Super Friends #38 - Nov. 1980

Comics Weekend "The Fate of the Phantom Super Friends!" by E. Nelson Bridwell, Ramona Fradon, and Vince Colletta.

With still no Aqua-centric New 52 books to look at this week (Great Neptune, it feels like its been months!), I thought we'd once again dip back into the pool of the Super Friends:

Later, two of the crooks make a grab at an art gallery. When the cops show up to arrest them, they find that the crooks are intangible! When they reach for their guns, they find those are intangible, too!

This case makes it way to the Super Friends, who discover the same thing when they split up to apprehend more of the crooks. First Superman, then Batman and Robin, and then Aquaman:

Wonder Woman fails to nab her targets, as well. She returns to the Hall of Justice where the rest of the team are trying to figure out how the crooks are pulling this off.

Diana gets an idea, and asks Zan and Janya to try and activate their powers, only to see they are intangible to each other, as well. Superman then spots Grax right outside, aiming some strange device at the Hall of Justice. They head outside, but:

Superman uses his super-breath to freeze Zan and Janya's hands, which allows them to transform when they touch. They in turn help the intangible and gravity-less Super Friends:

...The End!


Nice to see Aquaman get such a big sequence, even if he is pretty ineffectual at the end. I also particularly enjoyed how humiliatingly the Super Friends regard Grax at the end of the story.

Inker Vince Colletta was (in)famous for erasing backgrounds, presumably to get whatever book he was working on in on deadline; this issue seems to be one of those times: page fourteen, for example, looks like a coloring book, with its utter lack of any background detail.