Amazing Mystery Funnies v. 2 #12 - pt. 1

I have been surprisingly enjoying The Fantom of the Fair, so I was wondering what this feature would do once the World's Fair closed down at the end of the year. It turns out he wasn't so tied to that location after all, as he's already just packed up and gone off to Pennsylvania to fight crime!

Swinging out of nowhere to save a falling woman is pretty typical comic book fare, but on just the page before this, Jane was using that whip on her employees! Things aren't cut and dried here; should The Fantom be rescuing Jane, or her employees from her? It would be interesting if a Hideouts & Hoodlums Editor had been running this and intended for the player to do the later, but the player misunderstood the situation and did the former. Editors need to be flexible in what players can justify as good deeds, and award them with XP accordingly.

I'm tempted to say this is evidence of a new power called Unpassable. You would not be able to move past the Hero and the Hero could block an area 10' wide. It would probably be a 1st level power.

The Fantom probably gets called a tough guy because he's using the Get Tough power -- which makes sense; he can now transfer his extra damage into feet pushed, via the pushing rule for combat. He must also be buffed with Multi-Attack, since he's able to push multiple opponents at once.

I don't think we need a power for swinging. I do like that this combat takes place both horizontally and vertically. Multi-level encounter areas give the Editor and players that much room for creativity.

I've written before about using saves vs. plot to see through disguises, which would also apply to recognizing voices -- but the real reason I shared this page was so that I could rant about the changes made to the Fantom strip in this issue. Before, the Fantom did not appear to be masked -- his hair was visible in silhouette, and he was always somehow magically in silhouette no matter what the lighting, and with his blue costume and red cape...he could have been Superman. Now, he's very clearly not and is so much less interesting for it.

We've briefly seen Daredevil Barry Finn on this blog before, though he really seems more like a soap opera star than a daredevil. We first met Frogga back in issue #5 and he seemed more monstrous; here he's a comic sidekick character, despite being an artificially created merman.

Frogga fights a huge octopus (which, if we keep the large/huge/giant dynamics, we know falls halfway between the other two Hit Dice-wise).

Oil of Corrosion is a powerful consumable trophy that destroys everything it touches and does at least 1-6 points of damage to living targets.

Basil Wolverton's Space Patrol debuts here (Basil Wolverton's debut too!).  We see here how cleanly Basil lifts the tropes of the cowboy genre and transplants them in space, from the patrolling lawman and loyal sidekick, to bank robbing, to chasing bandits.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)