Planet Comics #3 - pt. 3

We're going to look at two more features from this issue of Planet Comics today. First is Buzz Crandall, who lives in a future where the Moon is like the Wild West, with isolated outposts surrounded by danger. This is far from the last time I'll be making a space-cowboy parallel observation on this blog.

The autoped reminds me just enough of the real moon lander to intrigue me. Use your imagination; if you redesigned the moon lander to be mobile, wouldn't it look something like this?

But more interesting are moon bats which, to a D&D player, loo exactly like giant stirges! Look at how that one in the last panel is the same size as the autoped and can damage it just by diving into it! I'm thinking 4+1 Hit Dice, and those  probiscises can suck 1-8 hit points' worth of blood out of you per turn, or it can crash into you in a dive for 1-10 points of damage.

Now how did our astronauts manage to avoid the lunar land squids? Look at the size of that baby -- I'm thinking 16 Hit Dice for this one, and maybe using d10 for those HD. It's big enough that it has a chance of swallowing even a large opponent whole (maybe on a 20), and a medium-sized foe on a...18-20? Anyone not swallowed takes 4-32 points of damage from those giant teeth.

Like Noah and the Whale, Buzz winds up alive in its belly -- but that situation seems like it could change because the missing people from the outpost are all skeletons in his belly (in the next page I'm not bothering to show you). Being in the autoped seems to buy him some time, as the digestive enzymes need some turns to wreck it down (1-4 turns?).

Now we're going to look at the next story with Nelson Cole. Those pirate ships remind me of Zaxxon! But the real reason I'm showing you this page is "We'll keep in constant touch with you by radio." Now, radio waves travel at the speed of light, which is plenty fast, but it's not instantaneous in space-sized distances, so Cole is essentially on his own.















Where the heck in space is this? Are they flying through a nebula? This is a really busy nebula, with a lot of planetoids of varying size inside it.

The concept of "attractor-beams," or tractor beams as they are more commonly known today, comes from SF novelist E.E. Smith, but had not come into common comic book parlance yet by 1940, where we still see things like "magno-rays" doing the same affect.

I appreciate the cutaway map of the inside of a spaceship in panel 2. Those ships sure don't provide you much protection out in space, do they?

Now this is remarkable because I think it's the first page of a comic book story to show how different styles of planes (or spaceships in this case) have different degrees of maneuverability that give one an advantage over another.

A previous page I didn't show you told us that Cole had a raygun hidden in his belt buckle, but I assumed it was a tiny gun he would pull out when he needed it, not that he would be shooting it from inside his belt buckle. I wonder what the triggering mechanism is -- voice command? "Pew pew"?

Yet another story that assumes spaceships would land on the ground like conventional planes.

I guess Cole was shot by an electric raygun and the conductive lever saved him? More likely he just made his saving throw vs. science -- but it's always nice when you can come up with an explanation using science (or something that passes for science!).

Didn't I say Cole was on his own? I'm not sure how the Solar Force just happens to show up here, since Cole never called for them. Cole is able to use radio to talk to them without breaking science because the battle is taking place in low orbit.

Only a charitable Editor would give the Solar Force bonuses to hit thanks to Cole calling out plays on the sidelines.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)