Feature Comics #30 - pt. 2

We're looking at the second half of this issue of Feature Comics today, and are still in this month's Dollman feature. If you can't guess, Dollman has snuck aboard a German submarine since we last saw him. If you ignore the dynamic layouts and just concentrate on what Dollman is doing on this page, you'll realize there's nothing here he couldn't have done at full-size, backing my contention that a shrinking power is nothing but flavor text.

Now, he did, on the previous page, conceal himself in a crate too small for a normal-sized person to hide in...but the Editor could easily have changed the scale of the crates to fit the Hero.

I know where this is! the highest suspension bridge in the world was the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado from 1929 until 2001.

I am really impressed by the wrinkle in this story, that Rance leaves the time bomb intact to give the story a time limit. It's not really clear why. What would make this work so much better is if the time bomb wasn't safe to defuse, so the only way to do so is to find the man who left the bomb in the time they have available and trick him into defusing i for them. Which is almost exactly how this story goes, except for the necessity factor.

This is more of what I like from this story - not only finding out who the villain was, but finding out his backstory, looking for things to exploit so they can trick him instead of beating him up. It's all so ingenuously done that I would probably wind up giving Cameron a penalty to his save vs. plot to see through the disguise (the distance and bad lighting probably help too, so, -3?).

Here's an example of expert level sleight of hand from a non-adventure character. But I was more interested in sharing this page for the unusual word "bohunks." I don't know if you all knew this already, but bohunks is actually a racial slur, referring to an immigrant from central or southeastern Europe, especially a laborer.

We haven't looked at educational filler in a while. Things like this are very useful because, when I'm deciding how high or how far a Hero should be able to leap without some kind of buffing (either by skill or power or spell), I will look to world records, but of course world records keep going up over time. It's hard to believe that the pole vault record was "only" 14' back in 1940; now it stands at 20'!

We're jumping from there into Charlie Chan, where the artist does a great job of getting Warner Oland's likeness with all the shading. Here, Charlie lands on the nature of the bad guys' scheme from two clues. I've spoken about this before on the blog, how difficult it can be sometimes to distinguish the Editor misspeaking from deliberately leaving a clue in dialogue. The better clue, for a RPG, is having Chan realize the binoculars are expensive. I'm not even sure if one should need a skill check to determine that; I would think it would be obvious if a pair of binoculars was fancy enough to be expensive.

This page tells me pigeon blood rubies are worth twice what diamonds are worth. I wish it also told me what diamonds were worth in 1940, as that would be a good cipher for figuring out what all other gemstones were worth. Interestingly, I can find this information online, but only going back to 1960.

You don't hear about "pigeon blood" rubies often, probably because it is as violent as it sounds. Pigeon Blood Ruby meaning is primarily associated with its color that matches exactly with the blood drawn from a freshly killed pigeon.

I'm currently running a campaign where one of the Heroes is working to become a professional boxer, so I found this installment of Slim and Tubby particularly interesting. At first glance it seems that Slim needs a license and bond to become a boxer, but that's not true; he needs a license and a surety bond to work as a boxing promoter, something that's still true today (Slim is looking to become a promoter to promote his own boxing career).

We also see robbers armed with sub-machine guns here (well, sort of -- they never leave the car, but we're told they are that well-armed).

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)