"Clip" Carson takes place in Algiers, the capital city of Algeria. Rescuing a man from attackers serves as both good deed and plot hook for Clip, as he winds up working as a guard on a caravan for the man he rescued. In a plot twist, the man told Clip he was delivering food to a sheikh, but is secretly an arms dealer; further, he plans to have Clip killed after the delivery, so he can't tell anyone he delivered arms to the sheikh. The sheikh's people are called "touregs" by the narrator, but what was meant was Touareg or Tuareg -- a Berber ethnicity indigenous to the Sahara region.
Because disguise is such an easy skill in comic books, staining your skin to look dark with a cigarette and water should be a basic skill check (as improbable as it may seem...).
This story is the first time I've seen the term "tractor car;" I suspect what the author means is a four-wheel drive vehicle, which were around but uncommon circa 1940 (in the late '30s they were considered luxury cars and produced by BMW and Mercedes-Benz). Clip tells us his tractor car can go 40 MPH over sand.
The "Clip" Carson art is much improved this issue by Sheldon Moldoff.
Tex Thompson is back home from his Africa adventures, home probably being Texas, even though the narrator never tells us so. This one's a murder mystery, and it's intriguing at first that the retired colonel is murdered right in front of Tex. Unfortunately, the clues are easy (why send a wooden figure to the victim made out of a special wood only you own?) and the explanation for where the knife came from is far from convincing. Also, there's the whole uncomfortably racist, nonhuman look of Gargantuan.
The Three Aces adventure starts in Alaska at the building of a Koyokuk Dam. I don't believe there is such a facility, though the Koyokuk River is real. None of the action takes place there, but it establishes that one job for aviators in their downtime is aerial photography. The Three Aces leave and fly over an unnamed mountain range, but in Alaska there are only three to choose from, the Alaskan Range, the Aleutian Range, and the Brooks Range.
Uncharacteristic of most fighter-types in comics, when Gunner, Fog, and Whistler arrive in town and see a fight in progress, but don't know the story behind it, they use nonviolent attacks like tripping and disarming to end the fight without hurting anyone.
The Three Aces help an old prospector who tells of his friend's find in the Mummy Range. It sounds made up, but there is such a place as Mummy Range -- only it's in Colorado, not Alaska. There is a Bald Peak in Alaska, so the old man's story is soon back on track.
Fred Guardineer's Zatara teams up with "Lord Ralway" in this month's story, but the dialogue strongly implies that Ralway is actually Lord Baskerville, of Sherlock Holmes fame. Sherlock Holmes is name checked as a real person, making this the first time he is added to DC canon.
Zatara casts a Levitate/Telekinesis spell powerful enough to lift a car into the air. He projects his astral form from his jail cell after being detained in a murder investigation. His astral form is invisible, but he can speak and be heard. His astral form can also fly and move through walls. Bizarrely, Zatara's astral form is able to carry Tong on its back, though perhaps he is simply levitating Tong directly behind him.
Zatara turns the bars of his cell into people, which seems ridiculously overpowered for a spell, even if it only lasts 1 turn. He turns a man into a salt cellar (what we would call a shaker today). Another man he ages by about 20 years. He turns the murdered body into a statuette so he's easy to carry. Tong -- who is way too understandable about this -- gets turned into a blood hound so he can sniff out Ralway's trail.
With another spell he causes all gun barrels to twist in a specific area. With another spell he gazes into a room he hasn't entered yet (Wizard Eye?). With another spell he teleports two people to him. With yet another spell he causes three large buckets of molten lead to appear in the room. He casts Cure Light Wounds on Tong, but we've seen him do that before. Lastly, he casts a spell something like Bigby's Grasping Hand to catch the two fleeing bad guys.
In a real surprise, Zatara says his magic has little effect on birds, so he is worried about three trained condors. There's no way to make the game mechanics do this without setting arbitrary weaknesses to spells, but that's not entirely unreasonable, as I've already added them to some of the race options.
Lastly, I would not put much stock in condors as a palpable threat, assigning them maybe 1/2 HD.
(Read at fullcomic.pro)
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