Silver Streak Comics #3 - pt. 1

With this issue, Silver Streak Comics finally gets its own feature called Silver Streak! Doubly important, this serves as a long origin story for the superhero Silver Streak, so long that we never see him in costume yet in this installment -- making this the longest origin story for a superhero published so far.

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Okay, Hideouts & Hoodlums hat on...it's hard to take this giant fly seriously. Besides looking seriously cartoony, I prefer to cap my giant animals at 8x normal size, which would put a giant fly at less than 1 hit point. Further weirdness comes in this fly's special features, like a ...breakaway proboscis that can impale people...?

What the swami does is the equivalent of a D&D campaign where a powerful wizard puts a Geas spell on the entire party and makes them go on his quest for him. Nobody likes that. Still, in this instance, it also explains how Silver Streak gets his powers.

Speaking of weird features on this giant fly...tentacles? Where? Aren't those just legs?

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Oh dear...swamis are Hindus, not Muslims, so it seems unlikely this one would be invoking Allah by name. It's also pretty unclear how being hypnotized kept our Hero from dying in the car crash.

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Back to gaming talk; can a target hurl away two men trying to grapple him at the same time? Here we have to consider the impact of this on the combat. If combat is being affected, then we should be careful not to invoke "flavor text" on this, and it does appear that, since the two men are knocked prone, this allows Silver Streak to leave the area without them getting free back attacks on him as he flees.

On the other hand, this could be appropriate flavor text if SS is buffed with the Untackleable power.

It's hard to imagine the police are baffled without a clue, when a fly the size of a car must keep flying away from the scene of each crime. How hard can that be to follow?

This may be the earliest example in a comic of the main villain not even being mentioned until the second half of the story. Of course, because this is a golden age comic, the villain is a mad scientist, but a mad zoologist is a new twist.

$20 million dollars is one of the steeper ransoms we've found in these early comics.

Silver Streak has not really demonstrated any traditional superpowers yet (though Feign Death appears to be one of them earlier), but here he clearly uses the Leap I power to reach the giant fly and grapple it.

I'm going to include giant flies now in the Mobster Manual...but am going to cap them at 3 Hit Dice.

No, he's not Bruce Wayne or even John Wayne, but Bill Wayne, and this is one of the earliest cowboys to have a vigilante name not itself a blatant rip-off of The Lone Ranger.

Mesa Bluff seems like there should be a real Mesa Bluff out there somewhere, but while I could find examples of streets and neighborhoods called that, I couldn't find that there is any real town called Mesa Bluff anywhere. 

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Bill is clearly getting two attacks in the same turn with his guns here. I've previously ruled out getting a bonus attack by carrying a second weapon, which means Bill must be at least a level 3 cowboy/fighter to get that many shots with single-shot firearms. Since Bill Wayne is debuting in this story and should not be third level yet, this could be our first confirmed instance of a fighter class getting (two) brevet ranks.

Lastly, let's revisit the curious intersection of physics and game mechanics. If you throw yourself down a flight of stairs at a group of people all bunched up together, can you defy the "one attack per turn" guideline for H&H combat? I would still be inclined to say no...and yet...I have previously encouraged Editors to go easy on their players in solo play and make more allowances than the rulebooks suggest. And, in this case, the Editor could offset the bonus with some serious repercussions. For example, the player might get only one chance to hit the whole group, and a miss means taking 1 point of damage on the stairs, plus lying prone for that turn, plus losing initiative on the following turn. A player would have to think about how lucky he was feeling before making that call...

Or, this could just be an example of a third-level fighter getting to use the combat machine special ability, giving him three attacks in combat against non-classed opponents.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)