Fantastic Comics #5 - pt. 2

We're back for round 2 of Samson vs. Eelo! Although he doesn't look like your "traditional" merman, I'd already decided last time I would stat Eelo as a merman. So panel 1 is either proof that mermen have great swimming movement rate, or this is the first clue that Eelo is actually a supervillain buffed with the Race the Train power.

I've seen some interesting rayguns in golden age comic books, but an underseas gun is a new one. A heat ray shoots heat. What is this one shooting out? Underseas? Is it just a water pistol?

That is some significant wrecking going on there. A submarine weighs a couple of thousand tons, so we're talking battleship category. 

But a hero shouldn't have to do everything; eventually moping up the enemies gets to be rote, or antic-climactic. It's good, then, to have the "cavalry" come in and mop up the remainder, or the remaining sub in this case.
 

I like most of this page. Samson, stoically guarding the two reunited lovers...Eelo, almost heroically, pulling himself up for one more contest with Samson (Eelo must be a supervillain with a few more powers at his disposal, to think he has a chance here)...

And then Samson just hits him and kills him. Ugh. Death-Dealing Blow needs to be its own power. It would be more powerful than Super Punch because Super Punch just does a bunch of damage to knock out virtually any foe, whereas Death-Dealing Blow must make you save vs. plot or die. So, a level 5 power? Maybe level 6? At this point, Samson only should have enough XP to reach 2nd level, so he's either been gifted more brevet ranks, or he's had more all this time and was actually holding back.

Like with ultra-powerful magic-users in the comics, one could ask me, Scott, if superheroes are this powerful, then don't you need more power inflation in even the early levels for Hideouts & Hoodlums? Good question, random stranger, but two explanations for this: 1) the superhero class is based on the first year of Superman stories, before all this power inflation happens, and 2) there are certainly elements I don't want to emulate about the early comic books because I just don't like them. These include done-in-one-blow fights and grossly overpowered heroes.

"Mercury is getting closer to the Sun every year. Eventually it will be destroyed by the - ah, I'm just kiddin'. Mercury is in a stable orbit and is gonna outlast both of us, baby." Apparently Flip just likes to periodically test how gullible Adele is.

Now I'm being flip, but this science is so bad it actually makes me mad that anyone would write it in a book children would be reading. What if they repeated this nonsense in class?

You know...you'd think someone brilliant enough to invent a fourth-dimensional projector would figure out a way to put two separate seats into it. I suspect Flip just uses this as an excuse to get all hands-on with Adele.

I don't even know what I'm looking at with those aliens. Are they giant pigeon angels with halos? Are those beanie copters?

Darn, I was just getting excited about statting Mercurian pigeon angels, but those are just thought-wave helmets. 

Whoa, I thought the misogyny in this issue was just going to be subtle, but this just got way over the top. Not cool, giant pigeon angle impersonators! But what do we think about Flip now? Is he off the hook for sparing her feelings, or should he be honest and tell her that the aliens are women-bashing in front of her? 

A thought about the architecture: at first these look like Earth skyscrapers, but if the natives are birds...what if these "buildings" are actually solid perches for the natives to roost on top of?

Nice...looks like I'm getting something cool for the Mobster Manual after all out of this issue. Heidites are D&D basilisk-like monsters, but instead of having a petrifying gaze attack, they exude green slime from their skin! From a D&D context, this potentially makes them even more dangerous than basilisks. 

Heck, I'm so excited, I just added it into the manuscript now! *sigh* Now to fix all the layout of the book after it...

 

Jumping ahead to Golden Knight, we have a lot of people in chainmail here. Except the girl, of course, who is for some reason in a 20th century bathing suit instead of even a dress. The chainmail is AC 5, but it exists almost as flavor text -- if you hit the target, you can stab right through the chainmail as if isn't there.

I had commented recently on a Facebook post about monster tactics in D&D that the DM has to have some latitude for deciding how advantageous to make those tactics, that the Editor had to stop short of making them so advantageous that the players will switch to the same tactics.

Here, we see entangling with nets giving great advantage. The Golden Knight, despite having a sword in hand, can apparently not cut his way out, or stab through the nets. Now, if this is simply a failed saving throw, and the player knows it, maybe this won't become his next character's main tactic. But if nets work like this every time? Then he will, and he'll expect it to always work for him too, and should. 

Other than that, what bothers me most about this page? The spaghetti straps on The Golden Knight's tabard? The Gothic style of the castle in medieval times? The fact that the castle is brightly painted all over? Okay, it's actually all three.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.) 

Fantastic Comics #4 - pt. 2

Picking up where we left off with Samson...it's a good thing Samson didn't kill off Professor Brun last time, because Brun has invented the transporter! Seriously, this works just like a Star Trek transporter dissembling and reassembling molecular structures in different places. It gets Samson from somewhere in eastern Europe to Russia at the speed of teleportation.

Wrecking a factory is in the category of battleships, out of range for superheroes level 1-4, but pretty easy for one of Samson's brevet rank-boosted level.

Decomposing ray? It's an unfamiliar use of the word, but it's not technically incorrect, if the ray is breaking Samson into his component molecules. But, on the return trip, should that be a synthesizing ray putting him back together?

That is it for this month's Samson adventure. Now, this month's Flip Falcon might look, on the surface, as if "Orville Wells" (actually Don Rico) was tripping on acid, but what he'd actually done was steep himself in pulp fiction, while at the same time anticipating science fiction to come.

First up, we've got atomic weapons and ray guns that do damage, but not the catastrophic damage we know atomic weapons really do.

The three-armed aliens anticipate Larry Niven's three-armed aliens, but also the many three-armed races of Professor Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne. It's hard to say what their magno suits and ray guns do, except in the general sense of providing better Armor Class and damage respectively. It also appears the suits let them fly.


"Dictascopic" isn't a word; Don may have meant "diascopic."

I've written before of the enigmatic slave-giants. They have mainly observed things before, anticipating Marvel Comics' Watchers, but at the size of Marvel's Celestials. Why this one throws them miles away, and arranges for them to somehow land safely, will never be revealed.

"We're lost, Adele. I don't recognize this place," has got to be the most remarkably understatement ever while floating through outer space.

It's very rare for a scientist to get something wrong in the comics, but this illustrates there is always a chance of failure.

The path has a Rainbow Bridge vibe to it, and the future men with their weak bodies reminds me of the Kaldanes from Thuvia, Maid of Mars. Their bodies are vulnerable, being little more than skeletons held together with skin, but the mechanical hands attached to their chairs are very effective as long as they are attacked one-on-one.

Up to five future men are encountered on this page. Although I'm calling them "future men" because of a plot twist that hasn't revealed itself yet, the story calls them "terrible things," "insane men,"and "dreadful claw men." 

For being a million years in the future, you'd think these guys would have more advanced traps than a portcullis.

"Life vest" seems accurate; the claw men (that one's starting to grow on me) don't seem to have enough organs left inside them to keep them alive without their protective vests.

So these guys have a time machine, but never thought to use it themselves?

I like the artwork on that second panel.

This is from Golden Knight, though you wouldn't guess that from the top tier, which shows a girl wearing an extremely anachronistic dress.

The father's curse is an intriguing one, but if he's powerful enough for a curse like that...why doesn't he have the power to just go down the well? Curses like that are plot devices, not covered by spells that player-controlled magic-users can learn.

Apparently all you needed was a stout rope to get down the well...

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)