Miracle Comics #2 - pt. 3

I did promise, so here's Dash Dixon's villain, The Eyes, in person. As you can see, having light-up fake eyes is a cool look, but...if that's why he's called The Eyes...then what are Fingers' fingers like...?

It seems weird that Dash is following directions from a blindfolded man, but what you don't know from the previous page is that the man had been abducted by The Eyes' men before and, though blindfolded then, from counting the number of stops and turns he thinks he knows where their hideout is. 

Now, players in a similar situation can try this tactic, but it seems to me that it would be really easy to guess wrong how long it was between stops, unless you count the seconds and have a fantastic memory for numbers. For this, I would have them make an Intelligence check, possibly even with a -2 penalty, since it seems like the route was pretty complex.

Lastly, Dash is using the Multi-Attack power to get two grappling attacks at once.

While I still think Dash himself is ludicrous, there is a lot to like about this story. I like the detail of the entrance to the hideout being a ladder concealed in a fake boiler. I like the trapped, electrified door. How much damage should 3,000 volts do? I just read that 30 volts can kill you, but it's not an even progression where every 30 volts should do a point of damage. Electricity is weird (that's my term for it, not the scientific term) and there are a lot of factors that affect how much damage electricity does to you, and a high voltage is not necessarily going to do more harm than a low voltage. Also, 3,000 volts is the strength of a strong Taser, so I'm going to set the damage range low for this -- 1-8 points.

Something else to consider here: should an electrified door be harder to wreck? Yes, I would say it would move the category up to machine level.  

I also like how all the mobsters have nicknames to distinguish them -- Finger, Trusty, and Switch. Nicknames can instantly give us a sense of character, and also help us keep track of which one is which.

Far from the first cross-dressing villain. Hey, wait...how does Dash know Eyes' eyes are cameras? Did he see a clue in the hideout we missed? Did he use a Microscopic Vision or Super-Senses power to see it? Is he just guessing?

 

Next up is The Scorpion and, sadly, this feature does not live up to the promise of that first panel.

Often, when you have a character who's supposed to be a celebrity in a story, you give him a name that's similar to a real world celebrity in that field, but I can't find any famous crooners with a name like Bill Phelps. 

Also, what is so suspicious about a millionaire cashing $10,000 checks daily? For all this guy knows, he's working with donations to charities.

I thought Zenda seemed like a made-up name, but Ancestry.com tells me that there were about 20 Zenda families in the U.S. in the 1920s, the majority of them living in Wisconsin! 

"Gosh, I'm so scared of Gus Zenda, my hair just turned white!"

Rex Gray, The Scorpion's superpower is his ability to make fantastic logical leaps that just happen to be true. Not only is there something suspicious about a millionaire making out checks, not only does he reach the conclusion that Phelps is actually an imposter based on two overheard sentences, but he figures he'll be able to prove it...by listening to Phelps' records?

And how do you get to be "number one kidnapper"? Kidnappers always try to stay anonymous until they're caught.

It gets zanier. Rex is so convinced he's right that he's willing to bash an innocent butler over the head so hard it changes the color of his jacket. Then, for the first and possibly last time in comics, a hero makes a villain sing at gunpoint.

The name of the song is, of course "Old Folks at Home," but even by 1940 it was already commonly known as "Swanee River," even leading to a movie with that name that came out in '39. The last crooner to release an album featuring this song was Bing Crosby in 1935, but Phelps clearly bears no physical resemblance to Crosby and I'm willing to discard that theory now.

What? Where did this oscillograph come from? Rex's back pocket? This violates the unwritten rule of every Old School RPG I know -- your character has no items on him other than what is recorded on your character sheet.

I also find it laughable that the casually dressed and boyish-looking Rex is immediately recognized as The Scorpion. This guy is the terror of the underworld? Really?

 

Oh my gosh...before I let you go, I just have to rant about the amateurish artwork here. Not only is every panel background-less, not only is Rex himself clearly the one shooting the imposter and shouting "Take that you squealer" in the first panel, not only does the real Phelps look nothing like the fake Phelps, but no one on this page is dressed like Zenda was on the previous page. Has Rex captured a Zenda impersonator while the real Zenda got away? 

Comics.org tells me the artist for this story is unknown. I wouldn't take credit for it either...

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)
 

 
 

Miracle Comics #2 - pt. 2

Welcome back! We're not quite done with Sky Wizard yet, and neither is Hawk Armand and his pals Vera and Butch. In fact, Hawk now has the upper hand and is taking his prisoners to his boss' secret kingdom in the Himalayas. Is it Black Bolt of the Inhumans? Oops, too soon for that!

Hawk may be smart, but he doesn't get the difference between a map and a globe. On a flat map, it appears the fastest way to get to Tibet from Guatemala is east, but it's actually north!  It's 9,460 miles to the Arctic Circle and back to get to Tibet. Since we know from yesterday's pages that the villains were able to catch up to the sky island in a plane that could go 300 MPH, we know sky island moves slower than that. That means it will take 37 days to reach Tibet. No wonder Sky Wizard had so much time to get free!

Let's also take a moment to talk about Kee-Shan. Keeshan would become a name used by blacks (sparingly) by the 1980s, but would be meaningless in 1940. Unless it is a phonetic spelling? It 

matches no Arabic names I can find...

I don't know about famous, but Secret Agent K-7 really was a radio character with 15-minute weekly episodes in 1939. 

Secret explosives are a common MacGuffin in spy stories. It's not clear here if the thermite bomb explodes silently or drops silently. Either way, it would be a trophy weapon to mid- and high-level Heroes (and probably best kept out of the hands of low-level ones!).

Sometimes it's the simple things that jump at me while reading these old pages, like the clever idea of having a machine gunner hiding in the back of an old cart under a pile of wood. Saving that idea for a future scenario...

I'm only including this page because I am so baffled by what is going on in the top tier. It appears that K-7 has shot the machine gunner and the driver surrenders to him as he drives past...but in the next panel he's saying "Good girl" to Yvonne because she...got the driver? So, did they jump out between panels and attack the driver? Was Yvonne shooting too, but we just never saw her do it? Did she take the wheel and run the driver over?  What do you think happened?

Hircon is clearly meant to be a Rasputin-like character. I could call this mobstertype a hypnotist, mentalist, or even a rasputin (following my examples of fu manchus, genghis khans, and napoleons). Hircon is not a real name and suggests no nationality/ethnicity.  

Ironically, petrosene is more of a real life name, even though it is used as a fictional chemical compound here. Fulmites are not a real thing either, though nitro is obviously nitroglycerin.

Would he really kill his best friend? The theory is never tested in this issue, and Charlotta could be wrong about how hypnotism works. In-game, I would say that a magically charmed fighter could be tricked into killing his best friend, and any other class might if they fail a save vs. spells. I don't think normal hypnosis should allow this, though. 

There are a lot of ways for Heroes to foil being locked in a room -- shoot the lock, bash the door in, pull it off its hinges (if you've a superhero in the party), cast a Knock spell...heck, this door even has a glass window in it, so you can just break it, reach around, and turn the doorknob from the other side. Normally, the reason why you would do this to your players is so your bad guy(s) can get a head start on running away, but our charmed doctor squanders his lead by searching for a bomb.

Here's something I don't think we've ever seen before -- un-hypnotizing someone. I guess it makes sense that one would use the same skill to unhypnotize as hypnotize. 

We're halfway through the issue now and we're just going to peek in on Dash Dixon again before heading out for the day. Yes, Dash is still dressed like a bellhop with his tighty-whiteys on over his uniform (at least you can't see his undies clearly on this page). The only cool thing here is the villain, The Eyes, a blind spy who has two light-up glass eyes (not that it makes much sense that they light up, but it becomes a semi-cool visual on the next page (and maybe I'll show you next time!)

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

 

Miracle Comics #1 - pt. 3

Although the science was a little whacked in Sky Wizard, I still enjoyed the lead feature in this issue. But the rest of it...the rest of it is a train wreck, the kind of train wreck that's hard to look away from. So naturally I'm going to wind up posting most of it!

What? The narrator is helping Dash Dixon? Okay, maybe that's not as weird as it seems -- in game terms, it would be like the referee is coaching the player on what to do, which happens a lot, particularly when you're trying to teach a new player the game.

This is the first we're learning of Dash's bellhop uniform being metal. That means the pockets on his coat have hinges? This too is not too unusual, if the "metal suit" is just flavor text for Dash activating his Nigh-Invulnerable Skin power.

No, what really bugs me is that last panel. Why are they laughing and smiling about how they don't often use their biggest size of coffins? Are they kidding around about executing children? What kind of sick country is this?

Really? Wooden wheels? How medieval does this artist think Europe is?

80' is really high for a castle curtain wall, but Dash has to give it his "all", when just a few pages earlier he was able to jump up to a flying plane?

I actually like the last two panels. They not only give a good sense of motion between, but locking the mob inside the first room is a sound tactic.

"Stop! Metal Bellhop Diaper Man is on your heels!"

"When I count three, run for the orangu!"

Not only does that sound like a messed-up game plan ("Let's run towards the big ferocious animal we want to kill him!"), but why call it an orangutan if you don't even have room to put the whole word in your word balloon? Just call it an ape (and, frankly, it barely even looks like a gorilla, let alone an orangutan)!

No one is forcing you to kill the dumb animal, Dash! Don't do it!

Of course he kills it. Sigh.

The false chimney that serves as a secret roof entrance, now that intrigues me. But wouldn't it have made more sense to drop the poisonous gas into the false chimney, where there would be no room to escape it?

When did the doctor give him "anti-gas capsules?" Is this flavor text to go along with him making his saving throw vs. poison?

On a similar note, does Dash really have "high-explosive capsules," or is that just flavor text for how his wrecking things works?

This is the next feature, The Scorpion. Ooo, sounds like we're going to get a dose of pulp noir, right? No...the Scorpion is the curly-haired guy who gets captured on page 2 by gangsters. Gangsters who know exactly where he lives, and write him threatening notes, written the same way they talk..

The gangsters wanted to bring the Scorpion and his butler along so they could witness them stealing an armored car, before trying to kill them. When the Scorpion wouldn't even have known about their plans had they not brought them.

So, the plan was to roll the car down a steep hill so that the Scorpion and Judd would crash and die at the bottom, but the car veers off the wrong side of the hill and goes into a pond. Rather than letting the car take the force of the impact with the water, they decide to jump out and take their chances with landing in the water on their own, along with the risk of the car landing on them when they all hit the water. And then somehow the car bursts into flames -- on contact with the water. Uh-huh. It's so hard to even wrap my head around this so I can assign game mechanics to it.

Or -- is the Scorpion secretly a genius? Has he outwitted the deathtrap by changing the conditions of it, so that it is not a deathtrap anymore, but merely a trap, and hence doesn't cause lethal damage (at least in H&H terms)?  Yes, that must be it.

...Nope, don't look at me. I cannot explain away that goofy first panel. I guess they're meant to be jumping over the police officers' heads? But even with a running start, how are they clearing six feet -- vertically? Or do they have a levitate spell we weren't told about?

Stealing police motorbikes is handy because you never know what you'll find on them. In this case, it was a pouch full of tear gas bombs. I suppose I will have to work out how many tear gas bombs can fit in a pouch now. A quick Google search tells me that military pouches would not have more than 2-3 grenades in it, so that seems logical.

And lastly, this is Blanda the Jungle Queen. It says a lot about your expectations when "bland" is right there in the title.

The map is not a good trace, but I suspect that coastline is from the Gabon territory of French Equatorial Africa.

(Scans from Comic Book Plus.)

Miracle Comics #1 - pt. 2

Your scream will be the signal? If I was K-7's supporting cast, that would not inspire confidence in me! (-1 penalty to loyalty checks?)

The question here is, is the villainous Czermin such a gentleman that he rushes to a lady's aid, or does he come rushing to see how high up Yvonne's hose goes? It's chancy, expecting your bad guy to do the right thing; I would ask for a save vs. plot to make sure that ruse worked.

Good thing Yvonne rolled to "hit" that hay cart, or her falling damage would have been 4-24 points and surely knocked her out cold.

This is a curious kind of scenario that you don't see often in comics, where the bad guys defeat themselves and it doesn't really matter if any good guys were there at all. I would not recommend using this often in a Hideouts & Hoodlums campaign.

This is Dash Dixon who, in return for helping a scientist, gets shot up full of drugs and then -- "Oh, I guess I forgot to tell you what I was doing to your body, Dash!" "Don't worry about it, Doc. As long as I don't get cancer from it, it's all good, right?"

Luckily, what happens is that Dash gets to become a superhero. And then he jumps up and hits the ceiling...which is weird because his strength has only tripled. Was he trying to leap 3' in the air for some reason, and then went 9?

A super man? That's a convenient choice of words. No, a super man is the level title for a high-level superhero; Dash is only a 1st level good man right now.

I also can't shake the feeling that Dash is dressed as a bellhop with a diaper over his uniform...

Panel 2 puzzles me, as I can't find any references online to air taxis before the 2000's. How common, then, was this term in 1940?

How high is that plane Dash jumps to? The lowest safe altitude for a plane is generally 500' (higher in heavily populated areas, or if the terrain is higher). Unless that plane is about to land -- and it does appear by its speed lines that it is descending -- then Dash jumps 62.5 times the current world high jump record, which is pretty high for someone who had their strength tripled. This is easily within the range of the Leap I power, though.

What game mechanic would a Hero use to keep from being crushed to death by the tremendous pressure of a plane wheel retracting? I would say hit points would be the main mechanic -- the wheel does crushing damage like being caught in a trap -- maybe 2-12 points of damage (or higher, for a larger plane). You can save vs. science to slip through and dodge the wheel, or activate a Raise power and negate the damage (because you can "lift" the wheel away from you automatically).

I'm having trouble even guessing which real life country the Republic of Scalene is based on. It kind of rhymes with Spain.

I like the secret exit from the basement, hidden inside a large cask -- though the steps in front of it might serve as a giveaway.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)