Funny Picture Stories v. 3 #2

It's still feast or famine, art-wise, from Centaur Comics, and we return to Funny Picture Shows with some surprisingly amateurish art in this outing. Still, there's a good number of clues to look for at a crime scene listed here.

It is just assumed by the story that the tug skipper comes to the warehouse without any trouble, but getting non-Heroes to move around to where you need them can be a tricky part of any Hideouts & Hoodlums scenario, particularly for Heroes with low Charisma, or bad luck at encounter reaction rolls.

The plot also relies on the cliche of flushing the bad guys out with a classified ad. More crooks would avoid getting caught if they stopped reading newspapers!

When you ask for a motor launch and provisions and get that, plus told where to go and given a sailor to help you, you've either made a really good encounter reaction roll, or your Editor thinks the scenario might be too difficult for you after all.

But if you're ever playing H&H and feel like you're not catching any breaks, just remember this guy. He got a motor launch, provisions, directions, and a helpful supporting cast, then got to trade the motor launch for a seaplane, but then crashes the seaplane and loses his SCMs. And when he does try to confront the villain alone, he's immediately captured. The Editor would be well within his rights to just scrap the entire campaign at this point. If something unbelievably unlucky happened to the villain now that flipped the situation back around for the Hero...well, that would be too unbelievable even for a comic book, right?

...Apparently not.

As hard as it is to believe, this guy in green is supposed to look like a mummy. Fake mummies will become such a common cliche in comic books that maybe they should be their own mobster type.

This trap is really weird. The pool in front of them is full of acid, so just pushing them in would finish them off pretty fast. But instead the killer ties them up so they are balanced right on the edge of the pool, so they will...yeah, I don't get it. Even if they lost their balance, they would just be dangling from the rope, right?

Maybe the best thing to take away from this page is the idea of using mummies to smuggle dope. I never would have guessed that was what was inside the missing mummy.

I have to say, in 15 1/2 months of doing this blog, this may have been the worst single issue I've ever had to plow through. At the end, completely incongruous to the rest of the issue, is a weird prototype of the Tales of Asgard stories Marvel Comics will start doing over 20 years later. Truer to Norse mythology than Marvel, Loki is not a villain in this story.