Keen Detective Funnies #19 - pt. 1

WOOOOOO! Finally! Finally, made it to April 1940, after being stuck on March 1940 for the longest time. But will the stories get any better? Uh-oh -- we're back to Centaur Comics...

We're going to start with Spark O'Leary, and the upteenth time someone in comics has invented a method of invisibility! Kudos, at least, to getting the optics of it kind of right, that it would have to bend light around an object instead of reflecting it, though how it makes hands invisible when they're left uncovered is unclear. And is it dangerous to wear the suit? Is that why it needs a built-in gas mask?

There is a lot of plot convenience on this page. One, Spark just happens to leave the press conference early, which seems to be a terrible thing for a "newshawk" to be doing, but otherwise he wouldn't already be on the road to see the kidnappers, who just happen to drive past him. 

The story completely glosses over how Spark manages to sneak into the building unseen, and then how the two men manage to sneak out unseen. But then, these are some pretty nearsighted mobsters, because they completely miss the car just sitting off to the side of the road. Perhaps we can at least give Spark credit for having Prof. Doran lay down in the backseat, rather than visibly sitting shotgun, but it seems a risky move when more careful mobsters might have stopped and checked out the suspicious vehicle.

An old flivver conveniently blocking the road is just the sort of examples of chase complications I need to expand my table, and the owner of the flivver also being an ornery sheriff is just a bonus complication. But how they resolve the problem leaves me very suspicious of who's side this professor is really on. And how impressionable is Spark that he immediately goes along with this plan to run a sheriff off the road into a pond, where he might drown?

It's very rare for early trophy items in comics to have this kind of built-in weakness, like having water short-circuit them. 

In anyone else's hands, having an invisibility suit would be the origin story for a new superhero (indeed, that's precisely the Invisible Hood's origin story!), but Spark simply gives the suit back when he's done with it. 

Spark is, again, unconcerned when he is out-scooped by another reporter, on the same story he should have been on top of, and instead of being concerned about this mysterious-sounding fire, he just shrugs it off like it's no skin off his nose. Way to avoid your next plot hook, player! 

We're going to jump to the end of the next story, Dean Masters, D.A. Dean has apparently gone out and bought this trophy item, a magnetic cane. It allows him to control rigged roulette wheels and, I presume, pick up his dropped keys without bending over. How it cut wires isn't clear; it would be cool if it had a concealed pop-out blade in the foot of it, but such was never shown.

Now we'll jump into Spy Hunters, for a very early, very rare example of breaking the fourth wall in a serious adventure story. Eat your heart out, Deadpool!

Brest is a real city, a port city in the Finistère département in Brittany.

The Maginot Line of defenses had been installed along the German border throughout the 1930s and would be familiar to most American readers. This comic book, though cover dated April 1940, would have come out in January, four months before the Maginot Line became irrelevant. 

I usually share any maps I see in old stories, in case they could be useful later in planning game sessions or published scenarios...but I'm not even sure what I'm looking at in this map. I wouldn't have much confidence in a military campaign relying on such a map. 

Salzwedel is a town in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, so it's optimistic, if not poor forecasting, to assume France would be taking the offensive into Germany soon.

I wouldn't be bragging if I won a fight with 30:4 odds, but this is always possible when you rely on random wandering encounters instead of planned encounters. The dice give you breaks sometimes!

A subaltern is an officer in the British army below the rank of captain, especially a second lieutenant, so this wouldn't be a term you'd be using to describe German soldiers.

This is from Dan Dennis, FBI. Polly spotted Dan and Tick shadowing her because he failed a skill check or a surprise roll (the Editor could handle that either way), and then she tries to throw them off by handing the package to someone else and splitting up, so Dan and Tick have to split up to follow them both. This could work particularly well against H&H players, as not splitting up is so ingrained in their training.

St. James Place may seem familiar to most of us from the Monopoly board, but it's also a fairly common place name. We can't know for sure if this is the St. James Place in Brooklyn, or Chicago, or somewhere else.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.) 

   
 

Colossus Comics #1 - pt. 3

We're back and this is still "The Gold of Gartok," an incredibly poorly drawn comic book feature, but one with some interesting concepts in it, as we discussed last time.

Here, we see another example of early superheroes having no problems with killing, as the Tulpa picks up a guard and casually chucks him down a well to die. 

Why would grey eyes be forbidden? 

Lama Tsang has some variant of the Message spell that can reach someone in their dreams -- though, since this was cast between two non-Hero characters, this sort of detail can be hand-waved as flavor text.

Note the use of hourglasses to synchronize, when watches are not available.

I don't have anything game mechanic-related to say here, but -- what a master negotiator Shia is. He's staring down the barrel of a sub-machine gun pointed at him, and he still manages to convince the good guy to bribe him to surrender! And not just with loose coinage, but an entire bag of gold. It makes me think about if I ever wanted to play a campaign where all money transactions were handled by trading bags of gold, ala the Talisman board game. It would certainly take the place of nuanced price lists for equipment; it would be more like 1 bag of gold = all your starting equipment.

Huh. I guess I thought of something game mechanic-y to talk about after all...

I love how comic book villains think. "Our bullets are bouncing right off him -- let's try our fists instead!" Though, to be fair, it's possible that the mobsters are trying to overbear and pin the Tulpa -- we really can't tell anything for sure from this terrible art -- and maybe they think he is invulnerable, but not super-strong. 

I would call Wolfgang's bluff, Bart. If being buried under an avalanche of bags of gold didn't set off that vial, it's probably not nitroglycerine he's holding. 

Now we're jumping right into the next feature, Blond Garth... you know, to distinguish him from all the other Garths in the South Seas. It's your typical white savior racist fare, but transported from Africa to the South Seas. I share this page to illustrate that you can expect your enemies to have concealed weapons hidden anywhere -- even in their loincloths. "Is that a dagger you've got in your pocket, Blond Garth...? Oh...I guess it was a dagger..."

In case you're wondering, he's going to shove the shell into the shark's mouth and make it choke; a pretty risky gamble and one I'm having trouble coping with game mechanically. I guess...he has to roll to hit, then make a save vs. plot to make the opportunity for the choking to happen, which forces a save vs. science for the shark to resist choking. Game mechanically, you'd think he would have been better off just punching the shark, but I agree this makes for a more suspenseful page than that.

This is a ...honestly, I can't tell with this issue when I'm looking at filler or if I'm looking at a feature. This is called Ruggey and it is, mercifully, the last feature in this book. It seems to be someone's riff on Will Eisner's Archie O'Toole, about a simple man who becomes a king. I share this page because, well, it's still early in 1940, and making fun of Hitler is not a full-time occupation in the funny pages yet. This one is pretty subtle, but promising you peace while stealing your sandwich seems like a "ha ha, that's Hitler for you" kind of joke that would sit well with me if I didn't have future knowledge that he was also committing genocide on the side.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Colossus Comics #1 - pt. 2

This is still Lucky Lucifer (that's a good guy's name, in case you couldn't tell). Game mechanically, I wanted to point out a rare instance of an aviator not using the wing walk stunt and just holding on for dear life. Should the fact that he's injured lower his number of available stunts? 

Storywise, I just want to point out that Lucky takes a huge gamble ditching his plane to hop onto another plane because he believes -- correctly it seems -- that the anti-aircraft gunners would ignore the still active pilot and concentrate on the plane that was going to crash soon anyway.

"Lt Lucifer, your reconnaissance -- I'm sorry, I just have to ask, why am I calling you Lt. Lucifer? Lucifer is just your nickname, right? Your father's surname isn't really Lucifer. Your mother didn't really go, 'O, I love this man, I can't wait to change my last name to Lucifer"?

That said, I like both how complex and how simple this next scenario is. It's complex in that there's going to be a lot of moving parts moving around, but simple in that most of that is going to be background detail, as the focus of our Hero is going to be on this spy retrieval side-mission. 

Given the speeds involved, the target AC for "hitting" the spy's outreached arms must be pretty low, though she can also roll "to hit" Lucifer back. 

Now, I know I have no skin in this game, but if I was the one flying into enemy territory to pick up a spy, I wouldn't go in alone; I would want at least one more plane with me to run interference.

As I said, the scenario is simple because Lucifer's orders are basically to stay out of it. If he ignored orders (and you'd sort of expect that from someone named Lucifer), he could fly into the battle and then you'd have to play it out, but if it's just going on around him, you can treat it as flavor text and describe a pre-decided outcome. 

When one plane separates to attack Lucifer's plane, that isn't necessarily bringing him into the big battle and can be treated as a separate battle/one-on-one dog fight.

Ugh...I can tell this one's going to hurt to read. It looks like some 4th grader's attempt to draw a L'il Abner clone. Although it might be hard to imagine drawing inspiration from this...I wonder if hillbillies, as a mobstertype, should have a bonus to "rasslin'."

Normally I would not apply the wrecking things rules to missile weapons used against you, but sometimes it could be fun flavor text. It could also be of practice use, like if arrows were being fired at you, to find out if the arrows broke or are retrievable (because arrows are a lot more likely to break than boulders).

Aside from that, I think I'll just mention that it's pretty weak storytelling, that the only spooky thing these guys pretending to be ghosts do is talk through a bush. I can't even count them as fake undead!

Jumping in here to the next story, Mory Marine.  Thumbscrews are a real thing, and could be as small as what is sorta drawn here, but they are archaic by 1940, being more of a 17th-18th century device. 

It is more likely that Mory (what kind of name is Mory?) blew his escape artist skill check than the mobsters have past experience as sailors. Mobsters don't generally have individualized skills. 

Finding a blood trail could be a searching check, and following a trail could be a tracking skill check, but an Editor should not require both unless the blood trail is very faint.

The bottom keeps dropping out on this artwork! Ugh...it looks like someone is dropping crumpled up balls of paper at our Heroes, here in "The Gold of Gartok." 

But behind that atrocious art is a pretty good idea to explain superheroes. Tulpas are real things too, or I should say real world theory. "Tulpa" is a concept in mysticism and the paranormal of a being or object which is created through spiritual or mental powers. It was adapted by 20th-century theosophists from Tibetan sprul-pa which means "emanation" or "manifestation." It can do anything the person who wills the tulpa into being is able to believe the tulpa can do, but only while concentrating and, as we learn here, if that concentration is disrupted, it takes an hour to create a new one.

A ledge saved our "white hero," but he's quickly captured and dropped into this snake pit. Interestingly, the snake pit only has four snakes in it, as if to give Rob a really sporting chance. 

Chanti and Charmi are Indian names -- but girls' names -- Genghis is a Mongolian title and not a name (but maybe a nickname?), and Bhutra is an Indian surname. Maybe Chanti and Charmi are nicknames too, like calling someone a Nancy or a Karen. 

It's interesting that the tulpa's explanation for what happened to him is patently untrue. Does a tulpa have to believe in itself to exist? Or it simply doesn't want Rob to know it can disappear on him again if the lama smells something else good? 

I may be having a deja vu moment, but, amazingly, I don't think this is the first time we've seen someone picking up snakes and throwing them as missile weapons in a comic book story.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Colossus Comics #1 - pt. 1

Wow! I have been reviewing comic books from only the cover date of March 1940 since August 2019. It's hard to believe it's taken this long, and makes me a little fearful of how long it's going to take to get through April! But now we are on the final issue available to me from this month, the one and only issue of Colossus Comics from Sun Publications (one of only two comic books they ever produced). It reads like a cheaper knock-off of Planet Comics...but I'm getting ahead of myself!

First we get a glimpse of the 27th century. We know from this page that mankind has colonized the solar system at least as far as Jupiter's moons by then, and that we've gone back to manned, moon-bound telescopes instead of automated satellite telescopes. Because this is the second attack of the Plantaliens -- vicious-looking Mr. Potato Heads with spaghetti-like green tentacles -- we get a "oh no, not again!" reaction and not a "we've finally encountered other life in the universe!" reaction. So we don't know from this story if this is the only other intelligent species out there. 

Getting permission from a patient before injecting an untested drug into them is apparently not a thing anymore in the future. Darn you, lax medical malpractice laws!   

Oh, girls are so ditzy! How can you expect them to notice the difference between 2/100th of a part of a catalyst and a portion 10,000 times larger?

 2,000' tall may or may not be a record for largest giant in a comic book to this point; the moon giants in Flip Falcon would definitely give him a run for his money. Thank goodness his clothes (somehow) grow with him!

That's right, technology has still not replaced the zipper by the 27th century -- unless Zenith just likes to wear super-retro clothes. Incidentally, if 20th century clothes were the retro-fashion of the 27th century, that would be akin to people dressing in 13th century garb in the 20th century to look retro.

I'm curious about that threat that he could crush them with his breath. I don't know how even the Mythbusters team would test that one. If we accepted this at face value, we'd have to assign damage to his breath, since Hideouts & Hoodlums currently has no wind-based powers that do damage.

Urbania is either a renamed city or a city that doesn't exist in our time. 

In the future they still have televisions with poor color quality, and use telegrams instead of, oh, an electronic version that transmits over some electronic device.

Here we see the Colossus using his breath to Wreck at Range, though at a distance of 2,000' it's more of an inconvenience than a threat.

You know, it's really annoying that we never get any frame of reference for the size of the Plantaliens. I'm tempted to stat them like a D&D roper, but what if they are only 2' tall?

So, these are fleets? I'm seeing 5 vs. 6. 

The range on those ground ray batteries/electric rayguns is fantastic; they can reach from ground level to the upper atmosphere.

It's not clear from this story if the Martians and Venusians are Earth colonists or aliens.

As odd a futuristic story as Colossus AD 2640 was, the Educational Adventures of Panda-Lin is much weirder. Why does the panda have a P on his chest? Who knows.

I'm showing you this page because of the unusual flying carpet that's a split bamboo mat. Magic items can be shaped to fit the culture they came from.

We're going to end today with just this one page from Lucky Lucifer, Flyer of Fortune. The artwork is so terrible I'm almost embarrassed to have it on my blog; I could find 5th graders who can draw better than this. I share it for two things. One is the concept of Heroes having an emblem on their vehicles that identifies them -- this is long before Batman gets his Batmobile. 

The other is the concept of a direct hit. Critical hits are a house rule almost as old as D&D itself, and in any d20-based game using criticals, it is usually treated as a natural (unmodified) roll of 20 on the die. But what if a direct hit was rolling the exact target number for the Armor Class? Against a live opponent, your direct hit might do +1 damage, or against a vehicle automatically cause a complication (like here, where the engine catches on fire).

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

 

Famous Funnies #68 - pt. 2

Just a few pages left I want to share from this issue. This shooting contest demonstrates that, if you get more than one attack per turn, and you win initiative, you still get all your attacks before the other side goes. 

These gags are from "Life's Like That," which I often enjoy. The one on the left I found particularly funny, while the right reinforces my own distrust of the stock market, all these decades later.

This page, apparently from way back in 1935 (according to comics.org), demonstrates that monkeys are naturally skilled pick pockets no matter what size the monkey (maybe a 2 in 6 chance?). 

What kind of monkey is this? As cartoonishly as it's drawn it is hard to say. It is clearly not a mandrill or a proboscis monkey. Since howler monkeys can grow to 4' tall, I'm thinking that's what this is meant to be, though a langur or a macaque are also not outside the realm of possibility.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)