Comics on Parade v. 2 #11 - pt. 1

I have been reading Tailspin Tommy off and on since this blog began, but never enjoyed it until this storyline, with an eccentric group of passengers and crew trapped in a remote valley. There is all kinds of survival advice players could use if someone sprang a similar scenario on them, like how important rationing food is, how many watts of power it takes to power a radio to reach 50-60 miles, and slang terms like "fan his conk." I'm pretty sure that means punch him in the nose...

The stranded passengers and crew do all the right things, figuring out how to hunt birds (they have to improvise missile weapons), foraging for edible berries, and looking for frogs down by th' creek.

We see a rare example of cussing from a newspaper strip as Tommy fails to see the value in trigonometry -- and, to be fair, I'm not sure how the professor's plan helps them any either.

Also note how soap opera relationships help keep tensions high among the cast.

Sorry if you planned on building your own Seversky Trainer out of paper; I'm more interested in capturing its max. speed and landing speed.

I never thought we'd talk so much about Abbie an' Slats -- but I've said that about a lot of strips by now, haven't I?

What I like about this page is that it deals with the main character's failure to win a scenario. Good guys always win? Not in Abbie an Slats they don't, and your players shouldn't feel like victory is always assured either.

Here we get some pricing information and, while some of it suspect, since the man paying is filthy rich and showing off that fact ($50 a day for room and board?), $40,000 for a high-end Rolls-Royce is definitely still believable, even for the 1930s.

And now, since it's much in the news these days, let's discuss misogyny in golden age comic books. Or, is it ever okay for your character to spank a lady?

Since the object of many role-playing games is to kill your opponents, spanking them seems pretty mild in comparison. I think it's also relevant that she slapped first, and he's doing the same amount of damage back. Would it be worse, or better, if he returned the smack instead of switching to spanking? From a game mechanics standpoint, he has to initiate grappling before he can spank, meaning he's invested more actions in his violent act than she did. And he would have taken an extra element of risk to do so in Hideouts & Hoodlums, as she would have an equal chance as him of reversing the hold!

I would say, had he spanked her butt as she walked away, that would have been a more tit-for-tat for the slap.

Moving on, this is from a full page of For the Record, but I only found the bottom two funny.

The Captain and the Kids also takes an unusual turn this issue, as it becomes a long flashback sequence for the Inspector, in his "youth" back in the 1890s. Note how Mitzi was of age to marry at 16, and everyone objects to the Inspector for leaving her at the altar, not for clearly being at least in his 40s at the time.

A few new nuggets turn up on this page. One is that the steamer's voyage across the Atlantic takes 30 days. Two, I love the detail about finding your way in the New York of the 1930s -- turn right at the lamp post with a cop tied to it. It's a grim detail if the cop happens to be dead, but certainly a good clue for any H&H Heroes that they are about to be on an adventure!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)