Miracle Comics #2 - pt. 2

Welcome back! We're not quite done with Sky Wizard yet, and neither is Hawk Armand and his pals Vera and Butch. In fact, Hawk now has the upper hand and is taking his prisoners to his boss' secret kingdom in the Himalayas. Is it Black Bolt of the Inhumans? Oops, too soon for that!

Hawk may be smart, but he doesn't get the difference between a map and a globe. On a flat map, it appears the fastest way to get to Tibet from Guatemala is east, but it's actually north!  It's 9,460 miles to the Arctic Circle and back to get to Tibet. Since we know from yesterday's pages that the villains were able to catch up to the sky island in a plane that could go 300 MPH, we know sky island moves slower than that. That means it will take 37 days to reach Tibet. No wonder Sky Wizard had so much time to get free!

Let's also take a moment to talk about Kee-Shan. Keeshan would become a name used by blacks (sparingly) by the 1980s, but would be meaningless in 1940. Unless it is a phonetic spelling? It 

matches no Arabic names I can find...

I don't know about famous, but Secret Agent K-7 really was a radio character with 15-minute weekly episodes in 1939. 

Secret explosives are a common MacGuffin in spy stories. It's not clear here if the thermite bomb explodes silently or drops silently. Either way, it would be a trophy weapon to mid- and high-level Heroes (and probably best kept out of the hands of low-level ones!).

Sometimes it's the simple things that jump at me while reading these old pages, like the clever idea of having a machine gunner hiding in the back of an old cart under a pile of wood. Saving that idea for a future scenario...

I'm only including this page because I am so baffled by what is going on in the top tier. It appears that K-7 has shot the machine gunner and the driver surrenders to him as he drives past...but in the next panel he's saying "Good girl" to Yvonne because she...got the driver? So, did they jump out between panels and attack the driver? Was Yvonne shooting too, but we just never saw her do it? Did she take the wheel and run the driver over?  What do you think happened?

Hircon is clearly meant to be a Rasputin-like character. I could call this mobstertype a hypnotist, mentalist, or even a rasputin (following my examples of fu manchus, genghis khans, and napoleons). Hircon is not a real name and suggests no nationality/ethnicity.  

Ironically, petrosene is more of a real life name, even though it is used as a fictional chemical compound here. Fulmites are not a real thing either, though nitro is obviously nitroglycerin.

Would he really kill his best friend? The theory is never tested in this issue, and Charlotta could be wrong about how hypnotism works. In-game, I would say that a magically charmed fighter could be tricked into killing his best friend, and any other class might if they fail a save vs. spells. I don't think normal hypnosis should allow this, though. 

There are a lot of ways for Heroes to foil being locked in a room -- shoot the lock, bash the door in, pull it off its hinges (if you've a superhero in the party), cast a Knock spell...heck, this door even has a glass window in it, so you can just break it, reach around, and turn the doorknob from the other side. Normally, the reason why you would do this to your players is so your bad guy(s) can get a head start on running away, but our charmed doctor squanders his lead by searching for a bomb.

Here's something I don't think we've ever seen before -- un-hypnotizing someone. I guess it makes sense that one would use the same skill to unhypnotize as hypnotize. 

We're halfway through the issue now and we're just going to peek in on Dash Dixon again before heading out for the day. Yes, Dash is still dressed like a bellhop with his tighty-whiteys on over his uniform (at least you can't see his undies clearly on this page). The only cool thing here is the villain, The Eyes, a blind spy who has two light-up glass eyes (not that it makes much sense that they light up, but it becomes a semi-cool visual on the next page (and maybe I'll show you next time!)

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)