Keen Detective Funnies #19 - pt. 1

WOOOOOO! Finally! Finally, made it to April 1940, after being stuck on March 1940 for the longest time. But will the stories get any better? Uh-oh -- we're back to Centaur Comics...

We're going to start with Spark O'Leary, and the upteenth time someone in comics has invented a method of invisibility! Kudos, at least, to getting the optics of it kind of right, that it would have to bend light around an object instead of reflecting it, though how it makes hands invisible when they're left uncovered is unclear. And is it dangerous to wear the suit? Is that why it needs a built-in gas mask?

There is a lot of plot convenience on this page. One, Spark just happens to leave the press conference early, which seems to be a terrible thing for a "newshawk" to be doing, but otherwise he wouldn't already be on the road to see the kidnappers, who just happen to drive past him. 

The story completely glosses over how Spark manages to sneak into the building unseen, and then how the two men manage to sneak out unseen. But then, these are some pretty nearsighted mobsters, because they completely miss the car just sitting off to the side of the road. Perhaps we can at least give Spark credit for having Prof. Doran lay down in the backseat, rather than visibly sitting shotgun, but it seems a risky move when more careful mobsters might have stopped and checked out the suspicious vehicle.

An old flivver conveniently blocking the road is just the sort of examples of chase complications I need to expand my table, and the owner of the flivver also being an ornery sheriff is just a bonus complication. But how they resolve the problem leaves me very suspicious of who's side this professor is really on. And how impressionable is Spark that he immediately goes along with this plan to run a sheriff off the road into a pond, where he might drown?

It's very rare for early trophy items in comics to have this kind of built-in weakness, like having water short-circuit them. 

In anyone else's hands, having an invisibility suit would be the origin story for a new superhero (indeed, that's precisely the Invisible Hood's origin story!), but Spark simply gives the suit back when he's done with it. 

Spark is, again, unconcerned when he is out-scooped by another reporter, on the same story he should have been on top of, and instead of being concerned about this mysterious-sounding fire, he just shrugs it off like it's no skin off his nose. Way to avoid your next plot hook, player! 

We're going to jump to the end of the next story, Dean Masters, D.A. Dean has apparently gone out and bought this trophy item, a magnetic cane. It allows him to control rigged roulette wheels and, I presume, pick up his dropped keys without bending over. How it cut wires isn't clear; it would be cool if it had a concealed pop-out blade in the foot of it, but such was never shown.

Now we'll jump into Spy Hunters, for a very early, very rare example of breaking the fourth wall in a serious adventure story. Eat your heart out, Deadpool!

Brest is a real city, a port city in the Finistère département in Brittany.

The Maginot Line of defenses had been installed along the German border throughout the 1930s and would be familiar to most American readers. This comic book, though cover dated April 1940, would have come out in January, four months before the Maginot Line became irrelevant. 

I usually share any maps I see in old stories, in case they could be useful later in planning game sessions or published scenarios...but I'm not even sure what I'm looking at in this map. I wouldn't have much confidence in a military campaign relying on such a map. 

Salzwedel is a town in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, so it's optimistic, if not poor forecasting, to assume France would be taking the offensive into Germany soon.

I wouldn't be bragging if I won a fight with 30:4 odds, but this is always possible when you rely on random wandering encounters instead of planned encounters. The dice give you breaks sometimes!

A subaltern is an officer in the British army below the rank of captain, especially a second lieutenant, so this wouldn't be a term you'd be using to describe German soldiers.

This is from Dan Dennis, FBI. Polly spotted Dan and Tick shadowing her because he failed a skill check or a surprise roll (the Editor could handle that either way), and then she tries to throw them off by handing the package to someone else and splitting up, so Dan and Tick have to split up to follow them both. This could work particularly well against H&H players, as not splitting up is so ingrained in their training.

St. James Place may seem familiar to most of us from the Monopoly board, but it's also a fairly common place name. We can't know for sure if this is the St. James Place in Brooklyn, or Chicago, or somewhere else.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.) 

   
 

Keen Detective Funnies v. 3 #1 - pt. 2

No, this isn't a black and white reprint; Centaur was still having financial difficulty at the beginning of 1940 and could not afford to put color on every page.

Dan Dennis shows you that G-Men did not have to observe rules or laws in comic books. Here, rather than getting a warrant for an autopsy in a sterile medical lab, Dan sneaks a complicit medical examiner into a private funeral home and has the examiner perform one in the dark. Interesting verdict on that autopsy -- unless it was skin cancer, there would be no outwardly visible sign of cancer. I wonder how much cutting up the examiner did.

This is Ed Colton. It's interesting how many similarities there are between this scenario and the Masked Marvel story I shared from yesterday, despite that being a mysteryman story and this being a cowboy story.

Ed lays out a good series of clues that can be gathered at a crime scene.

In order to pull off this bluff, Ed took a deliberate 10' fall into a gulch in order to look injured.

I guess there were not too many ranches with plane hangars in the area, so solving the "who done it" part of this mystery was relatively easy. Finding one of them conveniently holding the murder weapon in the hangar certainly helps.

By making it a tripod-mounted weapon, the Editor has made it virtually impossible to use in melee range, to Ed's benefit.

I laughed at first when confronted with the term "liquid oxygen," but it is a real thing and has apparently been used in rocket fuel in the past.

Of course, the caption is way too long, taking up an entire panel, and includes a lot of detail we just do not need to understand the story.

This is Dean Masters, D.A. There are three ways to handle that trick where he sneaks the tear gas grenade out of his pocket. The player could either make a sleight of hand check (basic skill check) to palm the grenade, rely on surprise rolls, or even just rely on initiative rolls to see if he could set it off before Louie could take an action.

Dean tricks Sam into going out into the hallway and getting shot. My first inclination was to say Sam had to save vs. plot to resist fast-talk, but there's not really anything here to resist. Instead, I would say this is an encounter reaction check situation.

Dean wisely doesn't fire into the crowd -- if he rolls low, he runs a risk of hitting a civilian (there's no game mechanic penalty, by the way, for shooting a civilian, but there could be in-game repercussions, like him losing his job.

Sam takes three bullets before he goes down. With those hit points, he must be a master criminal!

Scenario map (though, admittedly, not very detailed).

This is Captain Forsyth & Sergeant Maclean, Spy Hunters -- a title almost longer than its own feature. Here, we see bandits. We are told they are Arab bandits, but counter to typical racism of the day, there are no visual cues to the bandit leader being an Arab, other than a caption telling us.

$50,000 is a fortune in 1940 money.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Keen Detective Funnies v. 2 #11

Back at Centaur, we rejoin the Masked Marvel as he climbs the side of a building and leaps from one building to another. They're pretty mild as superpowers go, not all that different from what a mysteryman could do with stunts.

Despite looking like an ordinary plane, the Masked Marvel's plane has VTOL capabilities.

Again, the Masked Marvel seems de-powered here, as he finishes a fantastic leap with a swing on a rope, as if he needed that to land safely (though maybe he just does it for a flourish to look cool).

His invention is an everlasting fire extinguisher (a handy trophy item, if not a tad bulky).

This is Dan Dennis, FBI.  Dan's plan is to shut off all power in the city -- including to hospitals -- on the off chance that his hunch is right and the mad scientist is using his own power source. Asking the power company to do something like that for you is one of those things that should require a very high encounter reaction roll -- maybe an 11 or 12 on 2 dice.

This is from Dean Masters, D.A. -- though he's not actually here right now, as this is a long flashback scene involving the bad guy, here called a mad man. I've wrestled with how to stat madmen in Hideouts & Hoodlums, giving them multiple attacks in Supplement V.  Here, madmen appear to just have better carrying capacity.

This is A Russell Granville Adventure, though it's not the adventure I'm interested in here, but that last panel and the discussion of air control in mines. Finally, I have an explanation for why multi-level hideouts will need pit traps, and furnaces and electric fans as well. These will need to be part of the dressing of large underground hideouts.

There's a surprising amount of interesting features on this page. There's the shaft to the surface with baskets of burning coal in them. There's the mystery of the odd crank piece and how it fits to a crane disguised in a chimney. There's the idle speculation about murderers using asbestos suits and gas masks -- well-equipped mobsters, as both have been trophy items on the lists since Book II.

There's a good amount of detection work in this story, and I'm not going to show you all of it, but I'm particularly impressed with Russell Granville here when the questions whether the reporters are real. Because, as a player, I might have suspected as well that this was a perfect opportunity for the Editor to introduce a twist in the story. Also, it's just a good idea for Heroes to fact check things they learn in-game -- not every character they meet is going to tell them honest information.

Pirates steal $15 million in gold from this ship -- pirates seem to be the most successful criminals in early comics.

The naval destroyer has a "sonic detector" on board -- another term that would have predated Radar.

This is Dean Denton, by the way.

Language, Dean!  But, really, did you fail to search your arch-nemesis upon capturing him? Did you let your Editor have his own characters do it, knowing that he could have fudged search dice rolls, or hand-waved rolling altogether?

And just how did the Conqueror have paralyzing gas concealed on his person? Concealed capsules? There's a paralyzing raygun in the trophy section, and sleeping gas capsules, but nothing yet that combines the two...

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)