Amazing Man Comics #8 - pt. 2

This is the original Cat Man again. From this page, we get a rare "dead or alive" bounty for $35,000 (that's a lot of xp for Lawful Heroes!). We also see that plot hook characters can turn up coming from any direction.

Cat Man uses his cat to poison bad guys. Technically, it gets around the rule that Heroes cannot use poison, though since a cat has low Hit Dice and a corresponding low chance to hit a target, it seems an impractical method of delivery.

Speaking of impractical, this character takes the age-old cliche of crime-fighting in a dress and crossdresses it. It still seems impractical, but at least a dress this concealing can hold a bulletproof vest under it. Typical of comic books, people in bulletproof vests are shown to feel no pain at all when shot.

This is from the serial The King of the South Seas. First we see an unusual improvised missile weapon, and one that looks so small you wouldn't think throwing it against someone's head would knock them unconscious.

We see pirates and natives working together, which is a good combination of archetypes for variety.

Next we see a character bleeding out from a head wound who faints from it. This isn't how hit point loss works for Heroes and mobsters, but Editors have more leniency for bending the rules when it comes to plot-useful side characters.

I've no idea why the boat blows up.

The jungle island is pretty big; if the boat is being rowed at 6-7 MPH, and it takes them 30 minutes to reach their destination in the heart of the island, it means the island must be at least 6-7 miles in diameter. And this is good, because if you're going to use an island as a "sandbox" setting, you need it to be spacious enough for lots of travel.

If the coincidence of the "King" turning out to be the old man's son seems too great for your liking, bear in mind that we still don't know this is true; we only know the old man thinks it is true. Editors can always introduce false information through characters to throw the players off.

In the "future" setting of the 1950s, people use televisions to call each other. Carl Burgos is only one invention off here, as what he's posited turns out to be true later for computers.

Game mechanically, all Dr. Magno has done here is a disarming attack. If played that way, then the magnetism power is only flavor text. But it's possible to have performed this feat with a telekinesis, or a magnetic control power too (though the later would only duplicate telekinesis in this case).

There are some superhero buffing powers that would have shielded Iron Skull from that throwing knife, but it seems unlikely that he would have them prepared for a trip to talk to the police commissioner, and cannot activate them at the same time as being surprised. So, either Iron Skull is not as surprised by the knife thrower as the panel would have you believe, or perhaps the Editor has hand-waived game mechanics for this scene, since the thrower only needed to send the message and was not here to kill him.

It's remarkable that Iron Skull fails to sneak into the second floor window, so he changes tactics dramatically and noisily crashes into the basement. He's definitely buffed himself defensively so he takes no damage from the fall, and uses wrecking things while falling to go through the door.

Of course, this just plays right into Dr. Magno's hands, as his electromagnets happen to be housed right in the basement. I wonder what effect they would have had on Iron Skull if he was still up on the second floor. In the basement, the effect is essentially a Hold Person spell.

This museum keeps $50 million in jewels on display. A Hideouts & Hoodlums player playing the numbers would wait to thwart Dr. Magno until after he's stolen the jewels and the museum has put up a reward -- even a 1% finders fee would be 500,000 XP (basically 1 free level), while Dr. Magno himself is probably worth just a few hundred XP.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Amazing Man Comics #5 - pt. 1

No, I haven't skipped any issues; Amazing Man Comics really did start with issue #5. It was, after Superman, the second comic book named after its lead character.

We know from the caption that Amazing Man is over 25 years old. Hideouts & Hoodlums doesn't worry about character age or aging, but it was generally true in the Golden Age that Heroes were college-educated, which meant being at least 22 years old when they started.

John Aman is known both as Amazing Man and as The Green Mist, depending on who you ask, I guess. It would not be unsuitable for H&H Heroes to have more than one superhero name.

The Council uses a sleep-ray on John, I guess so he can't hear their deliberations. It seems to have a very short range, but is fairly portable.

Amazing Man is showing off his powers in the first test. This could be the power Raise Elephant at play -- though, since he isn't technically raising it, maybe he only needs Raise Car to stop it.

Bereft of other weapons, John uses his teeth on a poisonous snake. Although biting is not a particularly effective attack, he might have buffed it up with Get Tough or a similar power.

We know that Amazing Man has enough hit points to take two knife wounds and still be only lightly wounded. So...8-15 hit points? At least they're nice enough to bandage him up afterwards.

 I've no idea why the head of the Council is green.

The invisibility formula is like a potion meant to be taken intravenously. There is a side effect that not all invisibility potions have, but (as explained on the next page) the duration of this potion is a full week.

John's first case is solving railroad sabotage in Wyoming (you'd think there would be plenty to keep him busy in Asia, what with the Japanese occupation of China going on).

John finds his first clue, a monogrammed pencil -- with silver lead. I wonder if that would poke werewolves?

Also note that John has an airplane as a starting item. This is not commonly the case in H&H -- though an Editor could choose to hand out trophy items at the start of a campaign.

I'm not sure how John saves this train in such a way that no one else could have done it. The really amazing thing is that he just tells the engineer to let him take over before the crash -- and the engineer goes along with it!  John must have a high Charisma, and/or a lucky encounter reaction roll.

There's no power for superheroes to do this yet. Psychic Auto Writing? It seems too specific a trick to be useful often. Object Reading might be do-able (perhaps the "automatic writing" part is flavor text?). I would think that this is just a trick with telekinesis to flush a confession out of the villain, except that John seems genuinely surprised.

This is the bizarre last page of the bizarre first and only appearance of the very first Cat Man in comics. He's a man who dresses up like a crazy old cat lady, then has his trained cat scratch people with poisoned claws. The poison must be something that smells bad to the cat so it knows not to try and lick it off. The Cat Man's only superpower is somehow keeping from getting scratched himself, and his cat's only power seems to be that weird ability to smile it has.

No real bearing on H&H, except for the idea that you could have Heroes run into poisonous pets.

This story is the debut of the Iron Skull, but these are just robot bank robbers we see here. They are a pretty good match for the copper robots found in Book II, except for the added ability to shoot poison gas (save or die) out of their chests.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)