Smash Comics #8 - pt. 4

Today we're picking up where we left off with Invisible Hood, still fighting his way through a modern medieval castle (a villain's favorite real estate!).

Here we see that objects being carried by the Invisible Hood are not themselves invisible.

We also get the first occurrence of the phrase "friendly ghost" in all of comics-dom. Take note, future Harvey Comics employees!

"Why, Kent - what are you doing here? And why are you also soaking wet, like I am? Say...you're not really the Invisible Hood, are you?" - Tom would say if he weren't a comic book character.

Brace yourself, because we have some really racist pages of Paul Gustavson's Flash Fulton to get through now. All you need to know is that Flash has come to the Amazon to find a missing explorer. Lots of people have come down here to search for Roger Hart, but none have succeeded. So maybe Flash can be forgiven for being suspicious when this native turns up as such a convenient guide.

It's bizarre how often South American natives are drawn looking like African natives in some of these early comic book stories. This is an example of what indigenous Amazonians looked like circa 1940.

Now one detail he got right I thought was wrong -- voodoo really is practiced in Brazil. It would be an imported religion, though, not something the indigenous cultures would practice.

Being a comic book, it should be no surprise Flash can speak with the native. The surprise is that Flash knows the native's tongue and the native isn't just speaking in broken English.

Brazil has states,not districts, and there is no Kitawa state in Brazil. "Kitawa" doesn't even look like a South American word and, indeed, the only Kitawa I can find is in Papua New Guinea!

Again, Paul is right on some details; there are/were cannibals in the Amazon.

"Hey, our guide just jumped overboard!"

"You think we should just let him go since he helped us get this far?"

"No, there's a chance he'll betray us. Let's both shoot him in the back!"

Okay, enough of that! I think you can guess that they used sound effects to startle the superstitious natives, ho hum.

Turning now to my second favorite feature, John Law, Scientective! In many ways, John Law is like a second draft of Harry Campbell's earlier character, Dean Denton (featured heavily in my repackaging of Funny Picture Stories, on sale now!). Just like how Dean had to figure out who his nemesis, The Conqueror, was, John is narrowing down which of 13 suspects is The Avenger.

And, along the way, we get some science lessons, like how to leave threatening messages on other people's windows.

Sometimes the science is a little shaky for a science-based hero. I mean, compared to the average golden age comic book story, this still reads like an issue of Scientific American. But I can't figure out how the short wave heat inducing transmitter -- we call those electric heaters today -- managed to set the mattress on fire, but not the ceiling above it.

Now, John's scheme to unmask the Avenger is a little convoluted here and may require some explanation. It isn't obvious, but you have to assume that The Avenger is calling John in panel 8 to gloat. It certainly isn't a smart move on The Avenger's part, but John did bait him with the newspaper headline and villains have to save vs. plot to keep from gloating when given the chance.

It's worth pointing out that this is a time before there you could access multiple phone lines with the same phone. So if you wanted to have 13 phone lines, as John sets up here, you need 13 telephones to do it.

Also note the cartoon of Hitler with swakstikas for eyes on the front page of the newspaper.

Sometimes we have to look at Gill Fox's Wun Cloo, despite the painful racism of it, because there are interesting concepts hidden in here. Now, getting a robber to agree to pull into a gas station and park over the car lift is probably the hard part, but if he falls for it, you can lift it off the floor and threaten to set the floor on fire so he can't get out safely.

This is actually a bit of clever naming; the Tennessee Valley is large and the Tennessee Valley Authority built 50 of these dams since 1933. So when you call it the Tennessee Valley Dam, that can be a real dam, without knowing which one.

So Wings hunts down the "pirate dirigible" (even though it's pretty clear a foreign government is responsible for this attack, and for the life of me I can't figure out why he's shooting at the little gondola and not the giant bag of hydrogen directly above it. Does Wings just not like easy victories? "Getting the engine" is definitely a bad result on a random complications table for aerial combat.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Smash Comics #6 - pt. 3

Long-time readers would know that I've been a fan of John Law, Scientective, since I first discovered him. This installment has a great opening scene with a challenge Heroes seldom have to face -- get someone to the other side of an angry mob, without hurting anyone. Luckily, John has useful contacts all over, including an autogyro owner at the local airport.

It's interesting that June's jitters isn't a character trait, but a valuable clue.

By "cyclatron," John means a cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator invented in 1932. I'm not sure if a cyclotron big enough to fit in your room would be strong enough to stop your watch...but it's just the sort of plausible science that this feature was so good at.

That the murder weapon is a phonograph is a great idea, no matter how shaky the science behind it is.

Sure, John could have just hopped over to the clock and knocked it over to break it, but taking the bigger risk of relying on the cyclotron to stop it is more science-y!

Lastly, before being critical of how lame The Avenger looks with a white hood over his face, just think of what other bad guys wear white hoods...

Another Hero rendered unconscious overnight, and perhaps the first one ever knocked out by a self-inflicted head blow.

Like I said, the science may be iffy, but it's a situation created by science that can be solved with science.

Too bad we get such an abrupt cliffhanger!

Because next thing we know, we're already in the Invisible Hood feature. IH is just tagging along on top of the truck and watching all this, but I wonder what players would do when confronted with the cliche of the fallen man in the road -- just drive over him and go faster?

And it's stolen helium again!

It's worth being reminded how primitive communication technology still was compared to today. Public telephone conversations could be overheard, radio signals could be intercepted, so carrier pigeon is actually still a reasonable alternative circa 1940.

This is Wun Cloo, and while a racial caricature, it's not making up the $1,000 bill -- they were really printed until 1934.

Here's a rare early appearance of FDR and the "conquest-mad dictator" looks more like Hitler than even Eisner has been drawing him so far. Vernon Henkel is on the cutting edge of how the war will soon be treated in all comic books.

Wings seems to have bitten off more than he can chew when he flies over a shipload of smugglers. He stays out of range of their autocannon by staying near the aft end of the ship, but there's a machine gun there and his plane goes down after complications from all those bullets.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

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. 3

This is The Invisible Hood -- and here we have a rare example of a Hero using chloroform! I'll probably have to add this to the minor trophy list, with a note about how you need surprise on someone, or a successful grappling hold, to administer chloroform.

Yeah, I don't get how IH looks at that classified ad and just happens to know that a mobster wrote it. Some weird hunch? Information IH knows that the writer forgot to share with us...?

Up to this point, The Invisible Hood was only figuratively invisible. The captured scientist sprays his hood (really, his whole robe/gown) with an invisibility spray. It's an improved invisibility that doesn't end when you attack either.

You know you're dealing with a shy introvert when he turns invisible and raves that it's the best thing that's ever happened to him.

Well before a scientist died after creating Captain America, we see what a death sentence giving trophy items to Heroes is for scientists. I should probably include something about that in the write-up for scientists in 2nd edition...

Doing the questioning is Wings Wendall of the Military Intelligence.  He catches the sergeant in a slip-up, but that's difficult to roleplay in actual game play. If the Editor slips up while speaking in-character, was it intentional or a mistake? If the Editor does make a mistake, is he prepared to alter the story to match the mistake, or backpedal?

Note that the sergeant was bribed with only $500 to commit sabotage he knew would kill someone.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)

Smash Comics #1 - pt. 2

This is Wings Wendall, and I can point out a few salient features from this page. One: more proof that seaplanes are incredibly common!  Two: the Pacific Ocean is not so big that you can't just fly around randomly and spot a bit of flotsam floating beneath you that will serve as the clue you need. Or, in other words, always leave your players a chance of finding something they need, even if you reduce their chance to just 1%. Three: fragments of powder, smoke, and slivers of steel are good clues of shellfire. Four: for the Editor, it's a good idea to have a sentry outside your hideout, concealed under camouflaged cover. And, with the benefit of modern technology, he can simply phone his boss inside and tell him who's coming!

Here, Wings and the villain only called "baldy" are engaged in tactics of opposing attack modifiers. Wings gains an early advantage, hiding behind hard cover and sniping mobsters as they approach him. But Baldy is willing to wait him out until dark, when everyone will have the same penalty to be hit as being behind hard cover -- or twice as good if it's pitch black out!

Now, Wings' modifiers are cumulative, so he'll be at -4 to be hit; -2 for the cover and -2 for being in dim light, while everyone else just gets the dim light bonus. But it's not the dim light modifier, per se, that has Wings worried, it's that with his lower chance to hit some mobsters might get past him, or outflank him, and he'd lose his cover bonus.

Also, it's worth pointing out that, personally, I think summoning the Air Corps and have them bomb the heck out of the bad guys is a cheating way to win a Hideouts & Hoodlums scenario.

Archie O'Toole has fun, thanks to a Potion of Invisibility. This page also sets a precedent for ingesting food soaked in hi-tech/magic potions to have the same effect as drinking the potion directly.

The Invisible Hood debuts. He's the third Mysteryman with a gas gun. Other than that, he does a lot of sneaking around here, relying on surprise rolls.

Your Hero is seldom going to be this lucky -- the Invisible Hood is captured and held prisoner, but underestimated (probably because his costume is a hooded pajama suit) to the extent where one of his two guards stops watching him and reads the paper! Your Editor is probably going to give you a break like that only once in a campaign, so enjoy it while you can!

The Invisible Hood's gas gun can down four hoodlums at once (if they all miss their saves vs. science).

This is Captain Cook of Scotland Yard. I've learned from Cook that you can pimp out your (circa 1939) planes with: wireless radios, parachutes (obviously), blinding headlights, train whistles, an engine silencer, and ...an "anti-aircraft detector"? I guess from the context that it detects aircraft, and not anti-aircraft weapons. It's likely they mean Radar (a term which wasn't coined until 1940). Radar stations were not miniaturized enough to fit in a plane circa 1939, so they're referring to Scotland Yard men working the Radar from the ground.

This is Abdul the Arab. Jumping down into a moving vehicle as it speeds past you...I've never tried it, but it seems like that would be difficult. I guess it would be an attack roll, but the Armor Class would have to be guessed by the Editor based on how fast the car is going. Perhaps -1 to AC per 10 MPH? (a simplified version of the vehicular combat rules in Book III).

I've previously talked about how little damage car crashes seem to do in comic books, which makes it seem odd that Abdul gets knocked out here. But he is still a 1st-level Fighter, so it doesn't take much damage to knock him out yet.

The girl is "stunned". In this case, that means she's out for the length of a sandstorm, so...1-6 exploration turns?

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)