Hey, welcome back! There's just a few pages leftover in this issue I wanted to address, this first one being from the
Spark Stevens story. Spark always has the weakest artwork in the early
Wonderworld issues, but you can see how rushed this three-panel page was. Still, it is a good example of when you can bluff your way into a morale check for the bad guys.
This is a pretty important milestone issue, as it takes the War in Europe, that until now has been largely couched in terms of analogies and fictitious stand-ins, is finally being accurately represented as a German invasion of Poland -- which had happened just a few months earlier. Ripped from the headlines!
This is the first time -- possibly the last time, as far as I know -- that Polish is ever spoken in an American comic book. "Dzien dobre" means "Good day."
Despite the fact that I generally favor realism in my
Hideouts & Hoodlums campaigns, I still subscribe to the comic book convention of having everyone you encounter able to speak English. I do know of one
H&H Editor (hi Darren!) who is more of a stickler, wants more realism, and tracks what languages the Heroes know, based on their backstories more than their Intelligence scores.
While everyone else had to rush their jobs for this issue,
K-51 has more than one 12-panel page! Here we see one of the deadliest of complications during an aerial dogfight, the shooting of the gas tank, which makes the plane explode in ...well, I'm not sure how many turns to make it take. Maybe just require a save vs. science to get out of the plane before it goes kablooey.
(Although comics.org suggests that Bob Powell may have wrote this story, the timeliness and anti-Nazi stance seems very Will Eisner to me.)
(Scans courtesy of
Comic Book Plus.)
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