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).
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