Weird Comics #1 - pt. 4

I've a few pages left to cover, and just a little time left to get this in before the year ends!

Our final story is called Typhon, and it's a submarine adventure story with a twist; the pilot, Typhon, is also a sort of superhero with a combination of hi-tech and magic gear.

Here, he and his crew are exploring the bottom of the ocean in their super submarine when a giant electric eel attacks. That's way bigger than the giant eel I already had statted in the Mobster Manual; indeed, it looks more like a sea monster! If it's longer than the submarine, that is one gigantic eel, easily 15 HD, and probably with dinosaur-level Hit Dice (d12's?). 

A sea suit not only lets you breathe underwater, but survive unharmed at any water pressure. And because it's transparent, it can show off your fashion sense underneath!

I'm not sure what an underwater raygun does, except that it shoots underwater.

This new monster is pretty crazy! This is our first siren in comics, and it is a strange combination of human woman cursed to become part of a hydra. This one appears to be an eight-headed hydra. The woman doesn't even need to sing; her appearance alone is magically enhanced so that anyone encountering her has to save or be charmed. 

It hardly seems fair that Typhon gets both hi-tech and magic items, but in truth, most high-level Hideouts & Hoodlums heroes will wind up the same way. This seems like a Ring of Spell Storing with Dispel Magic and Remove Curse stored in it.

I'm not sure why the woman is wearing a helmet. If the curse joining her to the hydra-siren doesn't let her breathe underwater, then it seems like the curse should have killed her by now.

Serpent-men are at least as creepy as that siren. They're like D&D nagas, except they all have the same face as their master! They are "men" only in the loosest sense, looking more like bat-winged eels. Curiously, when they entwine the submarine, the submarine gets captured, whereas when the giant electric eel did that Typhon just went out and killed it.

The Ring of Spell Storing also had a Hold Person spell in it too! 

Happy New Year!

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Weird Comics #1 - pt. 3

This feature is Voodoo Man. Should ox tails become a minor magic item? I can't find that there is any real world truth in this, ox tails being voodoo charms, but when does that ever stop comic books? 

The Voodoo Man seems to be casting a very powerful spell, Contact Other Plane, to find the identity of the killer. 

I'm really intrigued by this huge black cat, but what to make of it? Baka is an authentic Voodoo word and means evil spirit. So do I ...stat this as a panther? Create stats for baka? I also have stats for black cats in the (sigh) unfinished draft of the Mobster Manual. Do I add a column for huge black cat? Unfortunately, we don't see this baka do anything other than chase people away. Fear aura...?

Now this is unusual -- not the zombies, but their resistance to bullets. Because comic books have a long history of being pro-gun, treating them as instant problem solvers. I have seen dinosaurs dropped with single bullets in these old comic books. So how do I deal with this page? Do zombies need a Hit Dice bump? A resistance to bullets? I kind of like the latter idea, that bullets do, maybe, half damage to zombies.

The description of being made a "living zombie" is intriguing and tempts me to make a new spell...but that could also be an explanation for how Charm Person works.

 

 

 

 

 

 

By coincidence, I just saw a post about this character on Facebook's Public Domain Heroes group earlier today, and that was the first I'd ever heard of this guy.

 

The most prominent Indian bird god was (is?) Thunderbird. Could it (he?) be the ancestor? There would certainly be an interesting story behind how Thunderbird's descendants turned into humans; too bad that one panel is all the backstory we get.

 

"Do not fear me, wanderers! Despite the fact that my junk is about one inch away from dangling out over your heads!"

The captions here are infuriatingly vague. Bird Man is unharmed...how? Did the bullet bounce off of him? Pass through him? It just missed? Give us a clue!

There are times when I'm reading these old comic books and I wish I had a time machine so I could go back and talk to the artists. In this case, I would say to the man, "You do know that mountain lions don't look like lions, right?" Maybe this is an escaped zoo lion.

But, again, it's maddening how little the art and captions tell us. Did he just kill the lion? Did he land on its head and knock it out? Did the lion lay down for a nap? What is happening in this story??

I had to double check to make sure I wasn't missing a page; the stone man seems to pop up from out of nowhere on this page (I did skip showing you the page before this; it just had Bird Man, weirdly, hunting on it). 

"Evil creatures" seems like a stretch for vultures and coyotes. Of course, maybe these are just evil spirits in animal form, like the baka? 

It seems they were just ordinary coyotes after all -- but that vulture sure wasn't that huge two pages ago! It must be able to change its size at will. 

It's kind of cool how Bird Man shoots silver arrows, given how useful silver arrows are in that other game. Does it take silver weapons to stop a baka, maybe...?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

 

 

Weird Comics #1 - pt. 2

We're still looking at the Sorceress of Zoom -- well, not too much of her on this page; this is still focused on Tom like this guy is the most important person in the world. I still don't get what the Sorceress sees in Tom, except that this is Tom's story, and I suppose if I met Tom in person maybe I'd be wowed by his 18 Charisma. 

This stranger interests me - I like the idea of the heroes having a magic-user benefactor, but one who is not acting out of altruism, but to use the heroes as pawns against the villain. It's also worth pointing out that this stranger only has to make eye contact to cast spells. Are his eyes his wand?

If I really wanted to apply science to this story, this would need to be a more powerful version of the Levitate spell that also protects the beneficiary from cold and lack of oxygen. That city is up really high! Better hope the spell duration doesn't end before you get up there, Tom!  

Spoilers: the Sorceress' spells require her concentration, including keeping the floating city in the sky (which makes you wonder how she ever sleeps...), so all Tom has to do is distract her and they all win.

So let's move on to Blast Bennett, because I think there's something interesting going on here despite these largely empty panels. Although Blast and his pal are interested in the meteor, neither is, understandably, interested in landing on it. Here's a little spoiler from the next page: the scenario requires them to land on the meteor. So what is a poor Editor to do if his players won't go where the adventure is waiting for them? You have four mysterious spaceships show up and push the location directly into the heroes' path, so they can't evade it!

The X-Men would sure like to have an anti-Magneto gun laying around! 

I was Googling "transverse valve" and the first hits were about rectums. I don't think I've ever stopped searching for something faster.

Let's talk briefly about "universe explorers," because that really seems like an all-encompassing job title. Unless they can access the multiverse in this future? 

The last caption we get just says "Later", with no indication how long it really took to build the gun. This is one of several reasons I've never been able to come up with inventing things rules for Hideouts & Hoodlums that satisfy me. Because, as easy as it is find examples of heroes kit-bashing things together, I seldom have any sense of time for how long it should take.

Now here's an interesting new mobster. I just wish it had a name! It's called "horrible monster" on the next page, so I'll probably have to go with that. Weird how this seemingly aquatic monster -- with its webbed hands and feet and sail, not wings, on its back - is on a waterless meteor, and it makes me think the space pirates either imprisoned it here, or planted it here expressly to kill Blast if he survived the crash. 

Although this page gives us a very poor sense of scale, the next page makes it clear the horrible monster is no more than 9' tall -- and strong -- as it clobbers Blast with one blow. The first panel on this page makes me think it can camouflage itself too, since Blast and Red don't notice it until it steps away from the wall. 

This page leaves the reader with way too many questions. Are they pirates or Canadian Mounties? Blast drops the monster on the pirate-Mounties? Is Blast super strong? Actually, they should all be near weightless on a meteor (there shouldn't be air either, but let's keep ignoring that), but if the monster is easy to pick up and drop because it's near-weightless, then it won't fall on anyone very hard either. And how does it happen to fall on all four of them at once? And how lucky are they that there were only four pirates on board when they confiscate the ship? And whatever happened to the other three pirate ships??

We're going to jump into the next story about Dr. Mortal, a character in the vein of Landor Maker of Monsters. The hero is Mr. Brent, who already knows something is amiss because Dr. Mortal, his girlfriend's father, has weird, malformed manservants with double thumbs. The scenario could go in several directions at the point where Mortal asks him to leave. Mr. Brent could have belligerently insisted he wasn't going anywhere until he got some answers. He could have decided Marlene wasn't worth this and started ghosting her. But I like this middle option he chose, of snooping around. At that point, it could have gone from roleplaying to exploration, with Mortal's house becoming a hideout.

However, this is just an 8-page story, so to move things along Mr. Brent just happens to see Dr. Mortal revealing all his nefariousness through the window.

Four mostly empty panels is really disappointing and tells me this was hastily made filler. 

I'm not sure what makes this guy a monster, other than having no hair, a super-long nose, and no memory of who he was until Mr. Brent, or Gary, does ...whatever it is he does here. Is he hypnotizing the monster to make him remember? 

That is one eloquent ex-monster there. 

What is up with how Dr. Mortal wants all his monsters in Speedos behind closed doors? 

Stray bullet, or intentional shot? If I was looking to make a fast escape, and I had, oh, let's say, consumed a potion of fire resistance recently, then filling the room with fire seems like a good way to safely cover my escape. 

On the other hand...if it's a pistol with six bullets, and there's only four monsters, why not use the last two on Gary and Marlene and skip escaping altogether?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

 

 

Weird Comics #1 - pt. 1

It's been some time since we read the debut of a "brand new" comic book together, but here we are with the inaugural issue of Fox's Weird Comics, plus the first appearance of a version of Thor in comics -- unless the character named Thor in Top-Notch Comics was the real Thor, and I've still reached no decision there). 

Already we're getting an unusual take on Thor...apparently he waxes, runs around in shorts, a cape, and a hat, and lives in Valhalla instead of Asgard. Say...is that acknowledging that Ragnarok already happened, and Thor is dead? That actually makes this truer to mythology than the Lee/Kirby version started, if I'm right.

Although Thor appears to be shooting an energy bolt from his hand, I believe that's meant to represent the path of his hammer.

Another interesting development: Grant Farrell could have just been given Thor's hammer and his powers, but instead he's "transformed into Thor's being," which seems more complex, like how Don Blake and Thor were merged into one person? 

How does he recognize them as spies? Grant isn't a spy himself. Is this some kind of Thor sense? Or are the Editor and player meta-gaming, where the Editor just tells the player what everything is he encounters?

The spies' motivation here is pretty suspicious. Could they really find no one to pose as a tourist for them willingly? 

"Andurian" makes me think of Peruvian. Peru is the 2nd largest world producer of copper and silver, 8th largest world producer of gold, so that does sound like something international spies would want to get their hands on.

Riding on a lightning bolt is a curious way for Thor to get around, but the Marvel Thor seldom used his goat-drawn chariot either. It could be the Teleport through Focus power, since electricity is technically everywhere, or this could be flavor text for a slower Race the power; after all, he doesn't really need to be faster than Race the Plane to catch up to the spies.

Forcing a plane to land I could see as a freebie result with a Control Weather power. 

So, Plan A was to sneak spies into the country to look for the mines, but Plan B was to roll tanks into the country and crush everything but the mines. It seems like a lot of escalation is happening there and maybe there should have been a plan in between?

No one in Hideouts & Hoodlums should be able to smash five tanks at once. I think I would cap Mass Wrecking at three tanks. Five...that's just a lot of tanks.

Speaking of plans...it's hard to imagine what Grant was thinking to accomplish, changing back to normal and just waltzing up to the mines. Was he planning on asking how they planned to defend the mines? Was he trying to flush out any spies around the mines? Couldn't he have done both as Thor? The story hasn't told us yet that there's a time limit to how long Grant can be Thor, but if there was one that would explain why there needs to be scenes like this. 

It's also worth pointing out that the low ceilings in the mine are pretty realistic, more so than how spacious mines usually look in the movies.

I didn't show you page 9, but Grant stays in the same spot throughout, which begs the question -- where did that lightning come from? Can Grant summon lightning even when he doesn't appear to be Thor? Did the real Thor send it? 

  

Again, it's difficult to get a sense of Thor's plan. Carrying the spies back to their home country seems more like doing them a favor then deporting them...unless Thor wanted them to get shot by the anti-aircraft guns? He must have been expecting it, because he buffed himself with Invulnerability before taking off.

 

Lastly, Thor must have eight brevet ranks, going into this adventure. 

 

Moving on, we meet the Sorceress of Zoom in her magic floating -- and mobile! -- city. I wish we could see more clearly the monsters in panel 4. When it says she created them with her magic spell, I don't think we should consider this an ordinary magic spell, like Mobster Summoning, with a duration. Rather, I think we can hand wave this as flavor text explaining where the monsters came from.

 

 

 

The monster in panel 1 reminds me of Spider-Man's future foe, the Jackal. It also looks kinda goblin-like? Even more interesting is the monster in panel 2 -- I really wish I had a clearer picture of it. It looks like it has webbed feet, one glowing eye, attacks by strangulation, and is wearing a cape? I want to stat it, but I don't even know what to call it!

 

The floating city "speeds off into the distance"? How fast can a magic floating city move? Fast enough that planes can't catch up to it? 

 

If I thought the Thor story was confusing, the narrator here is of little help whatsoever. I don't understand why the Sorceress wants to take over the city by force, but then gets upset when one single boy is knocked out. 

 

Ohh...carefully looking at the page numbers, I see two pages are missing. Now I may never understand what spell "hundreds of us" were under, or how the mysterious figure knows to single out Tom to help him.

 

There's our goblin friend again. While before I thought the red dots on his undies were gems, now they just look like polka dots. 

 

Hmm. I didn't actually have anything game mechanics-related to say about that page. I think I just wanted the excuse to mention his undies. 

 

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

 
 
 

Zip Comics #3 - pt. 5

More Captain Valor today, with Mort Meskin showing off his skill with crowd scenes, though hampered by some really racist depictions and sometimes sketchy details. I bring this to your attention, though, for panel 1, so we can talk about the two ways to set up a fight scene. Version 1 is that it occurs in "real time," with the crew arriving onto the deck in waves as they can reach it. Version 2 is that you set the scene with all the fighters already in the scene and then start the clock again. 

And we're jumping out of Captain Valor already into the next story, Mr. Satan. Holy cow, this scene is gory. There's actual blood everywhere! These bad guys are brutal...but the point of sharing here is the second to last panel, where Mr. Satan runs out, grabs the girl, and escapes unseen. But unseen by how many? We only see that one guy, but there must be a lot of other killers around. Is it fair to say this can be explained away as a surprise turn, a moving silently skill check, or maybe both to reflect the difficulty of no one happening to see him?  
 

The panels seem to be in the wrong order here...Mr. Satan should probably try to get that woman to safety first, instead of leaving her alone in a tunnel and going out to look for clues. 

What else can we gather from this page? Superhero costumes, despite appearing to have no pockets, must have room for matches or a lighter on them somewhere, or Mr. S would never have got that giant fire lit so fast. 

Also, we learn that rocks used as improvised weapons don't have to be very big.

That seems, at first, to be a clever twist about the sheriff, and having them both wind up on the tracks makes it seem extra surprising when the big reveal happens, but...why did it happen? Is he showing off his confidence in his men, that they would not betray him by tying him up for real? Is the deception part of trying to get Mr. Satan to reveal when the payrolls are "going to ride," and if so, why not try to trick him into telling while still on the tracks? Or he could have revealed himself as leader sooner, never been tied down, and still used the threat of the train to coerce Mr S into giving up the info? But on the other hand, if the robbers don't know when the payroll is coming, why are they so sure a train is coming soon? 

And if Mr. Satan knew the national guard was coming, why go back early to scout with the sheriff without them?

If it wasn't already obvious, Mr. Satan would be statted as a mysteryman. His "spectacular leap" and snatching Doris out of the car and jumping out in time both qualify as mysteryman stunts.

Now we're going to jump into the next story with Zambini the Miracle Man, and this is a prime example of everything wrong with the magician genre: if your magic-user is so powerful that Satan himself has to plot against him while he's on vacation so his guard is down -- then your magic-user is too powerful.

As if to illustrate this, Satan causes a tidal wave to threaten Zambini's ship and, instead of simply calming the waters, Zambini freezes "the oceans." Way to alter Earth's climate there, Zam! 

More interesting are these devil men...let's see if I need to stat them! Hmm...I guess not -- they get mass polymorphed into penguins on the very next page before they can do anything!

Mass Polymorph is, of course, going to be a Hideouts & Hoodlums spell. I think I've determined before it would have to be a ninth level spell, even though it gets cast an awful lot in comic books.

Sure, Zambini could have just cast Resist Fire on himself instead of conjuring asbestos...although, perhaps he did cast Resist Fire and this is how it manifested? Previously, we've seen Zatara cast a healing spell that made a first aid kit appear. The conceit here is that magic takes whatever form is most familiar to the caster. 

Really, Zambini? You're traveling into Dante's Inferno and your only concern is how long the trip is taking you?

And is he really trapped in a net, or just relaxing on a hammock?  

 

Whoa, whoa, whoa - take a close look at that Cage of Flesh. The bars are made up of human forearms, each grasping the next one in the row. That is crazy grizzly -- but also just the thing to impress veteran D&D players, accustomed to dungeons full of grizzly things. That it seems to contain an anti-magic field is just icing on the cake.

Who's the fool, Satan? You just told them to push the flammable cage into fire. 

The "docile" rabbits tracks with how polymorph works (or at least the spells of 4th level and above; H&H has lower level polymorph spells this won't apply to), as there should be a chance of losing your mind/personality to the new form. Otherwise, these would be satanic rabbits!

I'm not going to show you the rest of this crazy story, but here's two spoilers: one, Zambini meets a dinosaur down there, either brought down there in prehistoric times as a pet, or the story is suggesting that's where dinosaurs all went when they died?

Lastly, Satan is killed, which is a pretty crazy ending for just your third issue. 

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Zip Comics #3 - pt. 4

Just in case I've never made this clear, I don't just include stories I like on this blog. War Eagles makes me a little sleepy...but I include pages that interest me, illustrate how well my game Hideouts & Hoodlums emulates these comics, points out ways it could do so better, or just things I need to rant about after reading. 

This page is the second of those, and it illustrates that administering first aid only required intent and physical contact; you do not need a first aid kit (they do help, though!).

Hoo hum, the ol' "Guards, come quick!" trick worked again like a charm and...ooo, what's this? One of them doesn't make it out? Now, this woke me up and made me take notice. We so seldom see failure in the comic books, but of course it's quite easy to hit a fleeing opponent, particularly with a high rate of fire. And missing your hear noise roll? Sure, that can happen in game. 

Of course, Kermit is only supporting cast. Would they have turned around and gone back for a player character?

 

It looks like the boys are escaping in a Fokker, or maybe a Heinkel, but it has to be a two-seater and that canopy looks odd for either plane. The pursuit planes look like Stukkas, and it's amusing to think of a Fokker outrunning a Stukka - but hey, it's comic books, and random chance is king in Hideouts & Hoodlums as well. 

Oh, these crazy kids. The number of things that have to go right for this plan to work...no wandering encounters en route to the air field, landing unseen near the airdrome, finding a single guard out of sight of all other guards...

...the guard knowing where the prisoner is, the guard giving up that information, the guard's uniform fitting, getting a surprise turn for the bombing run, not getting shot by anti-aircraft guns on the way out, only one guard left guarding the prisoner...

Mind you, a lot of these are familiar tropes of the genre, but still...

"He ain't heavyyyyy, he's my brotherrrrr" -- Oops, wrong war!

What? Tom is still flying around bombing the fields? Where are those anti-aircraft guns? Why are four soldiers manning a machine gun instead?

Yeah, the kids easily win in the end, so no surprises there. This next feature is Captain Valor, and with a witty script by unknown-to-me scribe Abner Sundell (a name to watch for here!) and lush visuals by Mort Meskin, I'm feeling like we should just ignore the jaundiced look of the orientals and soak in the rest of the story...but at the same time, it occurs to me that there must be a lot of junks floating around in the sea and, if Tsin hadn't fired on them, Valor would never have known this was the right one...

This mobstertype is going in Mobster Manual part II: M-Z as a pseudo-giant, a bad guy who is bigger and tougher than a thug, described as a giant, but obviously isn't literally a giant by any literal measure. 

"Bullseye!" seems to suggest a critical hit, but it also could have just been maximum damage. 

"That spinach I ate" -- great Popeye reference!

Hmm...here I was just raving about Meskin, but...look at those awful, stubby arms in panel 3...

You'd think that Valor would be taking continuous hit point loss by hanging from his thumbs, but he seems to be feeling like he just woke up from a nap here. 

I've no objection to the half-pint escaping from being tied up; supporting cast get skill checks too. And last-minute rescues are one of the reasons to keep supporting cast around! 

Valor doesn't seem to be actively recruiting supporting cast here, so the Editor must be elaborating on a very positive encounter reaction roll here.

Heyy...where did that flare gun come from? Did they tie him up with the flare gun still on him?

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)