Famous Funnies #62

Opening with a joke...

Jack Kirby's Lightning and the Lone Rider reminds us that silencers existed for guns in the 1930s, though here it is called a "muffler". I would think everyone in a hideout would want a silencer, because gun shots echo so loud.

$2 for an airplane ride.

Dickie Dare's Editor needs to stop having his supporting cast do all the hard work for him, or he's going to get over-reliant on them. If Joe had missed a loyalty check, they would have been done for.

And here's a good lesson about smoking. If you smoke, you'll eventually discard a match in a pile of wood shavings and almost burn down the boat you need to get off a deserted island.

I have a write-up for nobles ready for 2nd edition, because evil counts show up so often in comics...but I can't help but wonder if this guy isn't an evil mysteryman, or even just a really capable slick hoodlum...

Oaky Doaks is a great example of Lawful Alignment. I admire his convictions.

From Babe Bunting -- a map!

From Connie -- a good size comparison of a yacht, a sloop, and a rowboat.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)

Famous Funnies #30

We'll start today with War on Crime and the oft-ignored "no. appearing" stat for mobsters (so oft that you'll only find it in Supplement I: National!).  As you can see here, G-Men really like to outnumber the mobsters they hunt down -- in this case, by a factor of 8 to 1!

Goat joke #6 (I told you I was going to start keeping track!).

First appearance of throwing knives as weapons?

I love this page of Scorchy Smith.  We don't see much of the hidden hideout, but that it is accessible via a rope ladder concealed among overhanging vines, and then you climb up onto an overgrown ledge with a short, locked door, which leads into a laboratory -- those are great details for a hideout.

Also note that Scorchy picks the lock, a skill normally associated only with Mysterymen, but here performed by an Aviator.  Hmm...

A new mobster type: fortune hunter, hoodlums who seduce rich women?  Or is this just a slick hoodlum?

Another terrain map for someone to use in their Hideouts & Hoodlums campaigns.

It's not surprising for a page like this to have its facts wrong, but snakes aren't all this slow. According to a quick Internet search, black mambas can move at 10 MPH.  I might need to double-check how fast I have snakes moving in their stats...

Famous Funnies #24

Ah, Captain Easy, the gift that keeps on giving.  Here we are introduced to witches, a mobster-type so hideous that anyone seeing them must save vs. spells or fall prostrate in front of them!



Alley Oops's animal of the day is the glyptodon.  Never yet statted for Hideouts & Hoodlums, a glyptodon would be 11 Hit Dice, but using 12-siders because of their massive size and mass!

Hairbreadth Harry has me a little stumped this time. Catching something should normally be a simple act of hitting something in reverse, so I would use the same "to hit" mechanic -- but does catching in mid-air suggest something much tougher that should be a specific stunt?  I'm on the fence on this one...

You might not have guessed, at a glance, what I want to talk about from Flying to Fame this time. No, it's not the sub-machine gun, but you're close -- it's the use of cover by the sub-machine gunner, and how the girl in the fight turns the cover against him by slamming the door into him as a weapon.

Now, you might not think it on the face of it, but this has fairly large implications towards how cover works in combat. Should there ever be a chance of your cover being a liability?  Should Captain America have to worry about his opponent grabbing his shield and pushing it up in his face?

You may have guessed, based on my last example, but I feel this should not become a game mechanic. More likely, the gunner simply missed his to-hit roll and knocking him with the door was the flavor text for explaining how he managed to miss at point blank range.

This rare sighting of Nipper on this blog is for the glider, an excellent transport trophy for low-level Heroes, that solves the issue of how to make Heroes airborne, without giving them too big an advantage.

Can tapping a table really disrupt a dictagraph?  I don't know, but that's a pretty good tip for Heroes concerned that they're being recorded by a concealed one...

Ah, Seaweed Sam, you silly source of inspiration.  Here we have an unusual example, Pre-Clarke, of science being indistinguishable from magic. The "XYZ Ray" seems to be a sort of transmutation raygun that can change back anyone previously transformed into gold or stone, which does seem a handy thing to have around.

There is also a reminder here that helium tanks are on the minor trophies list.

This version of the sphinx is likely not a mobster, but some kind of trick -- but a good one, and one time-tested in that Other Game.  Just use a slightly harder riddle than this one.

I never thought I was going to have to refer to the extraordinarily bland Babe Bunting on this blog, but this page brings up the issue of, just who should be able to track?  Tracking started out in H&H just as a skill the Explorer class had.  Then Mysterymen picked up an urban version of that skill.  Then it became a stunt Cowboys could use.  But this page suggests that any Tom, Dick, or Harry can follow the faint tracks of  little girl through dense woods. Should tracking even still be a special skill, or should everyone get a chance to find tracks, like looking for secret doors?  It bears strong consideration.

Lastly, this section on forced landings would be educational for anyone playing an Aviator.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum at http://www.digitalcomicmuseum.org/index.php?dlid=21647)