Amazing Man Comics #7 - pt. 2

Dinosaur Forest puts forward an intriguing premise -- what if dinosaurs were common enough still that you didn't need to find a lost world setting to find dinosaurs? Here, Jay and Ronald are already following dinosaur tracks in South America as if that was the most natural thing in the world.

The cliche of the whirpool is to see them big enough to swallow a ship, but this is a small whirpool only large enough to unsettle a raft.

The crocodile is pretty unsettling too, but like all opponents in comic books it seems easily dispatched. And with just a knife, no less.

This page makes the knife fight even more extraordinary, as the crocodile is now a "great crocodile" -- which I'm guessing means larger than normal.

This is the second allosaurus in comics.

Or is it an allosaurus? Because that's clearly a triceratops, and the two species didn't live at the same time. But then, we're also imagining that it's normal for them to still be around in 1939, so...

This is from a story called "The King of the South Seas." It posits that a pearl diving company could make $25,000 a month collecting pearls.

The manservant is a pretty awful stereotype, but the lookout is a strong ethnic character. Lookouts will turn up as a mobster-type in H&H later, though it's cut from the 2nd edition basic book for now.  Maybe it needs to have some skill or ability about signalling others over long distances.

That looks like an autocannon/anti-aircraft gun/heavy machine gun on the deck of the pirate ship -- and, by my research, there seems to have been little difference between those three circa 1939. I mention it because anti-aircraft gun is getting an entry in the H&H 2nd ed. basic book.

Three stories in, we not only get an origin story for Iron Skull, but we finally find out when his stories take place. This is a pretty bleak alternate future, where WWII dragged on at least until 1950, and it is now the "future" of 1960.

The Iron Skull sounds like a cyborg, but "android" works just as well and is the race he'd be in H&H. Other than him, color TV is the only other advanced technology so far...

In the future, you don't need to pick up a source from multiple directions to triangulate its source -- you just use a radio direction finder. They must be hard to come by, though, since Iron Skull has one but the police force doesn't.

Iron Skull is a superhero, but he doesn't wreck his way in, even though he easily could. Going for stealth, he uses a window like a mysteryman.

I need to give at least one of the robot types in H&H a self-destruct option.

It only takes Iron Skull minutes to recover, though it isn't clear if he was unconscious or just stunned somehow.

Giants being create-able through mad science needs to be reflected in their mobster stat entry.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)