Fight Comics #4 - pt. 1

If you'd asked me this morning what I planned to do with my day, writing about George Tuska's Shark Brodie boxing a kangaroo probably wouldn't have been any of my guesses. 

Not that he's actually boxing the kangaroo yet; at first, he's just sailing along, minding his own business, when he gets his first wandering encounter (spoiler: there will be more of these). The encounter is a chance for a good deed and some easy experience points, so Shark leaps at the chance. 

A dory is a small boat with pointed ends and high, flaring sides, like a large rowboat, only it can also support a sail or a motor. 

Here's a clever tip for Editors; when the players aren't spoiling for a fight, but you want to make a fight happen, have the bad guys make this mistake. 

I'm honestly surprised that players have never actively sought this out in one of my H&H campaigns yet, but fighting for gamblers seems like an easy way to make both xp and $, though Lawful Heroes should not be considering this option. 

Ten to one odds is very good odds. I would probably sink some levels in the fighter class into that kangaroo if I wanted it to be that challenging.

I like how there's no overarching plot to this installment, but just a series of random encounters that are made to overlap thanks to Stubby and Fritz motivating each encounter.

I hope I'm not reading too much into this page to think Susie and Dolly are prostitutes, but since Susie is a pickpocket we can always stat them as thieves instead of vamps. 

We're going to jump from there into the next feature, Kinks Mason. 

A 100-lb. swordfish is average size, so at 300 lbs. would be a large swordfish, at 900 lbs. a huge swordfish, and ...well, luckily giant swordfish don't exist in real life, and I would call this a huge swordfish. 

Huge swordfish can overturn small boats.  

I'm interested in how treasure can be concealed on a fish and be hook enough for an underwater adventure.  Treasure is always a good adventure hook, but don't forget that treasure should usually be guarded.

Sometimes it isn't enough to dangle plot hooks and Editor's can get impatient. When the Editor wants to get a character to an adventure locale so badly that he takes extraordinary measures to move the character there against his will that's usually called railroading, but here we can call it swordfishing.

Ooo, nice surprise encounter at the end here!

At first I thought he was going to be a ghost pirate, but that he's got a Potion of Water Breathing with a really impressive duration is a novel wrinkle. Since he's a captain, level titles tell me that he's probably a 5th level fighter. Having trained huge swordfish instead of a pirate crew is another interesting wrinkle. Did he have a Potion of Animal Control as well?

I'm not sure what's going on in panel 5. Either Kink is knocking over the table to serve as cover (which is sensible), or he knocked it over so he can jump off of it and lunge for the sword, burning a stunt and essentially wasting a turn of combat. 

If he managed to keep the sword maybe the extra damage over punching would be worth it, but Sneely (a terrible name for a villain, by the way, other than the villain's sidekick) manages to break the sword. This could be a non-superhero wrecking things roll, or the Editor had simply decided in advance that the sword was rusted and useless and just there to inconvenience the Hero. 

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)