Detective Comics #13

Crashing never seems to be very dangerous in comic books. Here, fighting Speed Saunders, we see two men plow through a windshield after a crash, and one of them is still up and fighting afterwards. I would probably only roll 1d6 damage for each occupant in a car crash, regardless of how fast the car was going (under most circumstances; perhaps doubled if it was two cars crashing into each other).

Bars are handy places to listen for rumors, or be spotted by hostile wandering encounters.

Speed will reveal on the next page that he's fine because he was wearing a bulletproof vest. Armor keeps you from being "hit" in Hideouts & Hoodlums (as opposed to damage reduction), but that doesn't mean that people might not think you were hit if you time it right and fall forward, like Speed does here.

Remember not to play your cowardly hoodlums too smart. Speed Saunders had nothing on this judge, not even a suspicion he was involved, until this hoodlum blurted it out. Had the hoodlum played it smart, he would have kept his trap shut, got a message to the judge, and asked if the judge could arrange to preside over his case and let him off, in exchange for his silence. In fact, bad guys in comic books are usually pretty dumb!

Stan Asch will go on to do a lot of superhero art in the "future", of which I've never particularly been a fan, but here we see that his true strength was always in gag filler.

Not long after my last observation about car crashes, here we find Larry Steele also walking away from a car crash without a scratch!  It seems that Heroes should get a save vs. missiles to avoid car crash damage, just like dodging bullets.

Book III: Underworld & Metropolis Adventures includes (ends with, really) a short section on vehicular combat rules that makes it very difficult to hit someone else in a speeding vehicle. One could, perhaps, make an argument that it should not be as hard to hit the speeding car itself, or its tires, as common as that type of hit is in car chases.




I'm just going to summarize the Slam Bradley adventure. Slam is having a slow day, so he decides to visit a seedy waterfront saloon dressed to the nines, just to provoke a fight (or maybe he needed just a little more XP to level up!).  The improvised weapons in the fight are a chair and a bottle. Slam and Shorty find a plot hook on a sheet of paper in a wallet that they take after the fight. Winding up on board a ship, Slam is repeatedly clubbed unconscious and winds up in the brig, only to escape and do something else that winds him back up in the brig. This is the kind of stubborn determination that low-level H&H Heroes need -- low hit points means being beat up and imprisoned by bad guys often!

Uh-oh. Slam also demonstrates the ability to pick pockets. Another stunt that has to be available to Fighters!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Archives)