Wonderworld Comics #11 - pt. 2

We're still looking at this month's Yarko the Great feature and those wacky Indian Mysterymen are up to their hijinks again. That panel 3 is really weird - if you plan on killing him in his sleep, why would you straddle him on his bed first?

The art in panel 4 reminds me so much of Vince Colletta.

It's not clear from this story if Yarko is just passing through, staying at this hotel temporarily, or if he normally lives in this hotel, which used to be more of a thing. Given the size of that balcony, it's a very nice suite he's staying in.

Initially I found panel 1 confusing. Is Yarko jumping into the pot? No, that's the mysteryman cultist he kicked off of him on the last page. Yarko has already teleported off the bed, as revealed in panel 2. I would be tempted to say he was using the simpler spell, Poof!, but there's no cloud of smoke accompanying the spell.

Panel 3 is either showing Telekinesis or Protection from Missiles.

The caption in panel 5 refers to the cultist as a Hindu, the man's words in panel 4 make him sound like a Muslim. More importantly, the earlier pages that show them having secret meetings on a mountaintop reveal him to be a cultist (a statted mobstertype in 2nd edition Hideouts & Hoodlums). Perhaps the nature of this cult is that they mix Hindu and Islamic beliefs.

The final spell cast is revealed by Yarko's words "That will hold you" -- it's a Hold Person spell!

A cursed jewel that makes anyone looking at it save or die is pretty serious stuff. Since Yarko openly wears his twin jewel all the time means they do not share this ability.

Kohat is a real city in modern-day Pakistan.The "Order of Aribah" is completely fictional.

The significance of being the seventh son of a seventh son stretches into antiquity, across multiple cultures.

Yarko is using the spell Project Image, which apparently has a super long range.

As goofy as it always looks, Iger's Shorty Shortcake is at heart a solid adventure story, and perhaps the first one ever set in Guatemala. I don't think there's any particular reason why this story would need to take place in Guatemala, though I suspect Iger simply thought it sounds funny.

Here we have a mad scientist who doesn't look that much more comical than some other mad scientists, and his water magnet is not that much goofier than a lot of comic book science.

Birds are a tricky thing to stat accurately because, even if you make them bigger, a hollow-boned animal still doesn't have much mass to assign hit dice to. However, if you go up to 40 x normal size, you can get a carrier pigeon that weighs (unless my math is way off) 1,300 lbs. That bird is 7+2 Hit Dice, and has a wingspan of 80'!

If the world's heaviest worm, the Megascolides australis, was subjected to 40 x growth, it would weigh 700 lbs. and have 4 Hit Dice. However, at some point we need to max out the Hit Die gain from enlargement, or a 100 lb. Shorty would grow to 80 tons and have 266 20-sided Hit Dice!

It seems odd that Shorty assumes the water shrunk him, not that the lightning changed him (as often happens in comics!), or that the duration just coincidentally ended.

A glider seems like a nice trophy reward. Good for getting Heroes from plot location to plot location, but can't do much else to spoil scenarios (unless outdoors, and Shorty simply rains dropped items down on mobsters).  

Loraine spies have to be from the Alsace-Lorraine territory that, at this time in 1940, was still part of France! The politics of these revolutionaries isn't clear, but it seems they would be a political group wanting either independence or want to be annexed by Germany, which would be a very bad call, but -- hindsight is 20/20, right?

Cab drivers are a good source for plot hooks. Even international ones, apparently!

"Pan-chromatic film" sounds fancy, but "a panchromatic emulsion produces a realistic reproduction of a scene as it appears to the human eye, although with no colors." Almost all modern photographic film (since 1906) is panchromatic. All this is from Wikipedia, of course.

It's a discouraging start to your scenario when your best fighter gets beat up and dropped down a well in your very first encounter.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)