Super Friends

Superman Stuff #42: Halloween With the Super Friends

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Here’s the thing about Halloween, guys – it seems to happen every year. Funny at that. But despite the proliferation of Halloween comics out there, it’s harder to single out Superman-specific comics that focus on the holiday, especially since I covered a lot of the big ones last year during the original Year of Superman. This week, I decided to take a slight detour, then, to a Super Friends comic, in which the unlikely partnership of Jimmy Olsen and the Wonder Twins save Halloween!

Super Friends #28
Title: Masquerade of Madness
Writer: E. Nelson Bridwell
Art and Cover: Ramona Fradon
Inks: Vince Colletta

It’s a wild Halloween party in Gotham City, and Zan and Jayna – the Wonder Twins – are enjoying watching their friends have fun with the premise. As they walk around having used their powers to turn into an abominable snowman and a black cat (respectively), Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson are having a little fun with their dates by dressing as Batman and Robin, and Jimmy Olsen has used the ol’ magic potion he’s used in the past to turn himself into a real werewolf for the party, with the promise from Jayna that she’ll kiss him after the party and end the curse. But when the clock strikes midnight and everyone is supposed to unmask, they find themselves trapped in the forms of their costumes, courtesy of the evil sorcerer Felix Faust.

Apparently, Bruce Wayne and several of the other guests each own ancient gems containing immense power that Faust wants to unlock, and he refuses to release the partygoers from their monstrous forms unless they surrender the gems to him. As most of the guests try fruitlessly to attack Faust, Jimmy lures the Wonder Twins away. Using the kind of logic that really only makes sense in cartoons like Super Friends, Jimmy explains that Faust’s magic only affected people wearing costumes – and since he’s a REAL werewolf, the spell didn’t work on him. The twins realize that the same spell prevents them from returning to their human forms, but they can affect SOME transformations, so Jayna turns into a cat-bat to fly off and find Wonder Woman and Aquaman while Jimmy summons Superman with his signal watch.

As the assembled heroes go on the attack, Faust forces the enchanted partygoers (dressed as Solomon Grundy, Bizarro, Swamp Thing, Man-Bat, and the Demon) to fight them back, raising some serious questions as to what kind of costumes you can find at Spirit Halloween in Gotham City. Like, is there a Joker costume? Would that be like a mass-produced outfit that lets you dress up like Charles Manson or something? The implication here is the creepiest thing about the issue. But anyway, what follows is several pages of the Justice League fighting Faust’s captives, in some amusing face-offs. Superman, naturally, fights “Bizarro,” Aquaman tackles “Swamp Thing” (whom he’s heard is pretty powerful), Batman fights “Grundy,” Robin takes “Man-Bat” and Wonder Woman lassos the “Demon.” You get the usual stuff about the heroes not wanting to actually hurt them, since they’re innocent people who have been transformed by magic, but the captives have all the powers of their costumes and none of the usual compunctions. In the end, though, it’s Jimmy and the Twins who finally get the drop on Faust, with Zan turning into an ice skeleton and freaking the villain out with a Grim Reaper routine long enough for Jimmy to get in and deliver a knockout punch.

I’m always amused by these old Super Friends comics. At the time these were being published, continuity was a fast and loose game, and even though DC Comics had pioneered the concept of a multiverse, it wasn’t something they used as vigorously as they do today. The result were Super Friends stories that tried to pretend they were part of the mainstream DC Universe with various references and callbacks that were probably wasted on the younger readers that the comic was aimed at. For instance, when the League is trying to come up with a plan to fight Faust, Superman suggests calling up the only Justice League member with magical powers, Zatanna, but unfortunately she’s busy on her own case. Jimmy’s werewolfism, as well as the cure (a kiss from a pretty girl) is a callback to one of the classic Silver Age Jimmy Olsen comics (in fact, I’m pretty sure I wrote about that one LAST Halloween), and there’s even a casual reference to the fact that Jimmy learned Batman’s secret identity on a previous adventure, which is a story I’ve never read or even heard of before, so I GOTTA find that one.

At the same time, the stories are light and simplistic, even compared to the DC Comics of the 1970s. They’re not making this comic for older kids, they’re trying to hook the younger ones. Those links are a neat way to do it, although a few footnotes indicating which issues they’re referencing would be nice.

As was often the case with Super Friends, the ending comes pretty abruptly and without much fanfare. Zan scares Faust, Jimmy punches his lights out, and as soon as he hits the floor the spell is broken and the people trapped in their costumes are set free. There’s also a quick beat at the end where the (unnamed) girls who came to the party with Bruce and Dick ask where they heck they’ve gotten to and the “real” Batman casually tells them that their dates have been placed out of harm’s way. It’s astonishing how often people in old comic books fell for that excuse.

It’s a fun little story, though, and I enjoyed reading it. With one Wednesday left until Halloween, though, I want to find something spookier. Hit me in the comments, guys – what’s the scariest Superman story you know?

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!

Superman Stuff #34: Super Friends-The Death of Superman

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An intriguing side-effect of having children is that your sick days at work are more likely to be used to take care of the kid when HE’S sick than saved for yourself. Such was the case earlier this week when my son came down with a nasty stomach bug that sidelined him and had me calling in to take care of him. But on the plus side, in his illness all he wanted to do was lie around watching MeTV Toons, including Super Friends, which is how I happened to rewatch, for the first time in decades, the 1985 final-season episode “The Death of Superman.” 

You have to admit, he’s looked better.

The final season of the show was titled The Super Power Team: Galactic Guardians, as a tie-in to the then-running Super Powers toy line, and as such most of the characters were characters who had action figures in the line, including the then-new DC hero Firestorm, who is actually the focal character of this episode. It begins in medias res (just like all great children’s entertainment), with the world mourning the shocking death of the Man of Steel. There was a massive funeral procession, ceremonies at the United Nations, and people wearing black armbands just as they would when DC Comics would kill him “for real” seven years later. In fact, I’m wondering now if they were deliberately invoking this episode when the comic book storyline was planned.

Everyone is naturally distraught over Superman’s death, but no one more so than the Super Powers Team’s newest member, Firestorm, who considers himself personally responsible. Firestorm is captured by Darkseid (the Big Bad for the final two seasons) who purges the young hero’s memory of Superman’s death. The two of them were on a mission in space where Superman was seeking minerals to cure Kryptonite poisoning, but Firestorm was distracted and, upon returning to his partner, found Superman dead of exposure to a Kryptonite meteor that Firestorm could have saved him from had he listened to Superman and stayed where he was supposed to be. As Darkseid plans an assault on the heroes, Batman and some of the others go to the Fortress of Solitude, where a Superman robot reveals that Superman had the ability to place himself into a trance to stay alive while being afflicted by Kryptonite poisoning. Hawkman recognizes the posture of the trance as being the same way he was found lying by Firestorm, meaning that he placed himself in the trance and there’s still a chance to save him. The Super Friends recover Superman’s body and revive him just in time to return and save the team from Darkseid, who goes fleeing back to Apokalips.

I have this same reaction any time the McRib goes away again.

This final season episode suffered from the same limited animation as most Hanna-Barbera cartoons (especially of the 80s). Not all of the voice acting is great either, with Darkseid sounding more like Toast from Histeria! than an actual menace. On the plus side, this was the era where they had Adam West voicing Batman, which was kind of cool, and Deep Space Nine’s Rene Auberjonois as Desaad was a treat. But the real surprise of the episode was the way they told the story. The world was legitimately mourning. Firestorm was an absolute WRECK. I watched this show faithfully as a child, and I have vague memories of this episode from back then, but I was surprised at just how DARK it was.

For all the silliness and camp that the Super Friends shows had, I’m actually impressed that with this episode (the second-to-last of the entire series, it should be noted) they told a real story with real emotional stakes. The ending is still a little pat, a little too easy to come by, but they did more with this than they did with 99 percent of the preceding Super Friends episodes, and that is greatly appreciated. 

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. Don’t forget, you can check out earlier blogs in the Year of Superman/Superman Stuff Archive! Got a request for a future “Superman Stuff”? Drop it in the comments!