More Fun Comics #49 - pt. 1

I have a little catching up to do on on More Fun Comics!

I last left off on issue #48, so we pick up again in #49 with the first feature, Wing Brady. For one thing, if he thought he was on the Mediterranean island of Majorca, then he was wrong -- this is the fictional city of Majoca in the Middle East. Second, he quickly faces the indignity of being disarmed by a monkey. Wing is surprised that the bandit leader, Ali Pascha, takes more punches than his average foe and keeps fighting, since Ali is a higher-level fighter and has more hit points.

Wing is trying to escape when he runs into Ali's first lieutenant, and level titles tell us that lieutenants are 4th level fighters. Instead of punching him for damage, though, Wing converts his damage roll into feet pushed and sends the Lt. falling off a 15' tall wall.

Wing is not the vicious, murdering type of hero. He triggers a morale check for the bandits by shooting a machine gun over their heads instead of at them, then scoops up a grenade and uses it on the gates so his reinforcements can get in, rather than use it on the bandits. Grenade explosions can wreck things, just like Heroes.

Wing refers to himself as a lieutenant in the Foreign Legion, which may be the first time we've heard his rank. He has roughly 18,000 xp so far by my page count (I figure 100 xp per page), and that would actually make him a captain by Hideouts & Hoodlums levels.

Biff Bronson accidentally gets a sandwich and soda delivered to him, and the sandwich contains a cryptically written note about a rendezvous and password. More interestingly, we see that meal deliveries used to be in plain brown paper bags, with the soda arriving in a bottle. When they arrive they are told to put in white hoods -- no, not that kind of white hoods! It's a meeting of industrial spies, bent on stopping a new wonder fiber from upsetting the silk industry. Now that's a plot you don't see recycled often! 

This story is also my first confirmation from a comic book that there were "open all night" drug stores around in the 1940s. Biff disguises someone as a corpse by splashing him with mercurochrome (misspelled without the first 'r') to look like blood. Mercurochrome was a topical antiseptic, no longer in use because -- obviously -- it contains mercury. Biff further uses sleeping pills more like a Potion of Feign Death.

The head spy is called The Master-Mind repeatedly in this story and even escapes to come back, making him one of the earliest recurring villains in comic books.

King Carter is a new Hero, one of those features that takes the cowboy out of the West and puts him in exotic locales, in this case China. And the story begins with shades of North by Northwest, with a plane chasing King while he runs on foot! But it's not a villain chasing him, it's a plot hook character. Red Rogers is one of those "old friends" we've never seen before, who invites King on a special mission to photograph a secret Japanese air-base (it is not specified as a Japanese base, but it was pretty clear who most of our war allies were, even as early as late 1939).

King does some wing walking, a surprisingly aviator-specific stunt for a cowboy, before the plane is shot down. Neither King nor Red have parachutes; when the Aviator class debuted, one of its stunts was Find Parachute. Now (in 2nd edition) that would translate into a skill check, which they both must have missed. Somehow they survive the crash unharmed, despite landing between boulders and a tree.

King and Red are overwhelmed by Japanese soldiers. The art isn't very good, but there appears to be no more than six soldiers present. The Japanese are not depicted well, being given names like Ah-Choo and Yee-Poo, and they are made to be stupid, taking King and Red to their leader without tying them up first, or doing anything but put them in a car with a single gunman watching them. 

(Read at comiconline.me)