Complete Genius Jones Collection

The Complete Genius Jones Collection

So who is Genius Jones? Genius Jones is a character from deep in DC's past, for the most part. Written by the widely respected science fiction author Alfred Bester before he became known for his science fiction, Genius was a young man who got stranded on a desert island with nothing but 734 books. He read those books until he managed to memorize them, then eventually burned them to signal a rare passing ship and get rescued. When Genius returned to the real world, he began to make his living by answering any question for a dime ... those some questions required him to dress up in a strange home-made superhero costume and defeat crooks to learn the answers.

Genius first appeared in Adventure Comics for a couple of years, then also started appearing in the quarterly comic All Funny Comics. Eventually he was moved from Adventure Comics to More Fun Comics, where he finished off his DC career ... until ... back around 2005 DC was preparing for another of their Crisis events, and a very strange back-up story appeared in the pages of Tales of the Unexpected v2. This 8 issue mini series featured a main storyline with the Spectre, and a very odd back-up storyline featuring a roster of odd, abandoned characters, lead by Dr 13, and including among them Genius Jones.

Strange? How so? Strange as in this bunch of characters come to learn that they are comic book characters, and that the 'Architects' of the universe (the DC writers) are about to erase them from the world. I rather enjoyed the scene where these characters are battling it out with the empty costumes of the main DC heroes, animated by the 'Architects.' A very strange tale, indeed. Volumes 1-4 of this collection contain the early Genius Jones storyline, while Volume 5 collects the back-up stories from Tales of the Unexpected.

So where did these come from? A great many of them came from the MTCDC-NMC collection ... but I would also lik to give thanks to Los Pollos Hermanos, who has provided newer, better scans of many of the later issues of More Fun Comics. Also a thanks to the scanners who helped create the version of Tales of the Unexpected v2 that I found in MTCDC-NMC, including Racer-X, GCPDGUY and Odororeo.