Keen Detective Funnies #18 - pt. 1

Ah, Masked Marvel, such an odd duck. This post might be more therapy rant than useful game content...

This installment starts with the beginning of what should be an epic quest to discover the lost city of gold. While everyone on Earth knows that El Dorado is the name for the mythical lost city of gold, this story insists on calling it Ora. I did a quick Internet search to see if there was any precedent for calling it Ora, but all my search results were for the upcoming movie Dora and the Lost City of Gold. Coincidence...?

Naturally, any human beings living along the Amazon River will be wild savages? What is your doctorate in, Lincoln, racism?

The trope of a highly civilized forgotten race is as old as pulp fiction. It's also a trifle racist.

Bear in mind, this is a Masked Marvel story.

I was expecting the Internet to be able to tell me what was 10 days upriver on the Amazon, but travel by water isn't so (ahem) cut and dried as that. Let's assume you made very good time over those 10 days and made it as far as the Colombian border. That would put you at or near the town of Leticia. I haven't found much information on Leticia in 1940, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't full of wild savages.

In fact, I found this video as the only evidence of what daily life looked like along the Amazon in the 1940s. Some workers did go around in nothing but shorts, but it is extremely unlikely that you would find a chieftain in a loincloth at this time.

Now, this is after the rubber boom, when native workers were first exploited and civilization was first brought to this region as resources were funneled away from them. Before 1920, yes, it might have been more likely to find natives in loincloths back then.

Remember how this was as Masked Marvel story?







Oh come on! The "natives can be bribed with booze" trope? I'm not putting that in my description of the mobstertype. I will have a note about sometimes using poisoned weapons, though.

Oh yeah -- the Masked Marvel! This is nine pages into the story and MM hasn't even got there yet. So here he is, speeding recklessly to make up for lost time. You'd think this was a timed tournament round by how quickly he's trying to get to the scenario.














At last, the City of Gold! Time for a climactic fight to the finish between the Masked Marvel and the diabolical -

Oh what the heck!? He snipered the villain from a distance? Who is the hero in this piece again? I'm betting it's the natives who were smart enough to leave the old abandoned city alone.

Okay, phew...got that out of my system. We've just enough space left to look at this month's Spark O'Leary, Radio Newshawk feature. Now, this scenario intrigues me, not so much for the spy tapping code over the radio, but the angle of it possibly being a traitor in Spark's supporting cast! This is a good story to throw at players who have amassed large supporting casts in long-term Hideouts & Hoodlums campaigns. Look at that -- brought it back to gaming right at the end!

"Of course I can!"

"Then why haven't you already done it?"

"I was waiting for a player-character to tell me to do it!"

It's a truism that's difficult to avoid...you want your game to be realistic, but you also want your players' characters to be the heroes and the planners, forcing non-Heroes to stand around and wait to be told what to do all too often. The reverse problem is when your Editor-controlled non-Heroes are too proactive and the players feel they have to go along with something the Editor is "telling" them to do. 

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)