Top-Notch Comics #4 - pt. 2

We're back and, if you've been waiting on me to finish the Wizard's story, here it is -- the Wizard defeats the "Bundonian" sub by lifting it out of the water. That's right, he can lift at least 750 tons over his head, without even firm ground underneath him. As unlikely as that is, I have to wonder if he's not actually using some form of levitation -- contra-gravity discs attached to the hull -- and then is pretending to hold it up just for the showmanship of it? Or, hey, I'd even be willing to accept some combination of the two. 

This ending brings up the issue of what to do in your Hideouts & Hoodlums campaigns when it's well before 1945, but your heroes have already forced Germany, or your German-analog country, to surrender. One possibility is to just keep replacing them with German-analog countries ("Bundonia surrenders...but the next day their neighbors Caledonia declares war on Europe!"). Or the country reneges on their surrender, finding some excuse to invalidate it and then continues the war effort. Or, you and your players agree to a campaign where nothing the Heroes do has an impact on continuity between sessions, as if the world resets each session (very much like many golden age comic books, though I don't recommend this so much for fun campaign play). 

But you didn't come back to hear more about the Wizard, you came back for Dick Storm. Because who can resist Dick Storm? 

Here we find an unimaginatively named Chile analog called Chilan, with an unusual history. It's not too surprising that, 22 years after the 1918 pandemic, people were still worried about plagues, but Chile had not had its own plague during the intervening years. 

I wonder what the president thinks Dick Storm is going to be able to do about a plague. Shouldn't he talking to a doctor instead?

Here is a great example of Hideouts & Hoodlums' abstract combat system, and at the same time an argument against specific hit locations. At point blank range, the assassin could probably hit Dick Storm anywhere, but panel 2 seems to make it appear the bullet is going to land in his right arm or stomach. In panel 3, the bullet lands in his left arm. 

That is the worst outfit for an assassin ever. Maybe not; I suppose pink pajamas would make him stand out even more.

Rana is surprised to see how quickly Dick Storm stands erect.

Pruvians is almost certainly an analogue for Peruvians. In reality, Chile and Peru had been at peace since 1883.

"I have a plan but you need to turn your army over to me for a few days."

"Sure, what could go wrong?"

"I'll also need access to all your bank accounts. And -- heeyyy...if you're Chileans, why is your daughter blonde?"

"Rana! Despite parading around in a cocktail dress, you've managed to sneak past my entire air force and reached that plane!"

Dick swings into action! Honestly, I can't even make fun of this stuff anymore because now I think the author is in on all the jokes.

To their credit, these soldiers have had about five minutes of uninterrupted stare-up-a-dress-time as the parachutists descend, but their thoughts are entirely on Dick Storm when they reach the ground. 

The fact that the general is still standing there unarmed in panel 7 as Dick Storm is attacking him seems to suggest Dick is enjoying a surprise round, but I don't think the circumstances here would have warranted a surprise roll. Rather, I think Dick won initiative and the Editor had made no statement yet of the general's intentions. It's also possible that the general is holding his gun in the shadows of his uniform; his whole right hand seems malformed, as if hastily drawn.

In a chase sequence, the desk in the way would be considered a complication to overcome, but in a combat sequence, this panel is correct; in H&H, you can ignore obstacles in your way during melee, unless you choose to incorporate them into your flavor text (or, obviously, if you plan to pick it up and use it as a weapon!).

I remember this scene from the first Indiana Jones movie. Plane propellers are nasty weapons; I'd put this at least in the range of 3-12 damage, so no wonder the soldiers are running. 

You might have guessed that Dick Storm's plan turns out perfectly and Chile surrenders after Dick arranges for a lot of them to die. So we're going to jump way ahead towards the end of the next story featuring Moore of the Mounted. Here we see an example of a trap as a wandering encounter. This page also shows us a good example of Lawful and Chaotic Alignments and how they differ in this scenario.

Technically Sgt. Moore is right; an Olympic skier can achieve downhill speeds of ten times someone running on foot, but the average speed of the average skier is more like 2 1/2 times faster (Movement rate 30 as opposed to 12).

And now we're going to make one last jump into the next story, Streak Chandler of Mars. I think from just this one page you can tell the backstory borrows heavily from Flash Gordon, with the wrinkle of the gangsters forcing them all to leave. Streak's problems are a frequent staple of the sports genre. The art isn't very good, but doesn't Streak look awful old to be a college football player?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)
 

 

 

Top-Notch Comics #4 - pt. 1

We're going to jump straight into the first feature of this issue, The Wizard, because there's some interesting issues here. The scenario here is that Germans (called Bundonians here) are planning to launch an invasion of Texas from Mexico. But the Wizard seems to have caught onto their plan late because he's arriving in Texas and the bad guys' base is already there. Further, it only takes him two hours to fly there. The Wizard is based out of Washington, D.C. and a non-stop flight to San Antonio, Texas normally takes 3 1/2 hours. So either the Wizard is not in Washington, D.C. at the start of this scenario or his plane travels almost twice as fast as a normal plane (certainly unusual given that it appears to only be a standard mono-prop plane). 

Also note how the subplot involving the fiancee with hurt feelings is resolved in one panel and a caption. Compare to a post-1961 comic book, where this soap opera material might stretch over pages.

This diagram reminds me of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe. Even with specs to admire, I still don't know what a VB-Ray does. Maybe it stands for Very Brutal? It can definitely melt/wreck through walls. 

Hypnotizing one-on-one is a skill any Hero can attempt, but hypnotizing a whole room full of people seems more like a power or spell. Although, from panel 4, it appears the general's staff is just this one soldier next to him. 

There are sound tactics here; hypnotism may only last so long, or the enemy might get wise to the deception, so he' right to make their arsenal his next target. 

I, admittedly, have no Air Force experience, but it seems to me that the bombers are dive bombing, not circling. I was skeptical of this until I looked it up, but dive bombing is a thing because angling down towards the target actually helps aim the bombs with greater accuracy. I would have thought dropping them straight down would be better, but this is why no one asks me to plan bombing missions.

  

Here we have another diagram that looks cool but doesn't really tell us how it works. Luckily this one is a very familiar one, the cliche of a ray that kills engines. 

A nice twist is that the bad guys have a ray gun too. A dissolving raygun? The caption said it sprayed corrosive liquid, but that seems unlikely that a squirt gun would be that accurate while traveling at airplane speeds.

This top row is all kinds of interesting to me. The acid has drained his strength, but has done no visible damage to him or even to his clothes. Is that possible? Only with H&H's abstract damage mechanic (and, to be fair, the mechanic of the game H&H is based on). When he's saying all his strength is gone, what the Wizard probably means is that he's down to his last few hit points already.

I'm not sure why we need to see the inside of a flask to get how it works. It's kinda neat that it shows us how the gasses get mixed inside it, but by pulling back to the curtain to show us the "science" it reveals two made-up gas names, riaton and oxothygen. I think we were better off with the ray guns that look technical but reveal nothing of how they work. 

I have never encountered this use of "I'm all in!" before, which seems here to mean "I'm completely spent!" rather than "Yeah, let's do this!"

It's nice that even the narrator in the caption of panel 6 realized how hard it is to believe that the plane just happens to come down at his fiancee's house. That should tell you there's something wrong with your story when even your own fictional narrator doesn't believe it. 

"Eggscape"? That's a German accent?

"Phial" is an unusual word you don't see every day. And invisible gas is equally rare in a comic book. 

Ho.Mg4? Holmium Magnesium? Seems like that would be extremely dangerous, even if that was a real isotope. 

Heroes always manage to pull out a last bit of strength when needed, as if their weaknesses were just flavor text.

Here's a rare cutaway view of a hideout. Although the map only shows three soldiers on the ground floor and one guard on the upper floor, it seems that there are four men on the ground floor after all. Or one of them withstood the Wizard's surprise attack. Or the guard from upstairs came down. Or maybe a guard from outside joined in. It's important that the players never learn exactly what they're up against no matter how well they prepare.

I have a pocket transmitter too these days, but my pockets sure aren't big enough to hold the transmitter we see in panel 3. Although the Wizard's main power is called his photographic mind, it seems more like omniscience how he senses everything. That's a power I'm not keen on being in Hideouts & Hoodlums, though I suppose I could bump it up to a 7th level power so I don't have to worry about it for awhile. 

I'm also uncomfortable with the near limitless range of the Wizard's Message power; this has to be a higher level version (Greater Messaging?) of how I envision the power working. 

I don't see how a contra-gravity flask would let him run super-fast through the air, but maybe he's buffed with both Fly and Race the Plane to get that speed?

Hey Wizard, are you seriously leaving your fiancee tied up? 

In case you weren't sure from the above that the Wizard was a superhero, we get a perfect example of him using wrecking things here -- superhero-level wrecking things (any Hero can snap rope on a good roll). 

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Target Comics #3 - pt. 4

As readers of this blog may have noticed, I have an unabashed appreciation for this peculiar little utopian future/boys adventure feature, Calling 2R. The writing is impressive and, on this page, you can see how the art keeps wowing me. Sure, this is a trace job, but it's a very good trace job! I think leaving all the perspective lines in even adds to the piece. 

There is something Steve Ditko-esque about this page, from the cartoonishness of that thrown punch to the didactic dialogue in the Hole. Yet the characters are inverted from how Ditko would later have written them; the individualistic Pretty Boy is sobbing and defeated, while the Captain is buoyed by his faith in the collective.  

It's also interesting that neither of these characters have proper names yet.

Contrasting nicely with the didactic Calling 2R is this more nuanced Tarpe Mills one-shot (part of the Fantastic Feature Films series, as if each one-shot was a movie), where four anarchists are portrayed in a surprisingly sympathetic manner.

In case, like me, you were unfamiliar with bubble dancing, The bubble dance is an erotic dance made famous by Sally Rand in the 1930s. The dancer (sometimes naked) dances with a huge bubble shaped like a balloon or ball placed between her body and the audience to make some interesting poses. It's possible that Tarpe had heard of bubble dancing but never seen one, since she seems to have misunderstood and has her holding the bubble behind her.

There are no heroes in this story. This American couple save the dictator, as if that was a good thing. The baroness, in the end, had the courage and conviction to do what seems to me to be the right thing, but is still thwarted. And the poor chicken gets killed!

That's it for this issue of Target Comics. Come back soon for my next read...

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Target Comics #3 - pt.3

We're visiting the latest story of T-Men again. The description of a funeral car does seem like a good clue, but I would stop and check to make sure there were no reports of a stolen hearse before going door-to-door.

We're still not at the stage of having impressively-designed villains yet. The Octopus looks like a bald Riddler wearing an octopus t-shirt. 

Lockets are both a good clue to find at a crime scene and valuable treasure to collect.

A hawser is "a cable or rope used in mooring or towing a ship." I've never heard that word before!

This is from the next feature, City Editor. The shack's cellar is nothing but a one-room cellar distillery, but you can imagine it as the entrance to a more extensive hideout, with some hideout dressing pictured.

This is that interesting and peculiar feature, Calling 2-R. The lesson here seems to be, if you're given a choice of who to fight, picking the littlest guy isn't going to do you any good. Indeed, there is no game mechanic advantage to attacking someone a few inches shorter than you.

It seems like this page is also demonstrating some sort of dodging mechanic, but bear in mind that anyone with 1 HD has only a 50-50 chance of striking anyone enough to do damage, so it's certainly possible for someone to miss three times in a row. 

There is no security the way we think of it in the utopia of Boyville, not even a necessary starter key to turn on a "bugoplane." 

I do not get that line "Back to the white lights for me" at all. I can't figure out if that is some pop culture reference of the time I don't recognize.

With that kind of a lead, it seems impossible for a flying suit to catch up. And yet, nothing ever seems to be beyond the technology of Boyville...

Yep, called it. So now the bugoplane is a "cosmoplane"? 

The design work on this feature never fails to impress me. Here, a simple spacesuit with bubble helmet is made uniquely different by elongating the helmet and putting bubbles on the front of it -- to magnify vision? That makes sense, considering the distance he's tracking the bugo-/cosmo-plane from. For comic book science, everything seems really well thought out here, down to the limited air supply in the plane. 

Even here -- notice how the motion of the propellers causes the ship to corkscrew -- because of course it would in outer space, with no gravity and no air to resist the propellers. And this is a comic book artist in 1940 who figured this out.

 
 

There's a little hiccup here with the science, when the boy opens the door into a vacuum and nothing gets sucked out of the room. The design of the ship is too small for the airlock it needs to make this scene work. The dizziness from lack of oxygen gets us back on track, though.

And that's that for this post!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Target Comics #3 - pt. 2

The first page of this story (which I didn't share last time) reveals that Bull's-Eye Bill is "of the Target Range - Arizona." Here we get a reference to Florence, which seems like our first big clue as to where in Arizona we are...though, on second thought, just mentioning the jail there doesn't necessarily mean we're near it. There's also the slight chance he means Florence, Colorado or Florence, Texas, but Florence, Arizona is definitely the largest and most important of the three Florences.

Oh look, the "good guy gets his hat shot off" trope!

The outlaws fail their morale saves. Losing half their numbers triggers a morale save, as does being threatened with guns by a fighter.

We're going to jump ahead to the next story, Lucky Byrd, Flying Cadet. The glossary of cadet slang could be useful for an aviation-themed campaign, but I think it's more remarkable that the author felt that camouflage was a term young readers would not be familiar with. Of course, everyone knows camouflage today, but could that be because we had to endure the disastrous fashion sense of the 1980s and the rise of camouflage pants?

Here, Byrd makes a skill check and is able to recognize the type of motor he's hearing. Granted, that's of limited usefulness, unless it also tells him what kind of plane he's hearing.

"Kerwhooomm" is a strange noise for a plane to make.

A nice twist with the cowboy is that he comes in all belligerent, like there's going to be a fight, but then turns out to be quite reasonable. This could be the result of good role-playing from Byrd's player, or a random encounter reaction roll.

I think I know what this "Randolph" is Byrd mentions -- Randolph Air Force Base in Universal City, Texas. Which, you know, has a nice generic comic book city sound to it, like Metropolis. Uvalde is a small city in Texas, so that works out too.  

This is a Harry Campbell story; Harry either lived out west or was very well-informed about life out west, as I've noticed before reading his Dean Denton stories.

 

I'm not sure if powerful magnets would be the most efficient method of opening a hangar door or not; I'm in the future, 81 years later, and my garage door still doesn't open that way. But I give Harry credit for always trying to ground his stories in science.

I'm normally perfectly comfortable with accents being spelled out, but it's bothering me a little this time because that accent seems like it would sound French to me. I'm curious why Harry thought the French would be sabotaging the American airplane industry...?

Lucky Byrd is right! First, the guard falls for the feigning sickness routine (save vs. plot to make that happen). Second, he wins that fight while still on the ground (granted, he appears to get a surprise attack followed by winning initiative on the first normal turn of combat). Third, shooting the door controls just happens to make it go down, when it could have just as easily not moved at all. As an Editor, if I didn't already have a random table for those controls, I'd try to come up with at least four results for shooting the controls (door goes down, controls explode, another door opens, nothing happens) and roll randomly on it.

That scientific explanation for the invisible plane is pretty sound; invisibility is explained much the same way in modern science fiction. Kudos, Harry!
 

And before we go we'll just peak in on the next T-Men story. Although called "Return of the Octopus," this is first time we've seen him and this is the first villain (of many) to be called Octopus (or some variation on that).

(Scans are courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)