Planet Comics #3 - pt. 3

We're going to look at two more features from this issue of Planet Comics today. First is Buzz Crandall, who lives in a future where the Moon is like the Wild West, with isolated outposts surrounded by danger. This is far from the last time I'll be making a space-cowboy parallel observation on this blog.

The autoped reminds me just enough of the real moon lander to intrigue me. Use your imagination; if you redesigned the moon lander to be mobile, wouldn't it look something like this?

But more interesting are moon bats which, to a D&D player, loo exactly like giant stirges! Look at how that one in the last panel is the same size as the autoped and can damage it just by diving into it! I'm thinking 4+1 Hit Dice, and those  probiscises can suck 1-8 hit points' worth of blood out of you per turn, or it can crash into you in a dive for 1-10 points of damage.

Now how did our astronauts manage to avoid the lunar land squids? Look at the size of that baby -- I'm thinking 16 Hit Dice for this one, and maybe using d10 for those HD. It's big enough that it has a chance of swallowing even a large opponent whole (maybe on a 20), and a medium-sized foe on a...18-20? Anyone not swallowed takes 4-32 points of damage from those giant teeth.

Like Noah and the Whale, Buzz winds up alive in its belly -- but that situation seems like it could change because the missing people from the outpost are all skeletons in his belly (in the next page I'm not bothering to show you). Being in the autoped seems to buy him some time, as the digestive enzymes need some turns to wreck it down (1-4 turns?).

Now we're going to look at the next story with Nelson Cole. Those pirate ships remind me of Zaxxon! But the real reason I'm showing you this page is "We'll keep in constant touch with you by radio." Now, radio waves travel at the speed of light, which is plenty fast, but it's not instantaneous in space-sized distances, so Cole is essentially on his own.















Where the heck in space is this? Are they flying through a nebula? This is a really busy nebula, with a lot of planetoids of varying size inside it.

The concept of "attractor-beams," or tractor beams as they are more commonly known today, comes from SF novelist E.E. Smith, but had not come into common comic book parlance yet by 1940, where we still see things like "magno-rays" doing the same affect.

I appreciate the cutaway map of the inside of a spaceship in panel 2. Those ships sure don't provide you much protection out in space, do they?

Now this is remarkable because I think it's the first page of a comic book story to show how different styles of planes (or spaceships in this case) have different degrees of maneuverability that give one an advantage over another.

A previous page I didn't show you told us that Cole had a raygun hidden in his belt buckle, but I assumed it was a tiny gun he would pull out when he needed it, not that he would be shooting it from inside his belt buckle. I wonder what the triggering mechanism is -- voice command? "Pew pew"?

Yet another story that assumes spaceships would land on the ground like conventional planes.

I guess Cole was shot by an electric raygun and the conductive lever saved him? More likely he just made his saving throw vs. science -- but it's always nice when you can come up with an explanation using science (or something that passes for science!).

Didn't I say Cole was on his own? I'm not sure how the Solar Force just happens to show up here, since Cole never called for them. Cole is able to use radio to talk to them without breaking science because the battle is taking place in low orbit.

Only a charitable Editor would give the Solar Force bonuses to hit thanks to Cole calling out plays on the sidelines.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Planet Comics #2 - pt. 4

Last post on this issue! We're still looking at Captain Nelson Cole of the Solar Force. On this page, their tiny fleet encounters floating radium asteroids. Instant destruction within 1,000 miles? I don't know about that...how about giving them a saving throw vs. poison at least? Saving throws don't work like that for inanimate objects like spaceships, but if the crew all dies, that's effectively the same as destruction, right...?

Skipping ahead...Nelson is the sole survivor of his entire fleet and when he arrives on the planet they were heading for, he gets upgraded with magic trophies. How awkward it would have been had more crew survived than there was magic trophies to go around to!

So, one, it's a pretty weird shift to go from a science fiction story into a magic-fantasy story. Weirder, he's given a fake mustache and told he has to pretend to be this world's Zorro now. What a mid-campaign shift!

Two-headed giants are already planned to be in the Mobster Manual, but this one at 40' tall might mean revising the entry to be tougher.

In Hideouts & Hoodlums terms, it's possible that Nelson/Torro hasn't been given actual trophy items at all, but has been allowed to switch classes to Superhero. Or maybe one or more of the items gives him levels in Superhero. Because the first thing he does seems very much like the 1st-level power Feather Landing. And then he wrecks things on the tree with his magic whip.

Wrecking things in front of mobsters provokes a morale save, as we see here.

"Boy, let me tell ya all about what my magic clothes can do! And don't get me started on what my socks and underwear are capable of..."

This makes me even more strongly suspect that "Torro" is a superhero now using flavor text to describe how his powers work -- because it seems a lot like he's describing Nigh-Invulnerable Skin, Leap I (well, technically, a much higher level Leap power, but maybe he's exaggerating), and wrecking things to me. Or maybe the clothes give him 1 level in Superhero, and the whip gives him another.

And lastly, we're going to jump ahead to the final feature, Auro, Lord of Jupiter. Again, there's a lot of John Carter of Mars influence here, right down to how common apes are just wandering around.

Auro is likely another superhero, buffed with one of the Get Tough powers, to be able to beat a gorilla bare-handed like that.

It's going to take weeks for that bite wound to heal? Does Auro have an immune system deficiency, or is he just making that up to score pity points from Ava?

Actually, if he was statted as an alien, and needed to have a racial weakness, I would allow slow healing to be his -- though I can't imagine a player choosing such an agregious handicap.

So the game mechanic question here is, is there a combat penalty for fighting with one hand behind your back? Technically, no, and judging by this page, there shouldn't be. However, I think an Editor would be well within his rights to assign a -1 penalty to attacks, and maybe a -2 penalty to grappling, while one-armed.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Planet Comics #2 - pt. 3

Well...that was a disappointing debut for the Taloned Man. We don't even get to see if Tiger Beat punched him off the roof or just pushed him off. At least we know he's okay, as he must have fallen into the same moat.

That is some sword Tiger Beat has; he just whacks a diamond and it shatters into a thousand pieces? That's better than a Ginsu knife!





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That's also a really improbable example of the wrecking things mechanic from Hideouts & Hoodlums. This would be like wrecking a dam, but at a -1 or -2 penalty.

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There's a whimsical naivte to thinking that we'll still have a Washington in the year 40,000, not to mention the notion that we'll be launching our spaceships from giant mortars.

The notion of our power source being special elements only found on some planets, though...well, that's textbook Star Trek with its dilithium crystals.

As Spurt Hammond might conceivably go on to become an obscure influence on Star Trek, so does this page show us how Spurt is inspired by the John Carter of Mars series. Well, "inspired" might be too generous, as the Red Men of Mars are blatantly ripped off from A Princess of Mars here.

Even the Martian ships look like they were taken straight from Edgar Rice Burroughs' imagination, while the Earth ships are more boring rocket-like ships.

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This is a large scale aerial combat. I have no plans to produce game mechanics for such; it would need to be handled by someone with a firmer grasp of wargames than me.

Spurt uses a raygun to wreck his way inside, takes out a guard, and uses the guard's cloak as a disguise -- some of the details are different, but the tactic has been used a thousand times in fiction up to this point.

Now, how Spurt knew this was the ship that the prince was on, that part is much harder to follow. Was he somehow able to detect that this ship was more heavily protected than the others?

You would also think that at least one of the prince's guards would have a weapon on them, but Spurt catches them all empty-handed and gets to wale on them with his fists!

Now we're moving on to the next story, with Buzz Crandall of the Space Patrol. Here we get a new mobstertype -- crab-men! Crab-men are numerous in appearance, outnumbering a spaceship's crew. We also find out here that crab-men are vulnerable to radiation, and this makes them susceptible to commands.

Look at how tough this crab-man is, picking Buzzup and just throwing him on the ground like a rag doll. These bad boys have got to be at least 4 Hit Dice.

Being trapped in giant specimen jars is an unusual form of trap too.

Spoilers: Buzz wins.

...So we're going to jump ahead now to the next feature, Captain Nelson Cole of the Solar Force. 

Dwight Field Airport is a real place, and I strongly support using real world locations in comic book stories for realism, though the ground-based, sideways-launching spacecraft then take some of that realism away.

There's also no such thing as  "light mile," though this might just be future shorthand for miles traveled at the speed of light. If 250,000 is the number of light years, though, that makes the number of miles 1.4696563 x 10¹⁸. Conversely, if it means 250,000 miles, that is just the distance to Earth's Moon, and reaching it at the speed of light would be like teleportation.

The object that can take out two spaceships moving at the speed of light? A shooting star, or meteor. Meteors, of course, move nothing close to the speed of light.

"Poor fellows! Oh well, they were newbies and kinda deserved it for being dumb. Full speed ahead, and let's skip contacting their families back home!"

Note how spaceships are controlled by simple levers.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Planet Comics #1 - pt. 4

So much to talk about Planet Comics! I really think someone could run a great, if campy, sci fi campaign using Hideouts & Hoodlums, and I hope someone does someday and tells me about it.

A couple of things about this page: one, making heroes wait for a reward at the end of the adventure not only gives them more XP, but it motivates the players to play out the return trip home, rather than just wind up a scenario right after the battles are over.

And another thing -- one of many that bugged me about this story -- who is that woman? She's been standing around Zan the entire story, and even in jail she's forced to keep the same gown on, but she never says a word. What's her story?

Ah, Spurt Hammond, the most awkward comic book character name of all time!  Spoilers abound here, as we learn that Spurt is going to run afoul of Amazons on the Moon (so, Lunerzons). This is sometime in the future after Mars has been colonized, so in the Amazon entry in the AH&H Mobster Manual, I'll just add a mention about them having a moon colony in the future.

Now this is kind of a cool cultural tidbit -- despite being armed with scimitars, the Lunerzons only beat Spurt into submission with their fists. This could be a code of honor like is found in the Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter books, where no one on Mars attacks with a weapon better than their opponent is using.

Those are some funky-looking plants for making explosives.

Speaking of funky-looking, the droopy-nosed Mooniacs are said to be "powerful," which should translate into at least 5 Hit Dice. But how powerful? Hopefully we'll see clues soon.

All we learn here is that the "dullwitted" Mooniacs are still smart enough to use tools (or at least can throw weapons), and that they can walk on two or four legs like a bear.

I guess mooniacs aren't so powerful after all, as Spurt can not only defeat them with his bare fists, but he beats a bunch of them. Oddly, despite the fact that I can clearly see four mooniacs in that lower left hand corner, they only attack him one at a time (maybe they are dullwitted after all).

Spurt clearly has no code of honor, threatening women with a gun that refused, twice, to use weapons on him.

Oh come on!  I guess the Amazons are attracted to douche-nozzles with no code of honor. I can honestly say I've never read a Golden Age story until now where I wanted the hero to get beat up by a moon monster.

I can tell getting through Planet Comics is going to be tough; here's another interchangeable space hero. Maybe this story will have more to offer us, though, as we already get the concept of plastic armor (AC 6 maybe?) and a mention of Neptunian Shark-Men.

Okaayy...I don't know what those shark-men are supposed to look like, but it sure isn't sharks.

Despite the fact that Buzz seems to be a fighter, Buzz appears to be using the Sleeping Nerve Pinch power of a superhero on the control room shark-man.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Planet Comics #1 - pt. 3

Captain Cole can't hear transmissions from Earth because he's got a giant door handle stuck over his ear. No, I'm kidding -- I can tell that's meant to be a futuristic wireless telephone receiver. It must have been a concept that seemed obvious from day 1 of the telephone, but took a long time for anyone to figure out how to make one work.

Again, the numbers are really wonky on this story. 300 miles per minute may seem super-fast -- and is for Earth travel -- but would take 6 months to reach Mars at that speed, and this story is suggesting they have traveled to a distant solar system in hours.

"We must be nearing a minor sun! Quick, let's get into heavy, fireproof suits!"

"But, Captain, we're flying near it, not into it! Won't we be hotter in asbestos suits? Maybe we should don our refrigerated suits instead?"

"Nice call, Ensign!" Cole says, sounding just like Zapp Brannigan in my head now.

We've seen sci fi zombies in comics already, but the layout on this page is pretty trippy and I thought was worth sharing.

A sulferic vaporizer sounds like something you plug in at night to help with a stuffy nose. It's hard to say what a sulfuric vaporize would do, other than shoot out poisonous gas, so I'm not sure why Cole has to release a valve rather than just pull a trigger. Because Cole and his men are wearing environmentally-sealed suits, they are immune to the saving throw vs. poison Zan was forced to make.

You have to look closely at that first panel to notice that Cole has a raygun that can wreck things.

That's a very strange prison for the men waiting to be turned into robot-zombies, as it looks like it would be easy for them to just slip under that bar and escape. There must be something more to it than that, like maybe the bar emits a paralysis field around them.

That's a pretty slick tactic to use against mindless attackers.

Now this is where the science really gets wonky. Apparently, just removing three vitamins from human bodies turns them into mindless robot-zombies, and injecting the vitamins back instantly revives them.

That might be the most impressive "number appearing" example yet in a comic book; there appears to be hundreds of robot-zombies marching on the fortress.

"Televeye" is the latest futuristic renaming of a simple television set in comics.

"Impregnable" is an odd word for an opponent. Are the robot-zombies so hard to beat, individually, or because there are so many of them?

And where did Cole find the controlling device? Wouldn't that have been an important part of the story to tell?

Bad guys often fail their morale saves after taking damage.

Now, this big twisty thing is likely meant to be a staircase, but I think it's much more fun to think of this as a slide that leads down deeper into the hideout.

In case you're curious, I checked and dynogetic gas is not a real thing. Perhaps it is an unique compound specific to the underground air on Volcus and, when the air pressure on it drops quickly, it creates wrecking-capable explosions.

Actually, this would be good for a trap...

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Planet Comics #1 - pt. 2

Here's something you didn't know would happen! Early in the 21st century -- like maybe 2018 -- interplanetary travel will become so commonplace that a single family might take their cruiseship out for a joyride to Uranus.

Now this is where things get interesting. The boy is a lone survivor in a savage land...adopted by a saber-tooth tiger. Could this have been the inspiration for the Silver Age Ka-Zar?

Luckily, Jupiter is not a gas giant at all, but a very Earth-like environment except for the gravity.

Auro appears to be using the powers Raise Car (to uproot a tree) and Wall-Crawling (to climb that sheer mountain).

Auro appears to be using the power Multi-Attack here. I have no doubt anymore that he would be statted as an alien superhero (alien because this isn't his home world and he has strange powers here).

These natives are ape men in all but name, no doubt the only line this sci fi Tarzan clone won't cross.

This page interests me for two reasons. One, how did Martha fix her plane? In the page I didn't bother sharing, her plane was hit by a raygun and fell into Jupiter's atmosphere because of some unspecified complication the raygun caused. So what could she have fixed from the inside? And should pilots always have a chance to fix a complication when their vehicle takes damage? This actually came up in my home campaign last session; the mad scientist's autogyro was shot down with a machine gun, but I gave the scientist a skill check to get it back in the air.

And then the other thing is the weakness in this plan. The "pretend to be captured" plan is an old cliche, but how can the King of Neptune be dense enough to think he has ape men from Jupiter working for him?

The Red Comet is billed as a mystery man and, I am hoping, we will soon see evidence that he belongs to the mysteryman Hero class.

Spider-people "return", though they look a lot different than they did in the Basil Wolverton story in Amazing Mystery Funnies. Their webs are somehow so powerful that rayguns cannot blast through them.

Okay, The Red Comet is decidedly not a mysteryman; he's superhero all the way! Here he wrecks things on the steel nets and covers 50 miles in seconds. That second feat has to be the Race the Plane power, as there's no way size alone would give him the ability to move that fast. In fact, though he may well be using an "infra-atomic space adjuster" as a trophy item that lets him Enlarge like the magic-user spell, the enlargement would not be responsible for any of the things he pulls off here, and might just be flavor text.

That Red Comet is back down to normal size again suggests to me that Enlargement must have a duration. Or maybe it's a giant spider-man? I'm not sure at this point.

There is no result on the grappling table for "tied up like a pretzel," though I kind of wish there was now.

His shrinking ability seems much less impressive than his growing ability, as shrinking ability usually is. Diminution seems to only grant him a better chance of surprise, while Enlargement lets him...well, let's say squashing hundreds of spider-men takes a considerable number of combat turns, even buffed with both Multi-Attack and Flurry of Blows.

This page interests me for two reasons. One, Red Comet finds it easier to bust through 20' of solid rock (using his wrecking things ability, or maybe the power Dig) than it is to bust through 20' of spider-man web. The web gun, then, in addition to being a powerful entangling weapon, seems to also be able to generate walls equal to a Wall of Force spell.

The other thing is Red Comet's "Robin Hood"-ness, which I guess places him in the Chaotic Alignment category.

This is Captain Nelson Cole of the Solar Force, and this building is amazingly unharmed after rockets are shot out into space from the side of it.

150,000 miles from Earth is closer than the Moon. The enemy is really close!

Magnetic rayguns can sort of act like tractor beams, I guess.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)