Science Comics #2 - pt. 4

We return now to Dr. Doom, the evil mad scientist who isn't really out to conquer the future so much as just to put small groups of people into weird situations. Case in point, this battle in a cage against "mosquitoes" after being shrunken down to smaller-than-mosquito size. I had to go back two pages and double check to make sure that page really said mosquitoes -- it did! -- but it seems no one told the artist.

Perhaps of more use to us would be a discussion of how to handle breaking a mount, game mechanically, in Hideouts & Hoodlums. One could argue it would be a skill check. It could also be an encounter reaction roll for the animal. Since breaking in a mount shouldn't be easy, I would require both rolls. In terms of skills, I would treat making it rideable as a basic skill, but if you wanted to teach it a trick, an expert skill.

And now even the writer has forgotten what they are! Unless, of course, mosquitoes have mutated into more of a bee-like creature at some point in the future. The thought here in the last panel is that all animals, like the myth about bulls, get angry when they see red. Indeed, the solution on the next panel is to throw all their red clothes into a pile and the "mosquitoes" all kill themselves stinging the floor through the pile. Yeah...

How many fish-men can be in an encounter? The answer is "lots." I'm not sure if that third panel is even countable, but fish-men are clearly very organized and militaristic (Lawful Evil, as they would be known in the AH&H Mobster Manual).

I don't have much to add here, except to say that despite how obviously the fish-men are all traced, the composition is really good.

Navy Jones was already a strange feature, but it runs into overdrive here as Navy encounters a fiendish trap where people strapped onto railway cars are transported into the waiting maws of a gigantic carnivorous plant. Yes, that two-headed thing is supposed to be a plant! I don't know for sure how to stat that thing. It looks gigantic, but being a mostly hollow plant, probably doesn't weigh nearly as much as it looks like it would. Maybe 13 HD, normal 6-sided hit dice, would not be unreasonable.

Those rayguns use a really obtuse-angled ray, able to hit up to  5 targets at short range. I bet their maximum range is not very far, as diffuse as it must be.

If you hurtle out a window, underwater, wouldn't you just float there?

I like sea swine, though. Those are so cute!

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Science Comics #2 - pt. 3

For this post, we're going to jump right into the middle of the Perisphere Payne story. All you've missed so far is that Payne and his men are helping to stop raids on the Moon. After successfully repulsing an attack, Payne flies around trying to figure out where the invaders came from -- you know, instead of just questioning prisoners or searching the wreckage of downed ships for clues. No, the twist here is that the attackers were coming from underground instead of in space.

That's just to catch you up. Here, we see how extremely maneuverable spaceships are while flying between mountains. We also see, almost as incredibly, the bad guys only leave a single guard at the entrance to their secret tunnel from which someone can foil their entire "invade from below" plan.

The "huge craft" seems to be more like a trolley car than a spaceship, and it's hard to see how it would launch off those rails and fly around.

If that seems confusing, panels 3-5 and are even more confusing Panels 3 and 5, it seems like Carson just walks in, is assumed to be an underling, is told to bring a fresh uniform, and just shrugs and puts on one. But panels 4 and 5 seem to be tell a different story, where Carson captures a guard and makes him take his uniform off (and his boots too!). Regardless, like almost all guard uniforms, this one fits the Hero exactly!

It is very strange to find a city at the core of the Moon, since at the center is a dense core of iron with a temperature of about 1600–1700 K (1,320-1,420 degrees Celsius). That city is going to need REALLY powerful air conditioning. 

I would love to overhear that villain monologing longer and find out how the Moon controls "the fueling system of the universe." Seeing as how the Moon is close to nothing but Earth, that works out how...?

It's also worth pointing out, I think, how even in a future sci-fi setting, big things still have to be moved by cranes and chains. The amount of thought that went into technology with this future world-building is usually minimal.

Marga is like Tarzan, only raised by black panthers instead of gorillas. This is the first comic book character to be named Ted Grant, to be followed by DC's Wildcat in two years.

Here's another wrinkle on the ray that freezes motors, this one freezes people too. 

Check out the scale on that fortress. That is either a mistake, or that is one huge anti-aircraft gun. It's at least as tall as the towers! The airplane hangar looks small, but it's difficult to say how far away from the fortress it is.

Leopards are unusual guards. Unusual guards, of course, often make for better encounters.

Is the Ethiopian strange because he's an albino? I'm surprised they don't mention that. Maybe he's strange because Uchunko isn't a real Ethiopian name. The closest is probably Urgessa.

 
The curious wording of that first panel caption could mean that the guards are savages, or just savage fighters. If the first, I would stat them as natives. If the latter, I could maybe stat them as bloodthirsty hoodlums.

I wonder what the poisonous fumes in the poison pit are. Sulfur? Whatever it is, it isn't very fast-acting.

Someone spent more time on that cheesecake shot in panel 2 than any other panel in this feature.

That tigers and leopards roam freely through the fortress is interesting. There must be a lot of open doorways and not many closed doors in the place.

I don't know how "heavy" that heavy cover is; it looks only slightly larger than the average manhole cover and I doubt I would make anyone roll anything to lift it. 

More curious is how exactly she's aiding Ted to reach the top of he pit. Is she pulling him up as she goes? That could require an expert skill check at climbing, or maybe even a stiffer penalty.

That Ted is "almost unconscious" suggests he's been slowly losing hit points to the poison instead of being in a save or die situation.

Now we're going to jump to the next feature, Dr. Doom! No, still not the Marvel Comics' Dr. Doom, and not the international spy Dr. Doom who really came first. This is middle Dr. Doom, the ugly old mad scientist guy who shrinks people down and puts them under glass with giant mosquitoes that look suspiciously more like hornets. The nice thing about shrinking heroes is that you can use the stats for giant animals for ordinary animals, and giant mosquitoes were statted as far back as Supplement I: National.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Science Comics #1 - pt. 4

I have a few more unimpressive pages of this issue left to share. This page of Dr. Doom features Jan and Wanda discovering that the shrink ray used on them had a limited duration, but before they return to normal size they encounter an ordinary crab and -- well, I can tell you that I would not want to encounter a crab anywhere near that large. From the scale of it, it looks like it would be 30' in diameter compared to them if they were regular size.

I'll give them this: Navy Jones is a clever name for an adventure feature. But this artwork is dismal and those fish-men look cartoonish in the worst way. By "fish-men" we might be supposed to be thinking of Namor's mermen, as they have an underground city somewhat similar, and fish-men are usually primitive in other comic books.

You wouldn't expect this, but apparently you can hurl rocks -- okay, coral -- underwater just as effectively as above water.

This turns out to be Navy Jones' origin story, as instead of a human fighter he's now a merman thanks to surgery. Mermen are the only class that can be half-human and still gain full racial benefits. 

I've talked about Heroes using living shields before, so I'll just point out that Navy seems to be using the Extend Missile Range I power, which makes him a merman superhero, and our second after Namor.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Science Comics #1 - pt. 3

Still plowing through the inaugural issue of Science Comics and...boy, this is becoming a tougher and tougher read! I think Electro was the best thing they had ready and quickly whipped up a bunch of sci fi filler to go around it.

Case in point, Cosmic Carson, with its near empty rooms on this page, and its almost entirely empty three panels on the last page.

That said, I do like the symmetry of that last wide panel on this page, and an empty entrance hall with a single guard manning a machine gun...well, it has merits for hideout design.

 ...As does this "acid well." I'm not sure what you would use an acid well for, but it's an interesting detail, and could make for a potent trap too.

Here we have another interplanetary adventure taking place in the future of the year 2000. It's adorable how confident we used to be in the march of progress.

The Interplanetary Transport Company reminds me of Futurama. But what, do you suppose, does it mean by "air routes?" Surely this author doesn't think there's air in space? If you can call fighters "space fighters" (which is what the class Fighter should be called in a sci-fi campaign, by the way!), then you should be able to figure out to call them "space routes."

Although the slavers are an intergalactic threat, with a base on Saturn, they look disappointingly like ordinary humans.

But there's something much fisher going on here -- if Payne is going from Earth to the Moon to refuel, how on Earth (*ahem*) does the slave ship get to the Moon just minutes later? Distances make no sense in these early comics. I'm not sure how to emulate that in Hideouts & Hoodlums, but I'm also not sure I care to.

Marga the Panther Woman is a weird one. At times looking like a Sheena rip-off, Marga is a woman in the future endowed with panther-like fighting ability by a mad scientist. After the scientist kills himself, Marga escapes and goes on this little mini-rampage, killing that poor little tiger with her claws.

===
A long time ago, a suggested race for H&H was the beastman, but I never had good examples of them in comic books. Marga is the perfect example, though, and we see how beastmen would have a short list of mutations to choose from, like how she gets claws.

"Protective current" isn't clearly defined here, but probably means an electric forcefield that either greatly enhances Armor Class or buffs the ship with a defensive power, as if it was a superhero.

Although these look like spaceships, their portholes and glass cockpits and holes in the walls serving as gun ports suggest these planes fly around at lower altitudes than would require pressurization.

Now this is Dr. Doom -- but neither the Fantastic Four villain nor the International Spy we've seen reprinted in earlier comic books. This Dr. Doom is an old man/mad scientist with assistants (finally found some art for that mobstertype I can use!) and they live on some kind of colony world where there are some other humans, but so few that the assistants have to go looking for them.

Jan Swift (descendant of Tom Swift?) and Wanda are explorers in the D&D sense -- they just seem to be randomly wandering and looking for experience, instead of working for someone or towards some specific goal.

One of the two assistants has a paralysis raygun that turns the tide for them.

I believe it was Dragon magazine #111 that had a great article statting real world microscopic monsters that you could either enlarge to giant size, or shrink the characters down to microscopic size so they can encounter them.

You can see Dr. Doom's shrink ray is slow enough that Jan can be picked up with tweezers while still 2 inches tall.

It would be interesting to research how many microscopic organisms were identified before 1940 -- probably not many, admittedly, as this was a few years before the electron microscope was invented. This artist didn't do any research on that, but just made up some bizarre bird-fish, regular fish, and a "giant ameoba" (amoeba) that looks more like a donut-headed snake.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)