So what does it give us first? Flexo the Rubber Man. Yes, Will Harr and Jack Binder took one look around the burgeoning crowd of superheroes in the field and said...Bozo the Iron Man looks like a winner; let's take that concept and make it even sillier. In a decision that would make for a hundred off-color jokes if this wasn't a family blog, the narrator tells us that Flexo is made of "living rubber" and filled with "secret gas." This rubber/gas combo somehow allows Flexo to outrun bullets (in Hideouts & Hoodlums, the Race the Bullet power), gives it the strength of an ox (wrecking things and Raise Car power?), and the ability to zoom through the air like a bird (Fly II power?). But narrators often exaggerate for new superheroes, so let's see if the story follows up on any of that.
Oh, and to make matters worse, the scientists who invented Flexo had to steal the supplies from the cancer hospital they work in. Nice job, leaving those cancer patients without the treatment equipment they need, jerks. It's almost a pleasure to see these two tied up by a mobster and his vamp/moll, who then steal radium from the two men. The mobster works for a mad scientist who need the radium for his death ray, of course. In one informative panel, the mobster explains that he would bump them off with a gun, but "the professor likes to wipe out his victims in fancy, scientific style," which basically explains every supervillain's deathtrap ever.
After activating Flexo to rescue them, we are told Flexo is running at the speed of a bullet, but that's our suspicious narrator again without any real proof. Flexo does leap -- very clearly leaping instead of flying -- and given the height of his leaps I would call this a very clear example of the Leap I power. When shot at, his rubbery hide provides the Nigh-Invulnerable Skin power. Then he uses Multi-Attack to grapple three mobsters at once. It takes a little bit more of a (ahem) stretch to see how stretching himself between the car and a telephone pole counts as a power, but since the purpose is to stop the car from moving, that seems to be the same as using the Raise Car power.
To find their missing radium, the unnamed scientists borrow a radium detector, or what we might call a Geiger counter, from the hospital. This Geiger counter has a really good range on it, though, because it can sense radiation from an airplane.
At the hideout, Flexo has to fight two electrically-charged robots. Flexo does really well at his wrecking things rolls vs. the robots, and demonstrates Electrical Resistance, his first level 3 power. In fact, since he hasn't even demonstrated a level 2 power yet, I'm wondering if he isn't demonstrating a power at all, but simply had enough hit points to take the hits from their electrical fields.
The hideout has a simple portcullis trap, but Flexo's solution to it, squeezing through the bars, might be our first instance of him breaking the H&H rules. Normally, I would call this flavor text for wrecking things, except that the bars are still intact and trapping the scientists even after Flexo squeezes through. For this, then, we would need a new power, perhaps some weaker version of Passwall, like a 2nd-level power called Pass through Small Openings.
Flexo defeats the mad scientist and his three hoodlums by spurting gas at them, which either does damage or puts them to sleep -- the story isn't clear. However, giving this robot a "breath weapon" is just like how I handled robots in 1st edition H&H, suggesting to me that maybe Flexo should be statted as a mobster, and a Supporting Cast Member, to the scientists, instead of a Hero with a race and class. This would eliminate any difficulties in statting him as an android superhero. But if Flexo is an android superhero, what level? One of his 1st level powers demonstrated could be his android ability, meaning he's demonstrated two 1st level powers and 1 2nd level power -- Flexo must have two brevet ranks, allowing him to start as a level 3 superhero, an extraordinary man.
Next up is Blue Blaze. This story starts in 1852 at Midwest College. It was difficult to pin down a specific college with so generic a name, but then my first assumption would be that Midwest College would be in the Midwest. What gets the story moving, though, is the tornado that sweeps through the campus and kills 85% of the people there. Finding out when major tornado touchdowns happened is easily done on the Internet these days and, possibly not by coincidence, a deadly tornado had ripped through downtown Arlington, Massachusetts only the previous year. I have commented before (see Whiz Comics #3) about comic book writers taking inspiration from headlines in the recent news.
While believed dead after the tornado and buried, Spencer is struck with "substrata dermatic rays" during his 88 years of hibernation, which is a term that doesn't really mean anything, but suggests that the rays are striking him under his skin. Is this how the author says radiation? If the narrator is to be believed, his strength increases 1,000-fold, which would make him able to lift/press about 50 tons -- or access to 5th-level Raise powers in H&H terms. More incredulously, Spencer was supposedly buried in a skin-tight costume with attached cowl and a riveted girdle. and these were the clothes he died in.
Upon digging himself out of his grave, BB immediately encounters two superstitious hoodlums. They both fail their morale saves after he activates his Super-Tough Skin power. One of them "has a heart attack," but you know how those pesky narrators keep exaggerating, and there is a result of "faints" on the morale failure table. The other one simply surrenders.
The hoodlums were digging up bodies for a professor with a super-cool hideout, accessible by a secret elevator in an inn on the edge of town, miles below ground. The elevator lets out in a foyer which accesses a huge entry hall through a Dr. Suess-shaped archway. The hall looks posh at this end with checkerboard tile flooring and thick columns. Either at the far end, or perhaps in a side hall, the columns are thinner and decorated with skull motifs.
There are also traps. Red gems spaced around the hideout activate "tension beams," like a Hold Person spell. Then the rays whisk their prisoners on a high-speed tour of some nearby laboratories (the professor is quite the show-off) to Professor Maluski's audience hall (a "receiving" gem ends the tour here). Near the audience hall is a dungeon where 50 zombies are kept. The zombies are not supernatural, but controlled by ray receptors sewn into their shrouds. Maluski is armed with a "new type automatic," which seems to be a way of saying a Gun +1 to me. The zombies turn on Maluski with the control tube is smashed, which is conveniently keeps in the dungeon with the zombies. There is also an access to an subterranean stream in the dungeon.
The next feature is Zephyr Jones; despite this being a first issue, Zephyr has crossed over from Daring Mystery Comics #2. Zephyr and Corky are now making routine trips to Mars in the near future, when they are hijacked by a mad scientist and his daughter at gunpoint. "The Mad Astronomer" wants them to take him to Cygni, by which we can assume he means Cygni 61, a star 11.4 light years away. This is going to be an extremely long story if not for faster-than-light travel. And when they call him mad, they aren't kidding. He thinks there is stardust on stars that can cure any illness. No explanation for why they have to go to a star so far away to get that instead of our own star.
The science is wonkier than that; apparently the author thinks there are "lesser stars" between Earth and Mars, by which he seems to mean comets. These stars are covered with gasses and Zephyr figures out that if he can combust the atmosphere of a comet, it will propel the ship away at faster-than-light speed. This actually works, devastating the number of known comets in near space and somehow fails to destroy their spaceship every time they try it. En route they almost hit a moon, but are traveling so fast that they pass right through it. This reminds me of the Silver Age Flash vibrating through solid matter at super-fast speeds, but it does beg the question how they are interacting with comets to gain speed from them if they are effectively immaterial.
(Read at readcomicsonline.to)
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