When Melissa Benoist was cast as Supergirl last week for the CBS upcoming superhero drama of the same name, I had a feeling the Jimmy Olsen announcement could only be a few days away, given that the auditions for both roles were held pretty closely together.

Like magic, we now have a new Jimmy Olsen! Mehcad Brooks (Desperate Housewives, True Blood) will be playing everyone’s favorite Daily Planet photographer/giant turtle-based superhero. Actually, the latter probably won’t happen sadly, but Brooks will surely have a camera in hand at some point.

The Supergirl iteration of Jimmy is described as “a smart worldly photographer for CatCo, the media company where Kara works. He had previously been working and living in National City for mysterious reasons, and his salt of the earth nature piques Kara’s interest”.

I’m not totally up on my Supergirl lore, but National City doesn’t ring any of my DC Comics bells (other than being the former name of the company). I assume its something created specifically for the new series.

There are a number of roles still to be cast, including: Cat Grant, Hank Henshaw – the Supergirl obsessed director of the Department of Extra-normal Operations, Kara’s CatCo colleague Wynn Schott, and Kara’s sister Alex.

 

13 COMMENTS

  1. Let me see… Jimmy Olsen is now black and wants to get into Supergirl’s pants instead of Lois Lane’s sister. Really PC You FREAKS !!! Spiderman has been killed off and replaced by a multiracial (black/hispanic) Spiderman. Superman has renounced his American citizenship. Green Lantern is gay. Perry white is black. Wonder woman may be gay. The new fantastic Four reboot has a black Johnny Storm and a white Sue Storm. And there’s talk of changing Thor’s sex. Archie is knocked off taking a bullet for a gay friend (was it Reggie or Jughead ?) . And now there’s talk of making Captain America black in the movies. This is what happens when liberals get in charge. They’re not satisfied with creating their own set of diverse characters. They have to get in there and destroy our age-old icons. Well FU Libs !!!

  2. @steamboat Fuck you, you bigoted fuck.

    Also, you are extremely ignorant about comics.

    Please feel free to climb back into your white hood and die there.

  3. Normally I would remove the racist rantings of Steamboat, but this time I’ll leave them up as a reminder that this kind of small minded bigotry is real thing. I’ve removed many such comments in the last few days.

    There is a glimmer of truth to what Steamboat says, however: how much better it would be to create brand new characters reflecting ethnic and gender minorities and see them gain in popularity? That’s what the new Milestone has in mind and I’m all for it.

  4. My goodness, that steamboat’s floatin on some hateful waves. Anyway…

    I’m all for diversifying characters that, to put in bluntly, were created in a time when we weren’t as socially enlightened as we are now (and trust me, I know we, collectively, still got a WAYS to go on that too). So changing characters to reflect different minority groups that have been painfully under-represented by entertainment mediums high and low is something I’m all for. #PushComicAdaptationsForward? And to your point, Heidi, I’m especially stoked for Milestone 2.0; not just for the diversity of characters, but creators as well.

  5. Being non-white isn’t ‘pc’. What an absurd statement.

    There’s nothing ingrained in the Olsen character that necessitates a specific race. Get over it.

  6. @zach – Right? And god help them if he’s an innie, cause it’s a pretty big part of Jimmy Olsen’s lore is that he’s an outie.

    What? Brooks is an innie? Whelp, there goes my childhood.

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