transformations as his motivations behind backing Luthor's bill to outlaw metahumans and in Countdown, Jimmy is used as a spirit container for the deceased New Gods, causing him to exhibit strange powers, albeit uncontrollably, with other stories simply make passing references.

• Giant Turtle Boy: One of Jimmy's most frequently cited transformations was that of his turning into a giant turtle boy.
• Elastic Lad - As Elastic Lad, Jimmy (by serum or by alien virus) could sometimes stretch himself, akin to Elongated Man or Plastic Man. As Elastic Lad, Jimmy was inducted as an Honorary Member of the Legion of Super-Heroes.
• Flamebird- This is the name he took as a costumed superhero, with Superman disguised as Nightwing, in the shrunken Kryptonian city of Kandor. These names were inspired by two native Kryptonian birds, the nightwing and the flamebird, but the relationship between Nightwing and Flamebird intentionally paralleled the crime-fighting team Batman (a night-winged creature) and Robin (a flame-colored bird).
• Speed Demon - In 1956, a month before the debut of Barry Allen as the new Flash, Jimmy drank a potion produced by a Professor Claude and briefly gained super-speed.
• Radioactive - After being exposed to a radioactive substance, Jimmy began to irradiate everything in his presence.
• Gorilla - When Jimmy switched minds with a gorilla, he went about his reporting duties as a gorilla in Jimmy's clothes.
• Morbidly Obese-Jimmy tried to get fat in order to stop a jewel smuggling and to impress a Circus Fat Lady.
• Monstrous beard growth - The machinations of the sinister Beard Band cause Jimmy to grow an immense beard.
• Alien-form - Aliens transformed Jimmy into a telepathic Jovian for a week. Fortunately, this turned out to be a Jovian week ... which is much shorter than an Earth week (about 70 hours = slightly less than three days.)
• Wolf-Man - In the vein of the popular Michael Landon 1950s film I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Jimmy found himself transformed into a werewolf.
• Hippie - Investigating a colony of hippies at "Guru Kama's Dream Pad", Jimmy grew a beard and participated in a mock "hate-in". On the cover of this story's issue, Jimmy's seen wielding a sign that says "Superman is a freak-out!"
• Viking - Jimmy put on Viking armor and mistakenly thought he'd been transported 1000 years backward in time.
• Woman - Jimmy would occasionally go undercover dressed as a woman. Grant Morrison paid a brief homage to this in the JLA: Earth 2 graphic novel and in All-Star Superman.
• A human porcupine