Science Comics #2 - pt. 4

We return now to Dr. Doom, the evil mad scientist who isn't really out to conquer the future so much as just to put small groups of people into weird situations. Case in point, this battle in a cage against "mosquitoes" after being shrunken down to smaller-than-mosquito size. I had to go back two pages and double check to make sure that page really said mosquitoes -- it did! -- but it seems no one told the artist.

Perhaps of more use to us would be a discussion of how to handle breaking a mount, game mechanically, in Hideouts & Hoodlums. One could argue it would be a skill check. It could also be an encounter reaction roll for the animal. Since breaking in a mount shouldn't be easy, I would require both rolls. In terms of skills, I would treat making it rideable as a basic skill, but if you wanted to teach it a trick, an expert skill.

And now even the writer has forgotten what they are! Unless, of course, mosquitoes have mutated into more of a bee-like creature at some point in the future. The thought here in the last panel is that all animals, like the myth about bulls, get angry when they see red. Indeed, the solution on the next panel is to throw all their red clothes into a pile and the "mosquitoes" all kill themselves stinging the floor through the pile. Yeah...

How many fish-men can be in an encounter? The answer is "lots." I'm not sure if that third panel is even countable, but fish-men are clearly very organized and militaristic (Lawful Evil, as they would be known in the AH&H Mobster Manual).

I don't have much to add here, except to say that despite how obviously the fish-men are all traced, the composition is really good.

Navy Jones was already a strange feature, but it runs into overdrive here as Navy encounters a fiendish trap where people strapped onto railway cars are transported into the waiting maws of a gigantic carnivorous plant. Yes, that two-headed thing is supposed to be a plant! I don't know for sure how to stat that thing. It looks gigantic, but being a mostly hollow plant, probably doesn't weigh nearly as much as it looks like it would. Maybe 13 HD, normal 6-sided hit dice, would not be unreasonable.

Those rayguns use a really obtuse-angled ray, able to hit up to  5 targets at short range. I bet their maximum range is not very far, as diffuse as it must be.

If you hurtle out a window, underwater, wouldn't you just float there?

I like sea swine, though. Those are so cute!

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Science Comics #1 - pt. 4

I have a few more unimpressive pages of this issue left to share. This page of Dr. Doom features Jan and Wanda discovering that the shrink ray used on them had a limited duration, but before they return to normal size they encounter an ordinary crab and -- well, I can tell you that I would not want to encounter a crab anywhere near that large. From the scale of it, it looks like it would be 30' in diameter compared to them if they were regular size.

I'll give them this: Navy Jones is a clever name for an adventure feature. But this artwork is dismal and those fish-men look cartoonish in the worst way. By "fish-men" we might be supposed to be thinking of Namor's mermen, as they have an underground city somewhat similar, and fish-men are usually primitive in other comic books.

You wouldn't expect this, but apparently you can hurl rocks -- okay, coral -- underwater just as effectively as above water.

This turns out to be Navy Jones' origin story, as instead of a human fighter he's now a merman thanks to surgery. Mermen are the only class that can be half-human and still gain full racial benefits. 

I've talked about Heroes using living shields before, so I'll just point out that Navy seems to be using the Extend Missile Range I power, which makes him a merman superhero, and our second after Namor.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)