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 #2 - pt. 4

 I just can't seem to let go of Calling 2R, being such a bold, ambitious utopian story -- the sort of thing I wish I could write, if I were to get really confessional. And that attention to detail in the background work! I don't think I would have the patience to draw that first panel alone.

I'm hoping the old man's not literally talking about fining those two for wrong thinking, as that sounds too 1984 for my taste. Owing a debt to society for wrong doing is nothing new, of course.

This page is full of glorious period detail, from the realistically drawn slums, to the sign for a "ice and coal" store, to slang you don't see in most stories, like "nerts" (= an exclamation like "nuts," and a fairly new exclamation, according to Mirriam-Webster online first used in 1929), "bulls" (= city police? But that's an unusual use of it, as Wikipedia tells me this was used for railroad police specifically), and the even more unusual term "white lights." This one's so obscure it almost has me baffled, except...if the punk likes to ride the rails like a hobo and has run afoul of the bulls before, then maybe "white lights" refers to the head lamps of trains?

Here's the protective vests of the rangers in action, and it looks like they work just like the force screen around the city, in terms of hurting and knocking back anyone who tries to melee with them, while also stopping bullets as if the wearer had the Imperviousness power. That's a pretty powerful vest; I'd try to balance that out by saying it can only operate for 3 turns in a row before needing 4 turns to recharge. 

It's unclear if the force gun actually harms/does damage to the opponent to render him unconscious or if it stuns (with a save to resist?). 

And this last page I'll share is from the last story in this issue; a stand-alone story about a pilot who befriends an ugly hermit. The hermit is so grateful that he shares a secret; he's guarding a cave full of dust (magic dust?) that disintegrates all metal it touches. A nice touch is that the dust is so fine that you can't see that it's in the air all around you while you're walking through the cave tunnels (as seen on a previous page). I'm sharing this page to show how incredibly potent this Dust of Disintegration is, effectively wrecking as if a 7th level superhero (I'm guessing, by how easily it destroys that tank). It's used here to stop the War in Europe, but it's a good challenging trap for high-level Heroes too.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.) 

  

Target Comics #2 - pt. 3

Welcome to the new year. First post of 2021! Whew...this will be Year 7 for the blog...

We're still looking at T-Men, which on the surface seems a pretty generic government agent adventure strip, yet when I look at the details it can be surprisingly well-informed. Like here, the U.S.S. Lexington isn't a random made-up name; there was a U.S.S. Lexington aircraft carrier, the second one, sailing in 1940, and would be until it was lost in 1942 in the Battle of the Coral Sea.

Then there's this weird, two-panel dogfight where it's really hard to tell what is going on. Which plane is the bad guy plane? Well, it's the one on fire. Why is it on fire? It's unlikely the Navy has a plane with a flamethrower on it, so I think this was an engine hit from bullets, even though the artist skipped showing us the plane being shot at. "The chief must have..." what? Rigged the plane so the pilot couldn't get out? How exactly did he do that...remote control locks? That actually seems an idea ahead of its time.

Southport is a curious name. For a strip that doesn't shy away from naming actual naval ships, you'd think it would name Bridgeport, Connecticut -- right across Long Island Sound from Long Island -- and a likely candidate for being where the plane took off from. There is a Southport, New York, but it's actually upstate, about halfway between Scranton, Penn. and Rochester, NY.

I am amused by how much the Treasury Department values Agent Turner. "There might be a lead there. Go on...take a year. Longer if you need it! Don't hurry back..."

Moving on to the next page, I'm equally amused by the hungry spy chief who forgot to eat today and "I want the lunch box, too!" But seriously, these saboteurs are unusually smart, using proxies whenever possible -- like the guy they hired to fly that rigged plane, or this guy, who is going to be impersonated with the aid of plastic surgery, and the man's own lunch box for added realism.

Man, you should never cross that spy chief! Shortchange him and he'll gun you down in cold blood. I mention it because, for the only villain unnamed in this story (and the other two have cool names like Gazor and Count Karna), this chief really shows up most every comic book villain up to this point, short of the Ultra-Humanite, for cunning, intelligence, and ruthlessness. The chief is captured and we're told on the last page that he'll likely go to the electric chair, but I kind of hope he escapes so I can re-use him in a campaign someday...

 

 

This is from a pretty engaging ensemble feature called City Editor. The City Editor isn't the hero of the piece; he's more like Professor X, leading from behind, back at HQ, while a male and female journalist and the kid who, I'm guessing, sells the papers on street corners, go out and complete missions for him. Because these two heroes aren't combat-types (maybe the Detective sub-class from a past Trophy Case?), a single woman with a blackjack is a serious challenge for them. This is -- for a weapon so common in Hideouts & Hoodlums -- the very first time we've seen a blackjack, or at least this clearly.   

Funny, I never would have thought of that as a "coal hole," it just looks like a manhole cover to me. It turns out coal holes were a real thing (accessing underground coal bunkers), though you were more likely to find them in 19th century Great Britain than 1940 New York City. 

Only in a story where the reporter is a main character would the reporter be allowed to barge into the building in front of the police officers on the scene.

I'm pretty sure the police officers are just supporting cast in this scene, so it's kind of surprising that one of them is the one who knocks the automatic out of her hands and saves the day, instead of Phil -- but this can easily happen in a game system ruled by random dice results. 

Golf bags are a good place to search for hidden clues and loot!

Lastly...is Pinky a boy? He's looking pretty effeminate in those last few panels, particularly with those girlish legs and shoes in the final panel. Hmm...

This is from Calling 2-R, a marvelously inventive and ambitious feature, just one with a terrible name. This is utopian fiction, something we don't see often enough in comic books, so I'm certainly willing to forgive it for its lack of suspense when an ineffectual villain shows up here. Note how the force wall does damage when touched (maybe 1-3 points, certainly not much), but also repels him back 1-6'. It otherwise functions as a Wall of Force spell.

I suspect a lot of tracing went into these panels, but they're still quite impressive! 

Free healing in the barracks? If my future players see this strip they'll want to go here between adventures. They'll probably want a speed plane too; this super-metal would make it resistant to wrecking, and the speed it flies at would seem futuristic until 1956.

The trick with utopian fiction, of course, is that one man's idea of utopia is not necessarily another's, and I'm having a hard time with the privacy issues surrounding an all-seeing television eye, and the misuses that mind picture machine could be put to. Still, vehicles run on cosmic force? That's better than electric cars! And I've had plenty of players who would want those force guns and body protectors. The gravity diminishers that let them walk on air would make a great trophy item too!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)
 

 

Target Comics #1 - pt. 2

Now, let's jump ahead to the next feature, Lucky Byrd, Flying Cadet. Although it looks like someone different inked over him, this is our old friend Harry Francis Campbell, from Dean Denton and John Law. Like his predecessors, Lucky wins the day with his scientific know-how, and here he explains to us how he figured out how a bomb set off by altitude could work.

Next up in this all-star line-up of artists is Joe Simon (minus Jack Kirby), drawing T-Men. T-Men, as the first page (not seen here) explained to us, are like G-Men, but they work for the Treasury Department. 

Here, a disguised T-Man is captured and is put into a deathtrap -- or rather, a deathtrap is sat in his lap. A black soldier spider isn't a real thing -- thank goodness, because that thing is huge! Well, using large/huge/giant terminology, this could be our first example of a large spider. Its bite is implied to be quite lethal.

It's unclear if the hoodlum falls because he's dead or just because he's been shot. Under normal circumstances, you don't have to worry about falling down after taking damage in Hideouts & Hoodlums, but common sense can overrule that for situations like this, when you happen to be leaning over a trapdoor at the time.

A rare example of a bullet wrecking things. I've never been happy with how to handle this, but perhaps the bullet can just be treated as flavor text, now that non-superheroes can all wreck things.

And we get an example of a secret door and a hideout connected to sewers.

This true crime genre feature is called City Editor, with the hook being that journalists are investigating instead of the police. Though, really, this kid winds up doing most of the detective work. And just for a plate of beans and some coffee too! Half-pints are easily bribed. They also can have surprising skills, like photographic memories and the ability to draw photo-realistic.

This feature is really different. Calling 2R is a twisted boys town with super science weapons doled out to the kids.

This first weapon is a raygun that can make you blind and stunned for 24 hours (though I would allow saving throws for both effects and have the duration be a range of hours, like 3-24). 

A vest that projects force blasts, or the Blast I power, seems awfully potent to turn on another half-pint with 1-3 hit points.

Three of the bad guys here are gangsters, accompanied by the spy in the green coat.

The electrical force wall seems to act as more than a Wall of Force spell; it does some damage (1-3 or a full die?) against anyone touching it, but apparently does more damage if you're touching metal and not grounded, and stalls electronics that touch the wall.

The airbug is an interesting design. I doubt it would fly, yet it almost seems feasible.

The Captain tries to sneak up on the spy, but the surprise check the Editor rolled said he failed. He might still have gotten lucky and gone first by winning the initiative on turn 1 of combat, but was not so lucky and apparently only had 6 or less hit points.

Speck was only stunned on a previous page, and that's not applesauce on his head. This strip is really violent, by the way.

At the end of this page is a very rare indication in a comic book that skills have to be learned, as most of the time anyone seems to have a chance to try anything.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)