Comics on Parade #24

Happy February! We're back and revisiting Comics on Parade and, for the first time in a long time, Tailspin Tommy.  Boy, it feels like Tommy and company have been stuck in that valley forever! 

Here we have a remarkably rare occurrence of an animal not being dropped by a single bullet. Cougars need to be really tough in Hideouts & Hoodlums; I'll have to review the stats and see if I should raise them.

It appears our Hero plans to act as a living shield for the damsel in distress, but since he is the only threat present it makes sense that all attacks would go towards him anyway.

We have an unusual use of "cookie" as slang here, but the real reason I shared this page is the tip about following tracks back to the lair. I have mixed feelings about this. There have been times when I had a lair all prepared and was frustrated that the players didn't want to follow the tracks back to it, and other times when it was a completely random encounter, and I was frustrated when they did follow the tracks!

The concern about an animal having a mate nearby is a sound one too. When rolling for number encountered, bear in mind that the total number doesn't have to be encountered all at the same time.

Detailed plane information for your next transportation trophy.

Oops, don't have a lot to say about this page. Keep scrolling down...

Hi again! So Abbie an' Slats is obviously not an adventure strip, but there is a strong moral dilemma here that I think would be delicious to explore in a game session at some point. A rich girl will save the town for you if you're willing to get rid of your most important supporting cast member. Is that 100 XP for a good deed worth it to you?

There are three things that stand out from this page for me. One is the uncommon term "soup strainer" for mustache. Two is the amount of money would could expect to find on someone of, let's assume middle class. Three, and perhaps the most unusual thing here is the exact height of her husband. Cartoony men are often drawn short, but in this case it is not exaggeration for comic effect. Yeah, and there's some racist depictions here too.

Yes, I'm obsessed enough on little details that I checked to see if the Bowery Lifter Upper Society was a real thing. This is almost surely a reference to the Salvation Army. 

A $150 purse seems really good for a boxing match in the 1930s, or even the 1920s (this story was first published in 1936, and the scene within it is a flashback to some years earlier). 

I'm not sure what the crime was here. Prizefighting without a license? Or was it illegal to be a female boxer? I can't figure this one out. I know it was legal for women to box in the 1950s, but I can't find anything about the earlier half of the century.

I had to look up "demi-tasse;" it's a small coffee cup, so this is an insult about his short height.

Lochinvar is a very obscure reference today, and I can't help but wonder how often this went over the readers' heads in the 1930s. Lochinvar was the fictional, romantic hero of the ballad "Marmion" by Sir Walter Scott (1808).

 

Even Fish Cake Fannie maybe isn't a throwaway line - "Fish Cake Fanny" was a 1923 play. 

This feature continues to educate! "A Bird in a Gilded Cage" was one of the most popular songs of 1900, reportedly selling more than 2 million copies in sheet music at the time.

Drinking champagne from a lady's slipper became a symbol of decadence in the early 20th century, possibly before 1910. 

"Skiddoo" meant "go quickly," later shorted to "shoo!"

And I'm tossing this gag filler in because I thought it was funny!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Comics on Parade v. 2 #11 - pt. 2

We're wrapping up with just a few more pages from this issue, starting with Looy Dot Dope. Here we get a glimpse into salary information, though we likely could have guessed that $20 extra a week would be too steep a raise for his boss.

More interesting, for me, was seeing the verb "buttle" in use.  We see the word butler all the time, but we forget exactly what it is that butlers do -- butlers buttle.

This is Ella Cinders, and I only share it for an example of how high reward money can go for even low-level mobsters.

This is the filler page Grin and Bear It; I particularly like the bottom left gag.














I've showed pages with salary information before, but this page of Dynamite Dunn reveals how expensive it is to hire a vamp to break up a couple.

Lastly, Knurl the Gnome intrigues me this time with the concept of goat-mounted mobile radios. Would Heroes ever consider buying pack animals to carry radios for them?

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Tip Top Comics #6

Today we're going to go way, way back to catch something we missed before -- that comicbookplus.com actually has a pretty good collection of Tip Top Comics, from United Features.  Now we're going to be taking a detour backwards for a while and catch up.

And we'll be starting all the way back to Oct. 1936 for this blast from the past (if some of this gives you deja vu, it's because most of these features were also published in Comics on Parade). And first, I'm just going to show you this page of gag filler because I think half of it (all the left half too) is really funny.

In the middle of this silly page is some interesting problem-solving when it comes to crossing a chasm, or preventing others from crossing a chasm behind you.

I thought I should include this because it's so hard for people today to wrap their minds around how difficult cross-country communication used to be. "Six bits" is 75 cents -- almost the cost of a meal back then -- to make one long distance phone call.

I think I've written before about using "punk" as another name for wimpy hoodlums, the mobstertype at the absolute bottom of that particular hierarchy.

But I'm interested in this notion behind wedding feasts. A spell that would allow you to control someone once you have access to their table scraps? What would you even call that? Charm through Leftovers? But it does bear more thought...

Hideouts & Hoodlums players who come from a D&D tradition often know to listen at doors, but how many of them also sniff at doors? The chances of detecting something would be the same (= basic skill check), but the question here is, should it apply to a smell check coming from two rooms away? Depending on the strength of the odor, I might upgrade it to an expert skill check, or make it ineligible for a check at all.

Price check: $10 dresses.

This is an interesting point. Normally, there is no restriction on movement in combat, but should that always be true while grappling? As a general rule, I like encouraging movement in combat; it keeps things interesting to not be standing in one place the whole battle. So I would say that your opponent has to have at least a partial hold on you to curtail your movement.

We see a surprisingly few giant squids in comic books; most artists seemed to prefer making giant octopi instead.

I really like that design of a diving bell with mechanical arms. Half-robot maybe?

The mushroom is a Consumable of Diminution.

This also makes me want to run the classic D&D module Dungeonland, but for H&H...

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Comics on Parade #17

One of the earliest mentions of bulletproof vests in comics.

Bill and Nell use fire, strategically, as a barrier. I had just written about this for 2nd edition Hideouts & Hoodlums not too long ago, under combat options.

This is from a gag filler called Grin and Bear It. It's a rare sighting of anarchists in comic books, sightings that will become increasingly rare as Fifth Columnists replace the role of anarchists in stories during the war years.

I also think the top and bottom gags are pretty funny here...

As are the top right and the bottom left panels here. There's a lot of gag filler in this comic book.

Here we see a surprise turn, a morale save made, a successful disarming attack (I've already hinted that disarming guns is going to be much easier in 2nd ed.), and a really successful unarmed grappling attack, throwing this guy on the ground for damage. I have just recently, finally, written grappling rules I'm happy with.

I'm not sure how taking his boots are really going to stop Dave the Fox if he gets loose. Unless maybe he'll be at a -1 penalty to Move because of his bare feet...?

Here's an example of taking environmental damage from really cold weather, enough in fact to knock our hero Billy unconscious. We also learn here that Dave the Fox is actually Neutral in Alignment, making for an unpredictable reaction when meeting Billy again.

This is a reminder to myself to consider putting gnomes into 2nd ed.'s mobster section. On one hand, I'm getting interesting ideas for gnomish culture here (like flower shoes). On the other hand, it seems like gnomes are so tiny in this strip that they might not even qualify for 1 hit point.

Surprisingly, this might be the first mermaid I've seen in the comic books.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)