Smash Comics #8 - pt. 1

It's good to be back around to Quality Comics again. Not that we haven't seen plenty of Will Eisner over at Fiction House and Fox, but I have a special love for Espionage, and I think Will did too. There's a lot of good anti-war messages in Eisner's early work, and here we see a pretty good summary of how terrible the war in Europe is going so far, with accurate dating for Germany's early conquests and only the curious prediction that they would move to China next.  The prediction that Germany's army would be stymied at France will turn out to be disastrously false over the course of just four days, two months after the cover date of this comic. 

Eisner put a lot of work into this story -- almost as much as he will soon into The Spirit -- so we won't skip a page of it.  Luckily, I think we can find something to talk about on every page.

Here, in the final panel, we see the value of relying on random rolls to see if anything turns up in a search. Just saying "I check the closet" shouldn't give you an automatic success, though being specific should give you a bonus.

We don't often get treated to foreign languages in American comics, but the German in panel 9 is asking "Where is the one we are looking for?"







I'm not convinced the name of the former high official of the German intelligence would have been common knowledge to an American in 1940, but we know today that this is likely General Kurt von Schleicher, who was head of the Ministry of Defense until Hitler changed it to the Ministry of War in 1935.

I think it's interesting that Black X refuses to take on the same plot hook from one character, but will take it if given by another. This reminds me of a player I have right now.

Saarbrücken is the capital and largest city of the state of Saarland, Germany. Saarbrücken is Saarland's administrative, commercial and cultural centre and is next to the French border.

There are great details here, from the strategy of substituting for a corpse to get on an ambulance (I'm guessing he let them make sure the man was dead first, then created a distraction and replaced the corpse on the stretcher), to needing to shave because it took so many days just to cross the French-German border. Panels 1-3 are great action scenes, while panels 8 and 9 are dramatically angled. And yet, despite 12-panel pages, it hardly feels crowded on the page.

Koblenz, spelled Coblenz before 1926, is a German city situated on both banks of the Rhine where it is joined by the Moselle.

When the secrets Gale is carrying are revealed, they don't sound that valuable to me.

It seems incredible that Madam Doom just happens to be hanging out at this particular guardpost when Black X happens by. Still, it's very comic book-y if you insert a recurring villain into your wandering encounter table every so often.

I wouldn't say it's incredible, but perhaps remarkable (forgive me, I've been playing more Marvel Super Heroes lately) that the shrapnel blast somehow misses both Gale and Black X, but does enough damage to kill the driver. I suppose they were outside the "save for half" radius and in a "save for none" radius.

 Batu uses...the Phantasmal Image spell? It's been a loooong time since I first discussed in Supplement IV if Batu is an example of psionics or not, and we don't have to revisit that here. Just enjoy some delightful character moments, followed by one of Eisner's signature anti-war messages direct to the reader in the final panel.

And, as an added bonus...it's been a long time since I last shared single panel comic strips. I like these two, particularly the one on the right. I had to think about it about as long as that girl is...

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Smash Comics #6 - pt. 1

Oops! Almost passed over this issue!

I love Will Eisner's early Espionage stories so much, I'm half-tempted just to post the whole thing...but I'll be strong and just post the relevant pages here.

This time, we're treated to yet another obvious stand-in name for Germany -- Govania.  Thalga is obviously Hitler. You might think Stadt represented Himmler, but Hitler made Himmler, not the other way around. Stadt better represents Franz von Papen, an ex-chancellor who helped Hitler rise to power so von Papen could get his office back. But, was this common knowledge in the U.S. in 1939...?

The last gold rush was 1896, but I'm sure in 1940 people were still hoping for another one. I could spend my whole blog, or start a new one, talking about how good Eisner's art was, but note how panel 7 represents the swirl of activity around the discovery of gold, represented by water-like ripples around the upraised hand, as if it was the Lady of the Lake offering up that gold nugget...

I've nothing to say here, because I'm completely stumped by the reference to an "East Rush." I have no idea what event that is referring to and can't find anything on such a thing having happened.

This page is great for the tidbits of backstory we finally get on Black X.  It's a shame Kadu-Kan is an entirely throwaway reference and never comes back in a story. Google Translate detects Kadu-Kan as Malaysian for some reason, but can't give me a translation. I suspect Kan is Khan misspelled.

Black X's technique, of drawing out his opponents by making himself a big target, happens to be one of my own personal favorite strategies in RPGs.

As mentioned in Black X's write-up in Supplement IV: Captains, Magicians, and Incredible Men, Black X seems to have remarkable ability to request trophy items from Espionage Division at short notice, including this fighter plane that just happens to also be packing a torpedo.  Spoiler alert to my future players: I don't usually give out trophy items this cool.

Chic Carter spends a lot of his time reporting from Moravia. The last time I wrote about Chic Carter, I thought Moravia was fictitious. And, since I write in what seems like a vacuum here, no one corrected me that Moravia is a real place in the then-Czech Republic. Now, Krasnow, that could be fictional city.

This would be a difficult scenario to actually play, because so much is happening around Chic, but he doesn't really have to do anything but observe. He gets the opportunities to do good deeds, or to take over fighting for others, but he has to decide very quickly if he is going to take those opportunities. And if he decides not to live dangerously, this is going to be a very boring series of the Editor just describing exciting stuff going on around him the whole time.

I think this is a weakness of the newsman genre as a whole and why it will be difficult to emulate in Hideouts & Hoodlums game play...though, that said, I haven't actually tried one of these scenarios yet to test that theory.

Speaking of the newsmen genre, Chic gets followed immediately by Flash Fulton, the Ace of Cameramen. Here's a perfect example of Flash not taking any active steps to fight the fire, even though the opportunity to do so is right there. He's just doing his job and filming the situation. Of course, danger still finds him even though he's not actively looking for it.

He also gets to wear a trophy item asbestos suit (though I don't think he gets to keep it).

The game mechanic issue on this page is subtle and not immediately evident. When Tony shouts out and warns Flash about the boom, does that make the boom miss? H&H has no active dodge skill -- if the attacker missed, it's just assumed you dodged (or something else happened that saved you). Now, what did likely happen here is that the shout did not make the boom miss, but took away the surprise attack it would have had and made the attack roll happen during the first (and only) turn of combat.

Splashing water in unconscious people's faces does not wake them up in H&H. Rather, the two mobsters were only stunned and the duration of the stun just happened to wear off while they were being hosed down.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Smash Comics #4 - pt. 1

And we're back to Will Eisner's Espionage, still featuring Black Ace instead of Black X.  This installment is the debut of Madame Doom, one of the best femme fatales invented for comic books and the precursor to, well, every femme fatale in The Spirit later.

From this page, we learn that a map of the California Coast's military defenses would be worth about $10,000.

200 MPH was certainly doable for a plane circa 1939. Pursuit planes, transport planes, and bombers all moved at about that speed.

In Chicago, in 1939, they would have likely landed at Midway Airport. But the city looks too far away in the background for this to be Midway. They might have landed at a smaller airport out in the near suburbs to evade notice; this could conceivably be the Pal-Waukee Municipal Airport (in Wheeling).

In Supplement IV, I spent a little while discussing Bantu and if he was a magic-user or psionic. Here, he seems to be casting the spell Phantasmal Image. There is no equivalent psionic power in Supplement III, where the psionics rules are.

When I cataloged various aviator stunts for Hideouts & Hoodlums (for The Trophy Case no. 6), I neglected the Immelmann Turn. Putting it in simplest game mechanic terms, the Immelmann stunt would be used immediately after attacking, and it gets you into position to go first in the following turn (you cannot lose the initiative for that turn).

The Immelmann is a popular maneuver from my limited experience playing Dawn Patrol; I may have to investigate that game more deeply.

This is likely Salt Lake City Municipal Airport.

Black Ace makes his save vs. plot to see through Madame Doom's disguise.

I am not a fan of Clip Chance at Cliffside, and you'll probably never see it here again. But it's worth pointing out that Ray Snort has got to be one of the worst names in all of comicdom. If you meet a character in a comic book story with a name like that, it should send up all kinds of red flags that you're dealing with a bad guy. Names like that, they scar a young man...

Two things here: one, The Green Lizard is not a fearsome name for a master criminal; and two, hiding a radio in a globe is a great detail for hideout dressing.

Invisible Justice calls this a giant crocodile, but it really doesn't look as big as some other crocodiles we've seen in the comics -- this is a large one at best.

It seems IJ only has to shoot it twice to either kill it or chase it off. Indeed, there are a lot of examples in comics of really big, fearsome monsters going down in one or two hits. I'll continue to ignore that for H&H, to keep big battles longer and more exciting.

Invisible Justice looks for tracks, which is now an option for all classes in H&H 2nd ed.

Despite being an underground hideout in a swamp, it seems the hideout is nice and dry. For convenience, and RPG tradition, underground hideouts will seldom have to worry about the local water table.

Concealing the door inside a tree is a nice hideout feature, as is the alarm on the door.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Smash Comics #3 - pt. 1

This is Eisner's Black Ace again, but the real issue here is the poor bloke who gets his head dashed in when a torpedo rolls into him and knocks his head back against the wall. As drawn, it doesn't seem like the torpedo could have hit him for enough impact for doing damage, let alone lethal damage. Hideouts & Hoodlums already has built-in precedents for Heroes operating under different rules from non-Heroes (like the save vs. missiles). In keeping with this, the Editor has a lot of leeway for fudging rules against non-Heroes.

Here, Black Ace is called on by the scenario to face a difficult moral dilemma -- try to save everyone and probably fail, or leave some to die and ensure that he can save some of them? As Heroes grow more powerful through the course of the game and have more resources available to them, it becomes more difficult to lead them into a situation like that. Still, if you can set them up for it, a dilemma like this is the sort of challenge that never gets easier, no matter what level the Heroes are.

This page brings up a particular issue with morale. Black Ace feels he's identified one lynchpin person in the crowd who risks breaking the morale of all the other sailors and decides to take him out to stop that from happening. Is Black Ace just imagining this, or does morale really need to work differently than all-or-nothing on each side? An Editor could account for this by rolling individual morale saves for everyone involved.

And lastly, from this story, we're reminded that an important goal for many scenarios set pre-war can be to prevent the war from happening. U.S. involvement was not a given as of 1939 -- in fact, the majority of citizens were against getting involved.

This is Chic Carter. Here we get another example of flavor text wounds on a non-Hero, as there's no reason Valerie's bullet wound should need her to be rushed to the hospital, unless the Editor set up such a condition to add a time limit to the scenario.

I'm not sure how I would handle the overloading of the plane. On one hand, I kind of want that to be in the pilot's hands and make him roll a skill check. On the other hand, maybe everyone involved should just roll a save vs. plot to stay alive. A combination of the two would have the pilot rolling the skill check and the passengers on the wings making saves vs. plot (or maybe science, to avoid wind shear).

One might say that Wall-E borrowed a page from Abdul the Arab here, who borrows into the sand to avoid harm. Now, the tent itself essentially made Abdul invisible, giving his opponents a -4 modifier to hit. But this isn't just another penalty modify to stack on, this is removing Abdul from the direct line of fire. Editors will have to make their own calls for when the situation calls for eliminating the chance to hit altogether. For instance, without the tent obscuring Abdul's actions, all that sand would have amounted to little more than soft cover.

One could make a case that it wasn't Abdul who won the day here, but the British captain who sent in Abdul's back-up. It's also implied that the British have the stronger steel formula now, giving them the military advantage the Arabs had tried to get. Abdul certainly turns on his own people a lot.

Also worth noting is that formulas could be considered treasure -- something with monetary value, but little value as a trophy -- to a Hero.

We've already established that climbing is really easy in comic books, and apes are natural climbers -- two factors that make it really questionable that the ape happens to slip and fall in this page of Captain Cook of Scotland Yard.

Again, I question the use of madman as a mobster type, as Professor Dwyer really seems to just be a mad doctor here. Mad doctors get an entry separate from mad scientists in 2nd edition and will have a skill in brain transplants.

There's also passing reference to two trophy items here -- an electro magnet that can guide planes off-course, and an incandescent (as opposed to fluorescent?) death ray that seems to focus on killing vegetation.

Invisible Hood is dealing with mobsters with a submarine. The submarine is an advanced model with greater speed and able to attain greater depths -- a Submarine +2, if you will.

Realistically, the mobsters don't want to spend all their time on a cramped submarine, which is why their true hideout is the schooner. The schooner appears to be an ordinary trophy-transport item.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

Smash Comics #2 - pt. 1

In Espionage, Black "Ace" (I always liked Black X better) is after the theft of this anti-electric raygun. It is like the larger device the Masked Marvel encountered a while back, but this one is smaller, portable, and only works on a single target.

Will Eisner seems to taken a stab at future predicting here and was off by a few years -- Russia didn't declare war on Japan until 1945, not 1939. But that's nothing compared to the stab in the dark Black Ace makes here -- correctly guessing the stolen invention will be sold off to either Japan or Russia, correctly guessing it will be sold in China, and even getting the city right! That's some hunch...and makes me think an Editor might have been railroading his player here to get him to go to the right place.

As if the stabs in the dark didn't end there -- somehow Batu knows who stole the plans and manages to find them! Is this his psychic powers on display? It seems like there are at least two pages of story missing here that would explain these connections.

On the bright side, we get an interesting trap, with a touch-sensitive chest of drawers that shoots a knife out of it at anyone in front of it (but where does the knife come out of...?).

Batu calls this hypnosis, but he's instead generating a Phantasmal Image. Curiously, Batu loses consciousness from blood loss and spell fatigue -- two things that have no game mechanic in Hideouts & Hoodlums. If he's supporting cast, this can be flavor text.

Not sure how the bad guys have a second mechanical jammer. Maybe there are three pages missing...

Black Ace's wandering encounter is with a doctor. Doctors were statted as a mobster-type in Supplement V and will probably make it into 2nd ed. too. Note that Black Ace was over India, but the doctor is a white man...

Black Ace regains consciousness quickly, having been only "nicked." It's a new mechanic in H&H that if you reach zero hp, and make a save vs. plot, you're only stunned temporarily instead of unconscious (since BA clearly wasn't out for 2-4 hours).

Black Ace is using the Aviator stunt Deadstick to fly after killing the engine.

Speaking of stunts -- jumping out of a moving plane and landing on another moving plane -- that has to be a stunt.

This is The Lone Star Rider. The snipers are going to be statted as assassins in 2nd ed., though I'll probably include a note about how they can be called snipers.

This is Abdul the Arab. The assassins he runs into use hiding in shadows and backstabbing instead of sniping at a distance.

At least one of the assassins carries poison with a really quick onset time.

Abdul's idea of disguising himself is to change his clothes.

Climbing hand over hand could be handled by just a skill check, but doing it with a full-grown woman on his back, that's got to be a stunt.

Baghdad was ruled by a king, not a sultan, in 1939. Faisal II was, in fact, the last king of Iraq.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)

Smash Comics #1 - pt. 1

We continue the exciting (cover date) month of August 1939, when a lot of companies first started adding new titles to jump on the sales boost that Superman had begun. Today, we find Quality Comics finally putting a second title out in the field.

Smash Comics leads with Espionage, the best feature from Feature Comics. This story is an allegory for Germany and Europe obviously, and carries with it some significant alternate history for South America. Editors can be free to shake up world history as much as they want in their campaigns.

For some reason Black X is called Black Ace in this story.

Disguise is clearly central to being a Spy, and is the primary ability of the Spy class.

Black X/Ace's strategy is borrowed straight from "A Scandal in Bohemia". Feel free to borrow from the classics when running or playing in your Hideouts & Hoodlums campaigns.

I usually give Will Eisner credit for having well-thought out his stories, but this one seems a little lacking. If Koran's empire extends only as far north as Brazil, then does it make sense for the freedom fighters to be in Colombia, outside the empire? And how did Mara Hani get there ahead of Black X/Ace? I could imagine players crying foul there.

The numbness in Black X/Ace's arm seems to be mere flavor text, as it doesn't seem to be affecting his fighting ability any.

Jaguars we've seen before, and were statted in Supplement III.

Another example of a Hero taking "months" to recover from injuries, while a mobster dies from conditions that, for a Hero, could have been avoided with simple first aid and rest.

I include this page of Philpot Veep, Master Detective for three reasons. One, the inside joke on the wanted poster in the background about G. Brenner (long-time readers will recognize that as the creator of The Clock!); two, $8.65 is apparently a reasonable price for a radio, with tubes, in 1939; and three, the casual reference to Sherlock Holmes' infamous cocaine addiction.

Interestingly, we saw this same panel of the gar-wrestling man in another comic book, from a different publisher! This title from Quality and Fiction House's Jumbo Comics both had the Will Eisner shop in common -- does this mean both comic books were produced by his shop? Or was Eisner able to re-sell the already-published page because no one paid attention to the educational filler?

Swordfish were also covered here. A 450 lb. swordfish would only qualify as a large, 2 Hit Dice, swordfish.

This is Chic Carter, Ace Reporter, the new feature from Vernon Henkel, who we've seen before doing Gallant Knight.

A monogrammed broken watch fob is a good clue for an Editor to let Heroes find.

Players will know when they got a good encounter reaction roll, when the police walks in on their Heroes, catches them compromising a crime scene, and still just lets them walk away.

This is not a tactic I would normally recommend, since there's a good chance the bad guys will try harder to lose you. But if you're confident in your driver, you might want to make it easy to let the bad guys know you're tailing them, so they'll stop and attack you or try to capture you.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)