Miracle Comics #1 - pt. 3

Although the science was a little whacked in Sky Wizard, I still enjoyed the lead feature in this issue. But the rest of it...the rest of it is a train wreck, the kind of train wreck that's hard to look away from. So naturally I'm going to wind up posting most of it!

What? The narrator is helping Dash Dixon? Okay, maybe that's not as weird as it seems -- in game terms, it would be like the referee is coaching the player on what to do, which happens a lot, particularly when you're trying to teach a new player the game.

This is the first we're learning of Dash's bellhop uniform being metal. That means the pockets on his coat have hinges? This too is not too unusual, if the "metal suit" is just flavor text for Dash activating his Nigh-Invulnerable Skin power.

No, what really bugs me is that last panel. Why are they laughing and smiling about how they don't often use their biggest size of coffins? Are they kidding around about executing children? What kind of sick country is this?

Really? Wooden wheels? How medieval does this artist think Europe is?

80' is really high for a castle curtain wall, but Dash has to give it his "all", when just a few pages earlier he was able to jump up to a flying plane?

I actually like the last two panels. They not only give a good sense of motion between, but locking the mob inside the first room is a sound tactic.

"Stop! Metal Bellhop Diaper Man is on your heels!"

"When I count three, run for the orangu!"

Not only does that sound like a messed-up game plan ("Let's run towards the big ferocious animal we want to kill him!"), but why call it an orangutan if you don't even have room to put the whole word in your word balloon? Just call it an ape (and, frankly, it barely even looks like a gorilla, let alone an orangutan)!

No one is forcing you to kill the dumb animal, Dash! Don't do it!

Of course he kills it. Sigh.

The false chimney that serves as a secret roof entrance, now that intrigues me. But wouldn't it have made more sense to drop the poisonous gas into the false chimney, where there would be no room to escape it?

When did the doctor give him "anti-gas capsules?" Is this flavor text to go along with him making his saving throw vs. poison?

On a similar note, does Dash really have "high-explosive capsules," or is that just flavor text for how his wrecking things works?

This is the next feature, The Scorpion. Ooo, sounds like we're going to get a dose of pulp noir, right? No...the Scorpion is the curly-haired guy who gets captured on page 2 by gangsters. Gangsters who know exactly where he lives, and write him threatening notes, written the same way they talk..

The gangsters wanted to bring the Scorpion and his butler along so they could witness them stealing an armored car, before trying to kill them. When the Scorpion wouldn't even have known about their plans had they not brought them.

So, the plan was to roll the car down a steep hill so that the Scorpion and Judd would crash and die at the bottom, but the car veers off the wrong side of the hill and goes into a pond. Rather than letting the car take the force of the impact with the water, they decide to jump out and take their chances with landing in the water on their own, along with the risk of the car landing on them when they all hit the water. And then somehow the car bursts into flames -- on contact with the water. Uh-huh. It's so hard to even wrap my head around this so I can assign game mechanics to it.

Or -- is the Scorpion secretly a genius? Has he outwitted the deathtrap by changing the conditions of it, so that it is not a deathtrap anymore, but merely a trap, and hence doesn't cause lethal damage (at least in H&H terms)?  Yes, that must be it.

...Nope, don't look at me. I cannot explain away that goofy first panel. I guess they're meant to be jumping over the police officers' heads? But even with a running start, how are they clearing six feet -- vertically? Or do they have a levitate spell we weren't told about?

Stealing police motorbikes is handy because you never know what you'll find on them. In this case, it was a pouch full of tear gas bombs. I suppose I will have to work out how many tear gas bombs can fit in a pouch now. A quick Google search tells me that military pouches would not have more than 2-3 grenades in it, so that seems logical.

And lastly, this is Blanda the Jungle Queen. It says a lot about your expectations when "bland" is right there in the title.

The map is not a good trace, but I suspect that coastline is from the Gabon territory of French Equatorial Africa.

(Scans from Comic Book Plus.)