Detective Comics #14

200th post!

There's no Bruce Nelson on this page of Bruce Nelson, but there are some interesting items here. Skeleton keys always seem to work in comic books, so they must make for great trophy items.

Hollow brushes also make for useful items. Note that our burglar wasn't intentionally searching the brush, but just got lucky on her "notice things" roll.

Bart Regan and Sally are up against spies who have stolen a molecular friction raygun -- which sounds a lot like a fancy name for a heat ray to me. On the bright side, it seems to take a full turn for the friction to build up enough to wreck things or harm anyone, plenty of time for people to, oh, hop out of a car that's been struck. A good threat for 1st level Heroes, maybe.

There's not a lot of Hideouts & Hoodlums content on this page of Cosmo, but I'm really amused that these guys are poultry racketeers. "You're gonna buy your chickens from us, see?" "You buy our poultry at our price, or you'll get your head cracked open like an egg." I can't see statting them anyway special, unless I made a new entry called laughable hoodlum.



There's also a nice Slam Bradley story I'm not going to share here, that starts with a plane crash, includes surviving a blizzard in an igloo, and lots of punching people. Worth noting is that Slam beats up a drunken hoodlum, and that his plane cost $13,000 (Heroes have really been enjoying revealing how much their planes cost/are worth lately).

There's also a short, but pivotal fight where Slam and the unnamed master criminal grapple underwater, trying to drown each other. This would be difficult to play out in H&H, with its 1-minute combat turns. Likely, the combat would be resolved by a single pair of attack rolls before it would be over -- which is actually pretty close to how quickly the fight is resolved in the comic book.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Archives)