Smash Comics #8 - pt. 1

It's good to be back around to Quality Comics again. Not that we haven't seen plenty of Will Eisner over at Fiction House and Fox, but I have a special love for Espionage, and I think Will did too. There's a lot of good anti-war messages in Eisner's early work, and here we see a pretty good summary of how terrible the war in Europe is going so far, with accurate dating for Germany's early conquests and only the curious prediction that they would move to China next.  The prediction that Germany's army would be stymied at France will turn out to be disastrously false over the course of just four days, two months after the cover date of this comic. 

Eisner put a lot of work into this story -- almost as much as he will soon into The Spirit -- so we won't skip a page of it.  Luckily, I think we can find something to talk about on every page.

Here, in the final panel, we see the value of relying on random rolls to see if anything turns up in a search. Just saying "I check the closet" shouldn't give you an automatic success, though being specific should give you a bonus.

We don't often get treated to foreign languages in American comics, but the German in panel 9 is asking "Where is the one we are looking for?"







I'm not convinced the name of the former high official of the German intelligence would have been common knowledge to an American in 1940, but we know today that this is likely General Kurt von Schleicher, who was head of the Ministry of Defense until Hitler changed it to the Ministry of War in 1935.

I think it's interesting that Black X refuses to take on the same plot hook from one character, but will take it if given by another. This reminds me of a player I have right now.

Saarbrücken is the capital and largest city of the state of Saarland, Germany. Saarbrücken is Saarland's administrative, commercial and cultural centre and is next to the French border.

There are great details here, from the strategy of substituting for a corpse to get on an ambulance (I'm guessing he let them make sure the man was dead first, then created a distraction and replaced the corpse on the stretcher), to needing to shave because it took so many days just to cross the French-German border. Panels 1-3 are great action scenes, while panels 8 and 9 are dramatically angled. And yet, despite 12-panel pages, it hardly feels crowded on the page.

Koblenz, spelled Coblenz before 1926, is a German city situated on both banks of the Rhine where it is joined by the Moselle.

When the secrets Gale is carrying are revealed, they don't sound that valuable to me.

It seems incredible that Madam Doom just happens to be hanging out at this particular guardpost when Black X happens by. Still, it's very comic book-y if you insert a recurring villain into your wandering encounter table every so often.

I wouldn't say it's incredible, but perhaps remarkable (forgive me, I've been playing more Marvel Super Heroes lately) that the shrapnel blast somehow misses both Gale and Black X, but does enough damage to kill the driver. I suppose they were outside the "save for half" radius and in a "save for none" radius.

 Batu uses...the Phantasmal Image spell? It's been a loooong time since I first discussed in Supplement IV if Batu is an example of psionics or not, and we don't have to revisit that here. Just enjoy some delightful character moments, followed by one of Eisner's signature anti-war messages direct to the reader in the final panel.

And, as an added bonus...it's been a long time since I last shared single panel comic strips. I like these two, particularly the one on the right. I had to think about it about as long as that girl is...

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

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.)

Feature Comics #26

I've talked before about how easy disguise needs to be in Hideouts & Hoodlums, and how easy it should be for Heroes to disguise themselves as mobsters. But here we see how easy it is for mobsters to disguise themselves as mobsters too!

Captain Fortune stops to woo a maiden in the street. Because he's such a lady's man? No, so she'll be moved to lie about seeing him! Given the conventions of the genre, it should only take a positive encounter reaction result to get a fair maiden to do that for you.

From Mickey Finn we learn that you could make up to $10 a day selling brushes door to door.

The Clock and this thug/robber tell us that this lone mobster managed to net $250,000 over three robberies. That's an awful lot of money to leave in a hideout as recoverable loot. I've tried before to deal with a solid demarcation between recoverable loot and claimable treasure, but the line remains frustratingly blurry, particularly with Heroes of different Alignments.

Back when I first read this story, I thought "Oh, how unusual -- a mysteryman knows hypnotism!" It was the first indication (there will be more) that The Clock doesn't fit just the mysteryman class. It was also an early example that the mysteryman class was varied enough and led to my adopting the concept of stunts for them instead of set skills.

By now, though, I've read every kind of character practice hypnotism and it's not so big a deal anymore...

This is Rance Kean's strip, but the real star of this page is the sharpshooting outlaw Dirk Purdue who managed to shoot half the mustache off a man through an open window.

Now, there is the fact that this only happened to a supporting cast member, was not crucial to a combat or a life-or-death situation, and so the Editor could choose to hand-wave game mechanics in instances like these and just say that happened. However, doing this sets a precedent for "impossible shots" being possible in your game and players will ask to try the same things eventually.

I would require a natural 20 on the attack roll for an impossible shot like that (giving a generous 5% chance of success).

This is from a filler page called Off-Side.  I include it mainly for the gag on the right, which is what I feel like whenever people around me are talking about sports.

This is a well-equipped Charlie Chan, with a miner's helmet and gas mask, but even those aren't enough to save him from a cave-in. Cave-ins are tricky, mechanics-wise. The damage from the falling weight alone should be enough to render Charlie unconscious, and then the continuing damage from having that weight on top of him should kill him. Perhaps a generous Editor would allow two saves here -- a save vs. missiles to avoid the initial falling damage and a save vs. science to avoid the continuing damage (assuming the rubble all became miraculously balanced over him).

Here, Charlie beats a dynamite stick in initiative and gets the chance to toss it away; dynamite sticks get thrown at the end of the turn, ignoring normal procedure for missiles, and don't go off until their opportunity in the next turn.

It's unclear what Kirk is doing, but it seems he's shooting the second dynamite stick in mid-air. While not an impossible shot, I'd be inclined to make a dynamite stick thrown in the dark to be AC 2 or even 1...

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

Funny Page v. 3 #8

The Arrow leads this issue, and I have to say I think this is the best installment yet.

This page tells us something about the value of gems, without really telling us much. A "set" of star-sapphires can be worth half a million dollars!  But how many are in a set? Assuming it was a set of 10, that would still be $50,000 each.  At the end of the story it is revealed that each set is mounted on a bracelet, so maybe this is more reflective of the value of jewelry.

Here we get an interesting tactic for bad guys to use. Borrowing a car for a getaway car is an unusual twist on the cliche of using a stolen car. The pro is that it's easier to trade cars afterwards, and the con is that you might leave a witness behind who can describe you and your "new" vehicle.

And here's a good tip from the other side -- our Hero, The Arrow, is chasing a car, but doesn't know if this is the right car or not (we don't know if the garage attendant gave him the license plate number or not). So he follows the car anyway and watches for a suspicious reaction. Even without knowing details of the car, he could have followed any car he saw on this road until one driver betrayed himself.

Just last post, I talked about that being the first time I'd ever seen a waterlogged gun not work in comics. Here we already see another dripping wet gun shooting normally again.

Wreck at range. An Editor can require an attack roll with wrecking, but it depends on circumstances (I would require it here, given the size of the target).

 Dark!

The price of duck was 32 cents per pound.

Windy, normally a one-page gag strip, was upgraded to two pages this issue. Though not a serious adventure strip, this haunted house could still make a good encounter area, and "Haunting Inc." is an idea worth exploring...

After a long absence, Abdallah finally returns with a new installment. Here we see that the "dragons" that inhabit Abdallah's Arabian fantasy world are actually dinosaurs. This is the first allosaurus in comics. Wisely, Abdallah high-tails it out of there on the next page and doesn't try to fight them. Dinosaurs would have such scary high Hit Dice that I haven't included any of them yet in the 2nd edition basic book (except for giant pterodactyls).

This is the 2nd griffin/gryphon in comics. Interestingly, it is an underworld guardian and not encountered outdoors where it could make use of its wings.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Jumbo Comics #9

I don't always have perfect digital copies of old comic books to look at, and Jumbo Comics is a perfect example of that. So far, I've had to settle for looking at the entire series in black and white. Normally, that doesn't trouble me greatly, but I do wish I could see "The Golden City" here in color, and determine how much of that "golden" is literal description and how much of it is hyperbole.

We get treated to some great visuals of this hidden land, most especially the courtyard of a palace. We see a dais, two trees growing up behind a throne carved to look like a many-armed demon. A man on the throne, flanked by trained apes. Looks to be quite an encounter!

A rare instance of a gun jam in comics.

The ape is using its "rend" special attack on Bob. Bob doesn't seem to be appreciating it.

The ape takes lethal damage from a fall. Bob was knocked out after two turns of fighting an ape (really, the ape just wailing on him mercilessly), but here is already recovered just a turn or two later.

The text doesn't match up with the pictures when Sheena and Bob fall into the trap. The caption says they are entering the courtyard, but they just fought the apes in the courtyard. It must mean "As they enter the palace".

The ol' trap door leading to an underground river trap. Note that Bob tries and falls to save them by holding onto the trap door, suggesting that the Editor gave them a saving throw to try and save themselves.

Peter Pupp runs into a 20' tall moon giant. They look and act like hill giants, but they're as big as cloud giants.

The Hawk fights Gor, a black "giant". Gor is able to pay "no attention to the rain of punches", probably because he's statted as a thug, and has a thug's Armor Class, despite wearing no actual armor. The Hawk keeps swinging, but isn't actually hitting well enough to do damage yet.

I think that's pretty funny.

Wilton of the West is teamed up with the Crimson Rider with this issue, the Crimson Rider being a cowboy, but of the Mysteryman class. My evidence of this? Mysterymen trigger morale saves as soon as they show up, while other classes have to do something first.

The Crimson Rider isn't concerned about making a 20' leap on horseback, and probably for good reason. The world record for a jumping horse leap is 28', so I'd probably give the Crimson Rider a ...4 in 6 chance of making the jump successfully?

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

Amazing Mystery Funnies v. 2 #7 - pt. 1

Something I've struggled with for Hideouts & Hoodlums 2nd edition is whether or not the game needs both dual classed and multi-classed Heroes (the former gain xp in one class at a time, the latter divide their xp between multiple classes at once). Can there be a better case for including multi-classing than the Fantom? Look at that agility (often considered a facet of Dexterity, the prime requisite for the Mysterymen class), look at the flair of his stunt, and look at his style of intimidation -- all hallmarks of the Mysteryman class. But what's this? He can also easily snap a rifle in half? Wrecking things? Is he a Mysteryman/Superhero?

Here's more evidence of the Superhero class, as Fantom uses the power Feather Landing to drop 200 feet.

It's not clear how The Fantom passes through the ground. On this page, it appears he can become intangible. On the next page, it says he went through a trapdoor that we never saw him open. Maybe it's some sort of revolving trap door that you just have to land on a certain way to make rotate...

If it wasn't clear before this page, The Fantom of the Fair (he's at the World's Fair, get it?) is a modern version of The Phantom of the Opera. But what's this? Now he's casting a spell? A Forget spell? So he's a multi-classed Magic-User/Mysteryman/Superhero. And he can't be dual classed because he hasn't had other adventures to switch classes on -- this is his first adventure!

Okay, I've got to admit this is pretty cool. The Fantom punches through an exterior wall (which means he's wrecking at 2nd level, at least), puts the guy on the other side in a headlock (at -4 to hit, because he can't see through the wall), and pins the guy to the other side of the wall.

A player in my current online H&H campaign has a background like this -- mysterious group funds his adventures.I haven't made any real use of them yet, but I like how The Inner Circle is composed of talented supporting cast who could all be useful to the Hero.

In my campaign, the group is based out of Los Angeles instead of Glasgow, and is strictly limited to U.S. interests instead of global missions. I could see a campaign where Heroes hop from organization to organization like this, moving up to a bigger organization as they go up in level.

Hong Kong sounds like a pretty exciting locale to base a H&H campaign around. The war zone there and the bombing campaign are seldom touched on in Western accounts of WWII. And "fish pirates" -- what's not to love about that evocative term?

And this is really smart playing, scouting out the base (or hideout) at night, then making plans, and even agreeing not to harm a particular class of mobster (natives) they might encounter. If they make any mistake, it's leaving their fake fishing boat too close to the hideout (though maybe they were going for a "hide in plain sight" strategy).

Warning shots? Oh, I'm jealous. My players almost never try warning shots first! Look at this strategy -- the Heroes' goal isn't to kill the mobsters, but to destroy the buildings. So they're shooting warning shots to force morale saves, hoping just to get the mobsters out of the buildings first. When that fails, they sneak up to the buildings and plant their fires, then let the mobsters go with just a warning!

Now, meta-gaming wise, this is actually poor playing because they may not get any experience points for defeating the mobsters, and they'll loose any xp from claiming trophies from the hideout since they burned the buildings down before looting them. With this style of play, though, the Editor serves the players better by awarding one big xp award for an accomplished mission, rather than for the details of the mission.

I know this is just gag filler, but...how sad is this? We're just 23 years from 2039 now, and not only do we have no manned presence on any other planets, but we're nowhere near building a spaceship able to travel 50,000 MPH. The fastest ever is Voyager 1, which is currently going 38,000 MPH.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)