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.)