Tip Top Comics #32, 35, 42

Almost caught up and going to be done with Tip Top Comics soon!  Woo!

Pricing information: $2 gets you a boy's shirt. Not as high-quality a shirt as Frankie supposed, since it tears so easily, but this ties in with what I was talking about yesterday; keeping starting price points really low, but increasing the price along with quality.

We have recently seen a heroic black lifeguard in the pages of this comic book, but we have perhaps seen no black character as heroic as this racistly-drawn maid who risks her neck to protect Frankie and disciplines the villain in the end.

I included this story because a jewel that can share a preprogrammed phantasmal image showing why the jewel was given as a gift seems like a pretty neat magic item for the game.

I include this one because the Mobster Manual is going to have an entry for sphinxes and I was perplexed by this reference to sphinxes having to do with the number seven. I have done some cursory research and can find no evidence to back this one up -- unless it is an obscure reference to the theory once proposed that the answer to the Sphinx's Riddle ("What has four legs in the morning," etc.) is the philosopher's stone, and the philosopher's stone apparently has some numerical symbolism with seven.

Jumping ahead to March 1939 (vol. 3, no. 11), we rejoin Hawkshaw discovering a gas trap with an unusual -- and a bit unbelievable -- trigger. I would not think the balloons would be able to fall onto even the sharpest arrowheads hard enough to pop them, assuming the arrowheads stayed upright...although, maybe razor-sharp caltrops would work?

I was really expecting there to be something in that barrel before Pastey rolled it at the cops ... glue, oil, razor-sharp caltrops, maybe? I guess it didn't matter because, if a barrel is rolling fast enough and hits your wheel hard enough, maybe it could do this kind of damage...? This will need to be an obstacle in vehicular combat.

If you've ever wondered where monkey sidekicks in comic books come from, you could buy them in pet stores, according to Dick Moores.

For all your 1939 selfie needs, yes, cameras had timers back then.

And we return to Hawkshaw now a few months later (Oct. 1939, vol. 4, no. 6) because he's encountered some traps both mundane and hi-tech. A mundane trap is having trellises appear to be easy access to your hideouts' second story windows, but then rig the trellises so they are easy to push over, or to fall on their own. A hi-tech trap is to rig machinery to the window that passes current through it, shocking anyone who comes in for x amount of damage.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)