Still plowing through the inaugural issue of Science Comics and...boy, this is becoming a tougher and tougher read! I think Electro was the best thing they had ready and quickly whipped up a bunch of sci fi filler to go around it.
Case in point,
Cosmic Carson, with its near empty rooms on this page, and its almost entirely empty three panels on the last page.
That said, I do like the symmetry of that last wide panel on this page, and an empty entrance hall with a single guard manning a machine gun...well, it has merits for hideout design.
...As does this "acid well." I'm not sure what you would use an acid well for, but it's an interesting detail, and could make for a potent trap too.
Here we have another interplanetary adventure taking place in the future of the year 2000. It's adorable how confident we used to be in the march of progress.
The Interplanetary Transport Company reminds me of
Futurama. But what, do you suppose, does it mean by "air routes?" Surely this author doesn't think there's air in space? If you can call fighters "space fighters" (which is what the class Fighter should be called in a sci-fi campaign, by the way!), then you should be able to figure out to call them "space routes."
Although the slavers are an intergalactic threat, with a base on Saturn, they look disappointingly like ordinary humans.
But there's something much fisher going on here -- if Payne is going from Earth to the Moon to refuel, how on Earth (*ahem*) does the slave ship get to the Moon just minutes later? Distances make no sense in these early comics. I'm not sure how to emulate that in
Hideouts & Hoodlums, but I'm also not sure I care to.
Marga the Panther Woman is a weird one. At times looking like a Sheena rip-off, Marga is a woman in the future endowed with panther-like fighting ability by a mad scientist. After the scientist kills himself, Marga escapes and goes on this little mini-rampage, killing that poor little tiger with her claws.
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A long time ago, a suggested race for H&H was the beastman, but I never had good examples of them in comic books. Marga is the perfect example, though, and we see how beastmen would have a short list of mutations to choose from, like how she gets claws.
"Protective current" isn't clearly defined here, but probably means an electric forcefield that either greatly enhances Armor Class or buffs the ship with a defensive power, as if it was a superhero.
Although these look like spaceships, their portholes and glass cockpits and
holes in the walls serving as gun ports suggest these planes fly around at lower altitudes than would require pressurization.
Now this is
Dr. Doom -- but neither the Fantastic Four villain nor the International Spy we've seen reprinted in earlier comic books. This Dr. Doom is an old man/mad scientist with assistants (finally found some art for that mobstertype I can use!) and they live on some kind of colony world where there are
some other humans, but so few that the assistants have to go looking for them.
Jan Swift (descendant of Tom Swift?) and Wanda are explorers in the D&D sense -- they just seem to be randomly wandering and looking for experience, instead of working for someone or towards some specific goal.
One of the two assistants has a paralysis raygun that turns the tide for them.
I believe it was
Dragon magazine #111 that had a great article statting real world microscopic monsters that you could either enlarge to giant size, or shrink the characters down to microscopic size so they can encounter them.
You can see Dr. Doom's shrink ray is slow enough that Jan can be picked up with tweezers while still 2 inches tall.
It would be interesting to research how many microscopic organisms were identified before 1940 -- probably not many, admittedly, as this was a few years before the electron microscope was invented. This artist didn't do any research on that, but just made up some bizarre bird-fish, regular fish, and a "giant ameoba" (amoeba) that looks more like a donut-headed snake.
(Scans courtesy of
Comic Book Plus.)
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