Fantastic Comics #5 - pt. 1

That's one big Samson! And this is one nice opening page, establishing our hero, our villain, and the setting, as the scenario gets quickly rolling along.  

Zanbar is just a lazy substitute for Zanzibar, which is also an island in the Indian Ocean.

There was a time when I would have statted Eelo as a merman...but now we have fish men in the Mobster Manual.

But already, on page 2, the fictional geopolitical landscape gets a little confusing. Zanzibar was a British protectorate, so Malajaca is either the name of the British colony there, or maybe it's the name of a neighboring island and Marie is just vacationing on Zanbar/Zanzibar. 

The amphibian henchmen are likely the same race as Eelo -- but not necessarily! I could see an underwater hierarchy where Eelo is a merman, but he can boss around fish men. 

That Eelo thinks he can interbreed with surface humans further suggests to me he is a merman, since we already have precedent for Namor (admittedly from another company) being half-merman.

 

You'd think Eelo would be able to grapple at least one of those girls before they all escape through the window, but he might be waiting for his wedding night to touch them, and his henchmen are all out of range. 

So, islands don't just float on the surface of the water like that. In all but the cartooniest of Hideouts & Hoodlums campaigns, I would refrain from messing with geology like that.

Here's my second clue that the three girls are vacationing on an island not their own. If her father was on the same island, and the islands is that small, you wouldn't need a telegraph to reach him.

The surface area of Zanzibar is 2,654 sq. km, so that island cannot be Zanzibar after all.  

Eelo seems to be an overreactor. Girls jilt him? He sinks their island. To punish the girls...he puts them in a trap that looks like it could kill them? 

That is an amazingly accurate teleporter, able to sit Samson down in a specific boat in an entire ocean. How does the Brun know where the boat is? It's probably best not to question things like that...though it's always possible that the seismograph is so sensitive that it can sense where boats are displacing water?

I find it very interesting that Samson has a blanket around him in panels 2, 3, and 5. What happened? Like the Teleport spell, is there a chance of failure and Samson appeared in the water next to the ship? Did he ask for the blanket so the crew would not get jealous of his amazing physique? 

Ceylon is what Sri Lanka used to be known as, so it's especially interesting that we've had fictional or half-fictional country names so far, and yet here we get a real one.

There's really no reason why the underwater pressure should be sapping Samon's strength, but not the amphibians, and no weakness to water pressure ever comes up again, but this is the beauty of game mechanics with unpredictable, random results -- that when the unexpected happens because of bad dice rolls, you have to explain/rationalize it in-game.

I really like Alex Blum as an artist, but I like him best for his layout work on inspired pages like this one. Panel 1 reveals so much about the characters from their stances. Eelo's dramatic posing in panels 1 and 2 remind me of 1960s Marvel Comics. Samson looks incredible powerful in panels 6 and 7 as he tears the torture apparatus apart and then stands over its wreckage, but the highlight of the page is being dropped down a chute into the deathtrap, as the deathtrap is slowly closing. 

Also note this implies a multi-level hideout.

I don't normally spend this long on admiring the artwork, but look at how panel 1 here zooms out from panel 7 of the previous page. Look at how practically Steranko-esque that 2nd panel is! Look at how panel 5 only exists to show a change of scene, in an age when many comic book panels were background-less. Admire the detail-planning that went into establishing that Eelo's machine has to be started with a key before the levers work. Admire the dynamics of Eelo leaning back, to show us he is about to pull the lever, instead of showing us a moment earlier when he was simply grasping the lever. Observe how the waves of pressure are illustrated in panel 8. 

Game mechanics-wise, I'm not sure how to handle thrusting one's way against pressure, except maybe by Strength checks.

I really don't get how the pressure creates a pathway to the sub, or what that even means. 

I have been grappling with where the "Maljacan fleet" comes from, but I think I've finally figured it out - Maljaca is Malacca, a small (at that time) British protectorate on the Malay Peninsula. I don't know why we're back to fictionalized names again. Now this makes sense, as the British Empire did have a formidable navy that would give even Eelo pause.

Samson sure gained on the sub quickly. He is likely boosted here by the Race the Train power. But how does movement translate underwater? I've never published specific rules on this, I don't think. 

Swimming speed should be 1/3 land speed...though I would be willing to consider it if a player argued that the Race the powers do not consider terrain. 

Turning the torpedo around sounds like the 4th-level Turn Gun on Bad Guy power. I've previously established that Samson started with five brevet ranks, so this should come as no surprise.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)