Planet Comics #1 - pt. 2

Here's something you didn't know would happen! Early in the 21st century -- like maybe 2018 -- interplanetary travel will become so commonplace that a single family might take their cruiseship out for a joyride to Uranus.

Now this is where things get interesting. The boy is a lone survivor in a savage land...adopted by a saber-tooth tiger. Could this have been the inspiration for the Silver Age Ka-Zar?

Luckily, Jupiter is not a gas giant at all, but a very Earth-like environment except for the gravity.

Auro appears to be using the powers Raise Car (to uproot a tree) and Wall-Crawling (to climb that sheer mountain).

Auro appears to be using the power Multi-Attack here. I have no doubt anymore that he would be statted as an alien superhero (alien because this isn't his home world and he has strange powers here).

These natives are ape men in all but name, no doubt the only line this sci fi Tarzan clone won't cross.

This page interests me for two reasons. One, how did Martha fix her plane? In the page I didn't bother sharing, her plane was hit by a raygun and fell into Jupiter's atmosphere because of some unspecified complication the raygun caused. So what could she have fixed from the inside? And should pilots always have a chance to fix a complication when their vehicle takes damage? This actually came up in my home campaign last session; the mad scientist's autogyro was shot down with a machine gun, but I gave the scientist a skill check to get it back in the air.

And then the other thing is the weakness in this plan. The "pretend to be captured" plan is an old cliche, but how can the King of Neptune be dense enough to think he has ape men from Jupiter working for him?

The Red Comet is billed as a mystery man and, I am hoping, we will soon see evidence that he belongs to the mysteryman Hero class.

Spider-people "return", though they look a lot different than they did in the Basil Wolverton story in Amazing Mystery Funnies. Their webs are somehow so powerful that rayguns cannot blast through them.

Okay, The Red Comet is decidedly not a mysteryman; he's superhero all the way! Here he wrecks things on the steel nets and covers 50 miles in seconds. That second feat has to be the Race the Plane power, as there's no way size alone would give him the ability to move that fast. In fact, though he may well be using an "infra-atomic space adjuster" as a trophy item that lets him Enlarge like the magic-user spell, the enlargement would not be responsible for any of the things he pulls off here, and might just be flavor text.

That Red Comet is back down to normal size again suggests to me that Enlargement must have a duration. Or maybe it's a giant spider-man? I'm not sure at this point.

There is no result on the grappling table for "tied up like a pretzel," though I kind of wish there was now.

His shrinking ability seems much less impressive than his growing ability, as shrinking ability usually is. Diminution seems to only grant him a better chance of surprise, while Enlargement lets him...well, let's say squashing hundreds of spider-men takes a considerable number of combat turns, even buffed with both Multi-Attack and Flurry of Blows.

This page interests me for two reasons. One, Red Comet finds it easier to bust through 20' of solid rock (using his wrecking things ability, or maybe the power Dig) than it is to bust through 20' of spider-man web. The web gun, then, in addition to being a powerful entangling weapon, seems to also be able to generate walls equal to a Wall of Force spell.

The other thing is Red Comet's "Robin Hood"-ness, which I guess places him in the Chaotic Alignment category.

This is Captain Nelson Cole of the Solar Force, and this building is amazingly unharmed after rockets are shot out into space from the side of it.

150,000 miles from Earth is closer than the Moon. The enemy is really close!

Magnetic rayguns can sort of act like tractor beams, I guess.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)