Mystery Men Comics #7 - pt. 2

We're moving on through Mystery Men Comics and have reached the Rex Dexter of Mars feature now. There are some interesting predictions here, including automation replacing the workforce (coming true in the 21st century), a "people mover" (ala Disneyland), vitamins replacing food (never going to happen), and slide projectors in history class (occurred by mid-20th century).

That "high-powered machine" does look fairly realistic for a rocket car.

A truth ray gun is handheld, has a short range, but requires a save vs. science or the victim is compelled to tell the truth. The fatal ray gun is unseen, but the effect is save or die.

Moving right along, this is from Green Mask (what started out as the lead feature). The idea presented here intrigues me, that mobstertypes can be further broken down by geography-linked specialization -- so that a St. Louis hoodlum would be a kidnapper, but a Chicago hoodlum wouldn't be a kidnapper because their specialty is bumping off the competition. I think it's too late to restructure the hoodlum entries to fit this concept, but it could work for an individual campaign.

I'm also intrigued by this, where the bad guys use the Hero's own stool pigeon to invite him to meet with them. Everything I've written to date about supporting cast members is from the player's perspective, but the Editor can have villains using or manipulating those same SCMs too. 

Note just that last panel -- it's very rare for us to see a knife-wielder disarmed by an attack, while the gunman manages to hold onto his weapon. This points to the randomness of disarming attacks and that gun disarming should not be automatic, despite how often it happens in other instances I've cited here.

$50 million might just be the biggest jackpot any bad guys have talked about going after to date.

These same bad guys are stupid enough to discuss their secret plan without checking to see if Green Mask really left first, or if he might be listening in.

I just spoke the other day about complications in vehicular combat. I need to compile a lot more of them; here is the best/worst case scenario (depending on your point of view -- the direct hit, which automatically (?) destroys the vehicle.

This is an unusually racist installment, even for Chen Chang, but long-time readers know I'm a sucker for this Munson Paddock artwork. There have been some efforts to portray the Chinese-Japanese conflict of WWII in the early comic books to this point, but none that portrayed the savagery of the fighting with the intensity that Munson manages here. Bear in mind how rare 3-panel pages were in comic books of this time; the creators of this story really wanted to highlight how terrible the war over there was by making it impossible to ignore on this page.

But the rest of the story focuses on Richard Kendall's efforts to save these school teachers from Chen's clutches. Just out of sheer malice he tortures them in a spiked-descending-ceiling trap, and then instead of tying them to railroad tracks, ties them to the front of two trains and plans to smash them into each other. That is EVIL!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)