The SECOND Fab 4

Dell Publishing Co. had a heap of superhero comics trying to weed something out of the campy Batman phase of the mid-60s, one of which was aptly titled Superheroes from 1967 featuring their own team named the Fab 4, although not the boys from Britain. This Fab 4 were four teenagers who visited the Dell Hall Of Heroes which featured statues of various characters of Dell Comics including Nukla and Toka, as well as a set of shiny androids each with their own specific power labeled The Fab 4 who all look like rejected Mega Man characters. El can shoot lasers, Hy has hypersonic capabilities, Crispy can freeze anything, and Polymor Polly is the token girl character with the power of flight and stretchable arms. A power surge causes the four teens to be able to mentally take over the bodies of the androids, the downside of which is that their own bodies are in a coma while their brains are operating the robot superheroes. From this point on, the teens slip in and out of consciousness when they're using the androids to lock horns with everything from rampaging robots, mad scientists, evil clowns, and oddly named crooks like Mr. Nutt, Dr. Orb, Coal Man, Nepto, and Johnny Boom-Boom. This little winning streak comes to an end when the Fab 4 come across the hypnotic Mr. Mod whose mind-control talents result in the teenagers getting the robot powers downloaded into their own bodies, so now the team have to wear different outfits with masks to keep their identities secret. We never learn anything about whoever made the super androids in the first place, why four teens are able to download their minds into them, or how they had the androids' mechanical abilities transferred into their physical selves. Whoever the writer for Superheroes was a slight mystery, but the colorful artwork was done by Sal Trapani who previously was an art director on the barely animated Space Angel TV series, became the artist for Nukla, and went on to draw for Marvel Comics in the 70s doing other eclectic characters like Man-Thing, Ghost Rider, and Howard The Duck. The Fab 4 were obviously not "The" Fab 4, nor was there any reference to The Beatles throughout the 4-issue run of Superheroes, but someone at Dell knew what they were doing when they tried to cash in on the band's nickname. The biggest unanswered question lies in the Hall Of Heroes itself where you have to wonder if this museum dedicated to Dell superheroes in a fictional sense or if all these characters exist in the same universe which would have made for some interesting crossovers as having a nuclear-powered being team-up with a jungle king sounds like interesting reading.