Keen Detective Funnies #18 - pt. 2

This is still Spark O'Leary, that famous Irish newshawk who doesn't look remotely Irish. In fact, doesn't he look Asian to you? I wonder if he was drawn with the intention of him being Asian, and the publisher decided to paste an Irish name onto him instead, thinking no one would notice or care.

Spark has such an easy time following these clues that it's amazing the feds asked him to pursue this instead of just figuring it out themselves. In fact, there was so much evidence immediately pointing to Kurt that I immediately suspected a red herring; maybe the FBI did too!

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It's rare to see ordinary mobsters with a really cool trophy weapon, but this unnamed spy has a tear gas gun! I would imagine it has the range and area of effect of a sleep gas gun, but is less effective (temporarily stunning anyone who fails their save vs. poison?).

It's remarkable that as dramatic an escape to a deathtrap as we get on this page is all recapped in panel 4 alone. I'm not sure how you could dodge out of the way fast enough to make someone pushing you fall out of a plane...but it does create a precedent for fumbles being allowed on push attacks!

But panel 5, with him knocking himself out, Scotty in Star Trek V style?

There's no way to emulate that in game rules; I'm not going to make people roll for movement, with a chance of fumbles and hurting themselves. The only way that makes sense is if there was a lot of turbulence on the plane and the Editor required saves vs. science to keep from falling sideways.

Seditious pamphlets is minor loot you can find with certain types of mobsters.

Setting fire to the ship you're standing on is a ballsy move!

Speaking of ballsy playing, I think we all know the real reason Spark wants to find the hideout -- he burnt up all the trophy items on the ship and he needs more loot to level up!

Rigging an entire hideout to blow up is not a recommended tactic, unless you didn't have time to design anything before the next session and you really don't want the players going in there.

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I'm never sure how much faith to have in these "fact" filler pages, but there's some interesting stuff here, including number of teens arrested in a year (I suppose I could verify that in the FBI's Crime in the U.S. serial, but I'd have to find a depository library to get paper copy of the 1940 issue; I can't find it that early online), where the term "gumshoe" comes from, and which states had no capital punishment circa 1940.

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C-Man shows the value of questioning, not just one witness at the scene of a crime (and expect the Editor to feed all the information you need through one character -- that's lazy game-mastering!), but up to seven witnesses. Actually, if the Editor assigned a 1 in 6 chance for each witness to have valuable clues, there would be a good statistical chance of getting the information in just 6 witnesses.

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Cigars with distinctive wrappers, fresh car tracks, footprints, broken twigs, and heel marks are all good examples of clues to use when Heroes are tracking.

Going to jump ahead now to Dudley Dance, a feature about "the greatest crime chaser of all time" and not, as one would expect, a dancer. Here, Dudley tackles -- or rather is tackled by -- one of the earliest werewolves in comics. Or is it another case of a fake werewolf?

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"Leather hardness of Dance's cheek"? What does the man do to develop such thick cheek calluses that they count as armor? Seems like an Editor that had trouble coming up with believable flavor text on the spot.

Hmm...six shots in rapid succession is possible in Hideouts & Hoodlums, but not for low-level Heroes. I hate giving firearms any advantage, actually, as my personal preference is for two-fisted fighter types, but there is plenty of gun-toting Heroes in these early comic books the H&H game has to emulate.

The story ends with a lot of attempting to explain away the werewolf as something non-supernatural, but it just sounds like he's just describing a tribe of werewolves that live in India to me...and that sounds like a pretty good adventure location for high-level Heroes!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)