Flash Comics #3 - pt. 2

Continuing where I left off...

Hawkman's (or Hawk-Man's) friend is "killed" by Una Cathay, a female mad scientist/magic-user, a very unusual combination in the Golden Age, when most women aren't shown as being scientific-minded. The story is (get ready for spoilers later): she has come up with an interesting spin on raising the dead; her chemical potions can resurrect dead people, but to stay alive they have to remain mostly immersed in the chemical bath. She has a collection of revivified men floating in water tanks, a spin on the "brains in jars" trope. Oh, and she can work "Voodoo" spells. If she ties her hair to someone, she can make him take burning damage even at long range (not sure what to call this spell...Voodoo Fire?).

Hawk-Man does not yet have much of a reputation as a good guy; he is able to easily fool the scientist and a Russian spy working with her (actually identified as Russian and not given a fake country) into thinking he wants to throw in with them. But she decides to kill him anyway, with the aforementioned voodoo spell. Typical of the genre, the spy is an aristocrat (or at least calls himself a count).

Somehow, when Hawk-Man goes home to pick up some throwing daggers, Shiera is there, immediately spots a long woman's hair wrapped around his wrist from across the room, and instead of jumping to the conclusion that Carter is seeing another woman, she jumps to the weirder conclusion that someone cast Voodoo Fire on him. Could that be an expert skill check in arcane lore?

The twist to the story -- as too often happens -- is that there's less supernatural or super-sciency going on than it appeared; Una was poisoning people with something that put them into comas and pretended they were dead.

Hawk-Man confronts the villains after freeing the prisoners and pins the spy's hand to the wall with a dagger, but the dagger really just disarms the spy (it was his gun hand) and the pinning is quickly forgotten flavor text.

Una escapes from Hawk-Man by using a secret door that he appears to be unable to bust through. Does that suggest that secret doors should be harder to wreck than normal doors, or is Hawk-Man only concerned that wrecking the door will take too long and Una will get away?

When the spy falls out a window, Hawk-Man makes no effort to save him.

For the first time in any medium, I've now seen a thrown dagger puncture a tire and make a car crash. Also unusual for the car crash trope, the villain actually dies in the crash, Una suffering a broken neck (and Hawk-Man even checks the body to make sure she's really dead!).

Next up is Johnny Thunderbolt, or Johnny Thunder as we know him! Training to be a boxer, Johnny has gotten ripped since last issue.

"Pile of jack" is slang for "lot of money" in this story. Johnny also uses the term "slop up" to mean "go out for a drink" (though this is Johnny, so he means a chocolate malt, not booze). There is a topical reference to Glenn Cunningham. According to Wikipedia, Glenn Vernice Cunningham was an American middle-distance runner, who was considered as the greatest American miler of all time. He received the James E. Sullivan Award as the top amateur athlete in the United States in 1933.

When Johnny tells bullets to go back where they came from, he activates what appears to be the Turn Gun on Bad Guy power. Since Johnny is a magic-user, that means we need a Missile Reflection spell too.

Johnny is, at least briefly, heavyweight champion of the world. We still haven't seen a physical manifestation of his thunderbolt-genie yet.

Next we're treated to a reprint of Rod Rian of the Sky Police. The Mephisians use a giant raygun (one of those that looks a lot like the dome of a planetarium) to pull Rod out of the sky using a combination of magnetism and gravity, or what we now call in science fiction a tractor beam. In a convenient moment of charity, the Mephisian leader (who's name also happens to be Mephistos) not only spares Rod from being shot and decides to strand him and the other prisoners on The Island of the Living Dead, but also is sporting enough to arm them first. I guess Mephistos isn't such a bad guy after all! On the island we haven't seen the living dead yet, but we get to see the chasm beast! We haven't seen this guy since Dell's The Comics #10!

(Read at readcomiconline.to)

Flash Comics #2 - pt. 2

Hawkman shows up third in this issue. New York City (I presume) is struck by a major earthquake (no other DC characters notice because there is no shared continuity yet). The cause is unusual; a mad scientist calling himself Alexander the Great has created a machine that increases an object's weight 1,000 times, and that is what caused the earthquake. It takes an hour to warm up the weight-increasing raygun before it can be fired.

In this story we learn that Carter and Shiera are engaged, and Carter has promised to give up adventuring when they marry (so, of course, they never do marry).

In a rare sign of heroes drinking, Carter is mixing a drink in a shaker. These are clearly adult heroes; not only does Carter end the adventure by offering Shiera a cocktail, but it's clear from Shiera's dialog that she just spend the night over at his place.

Dinner is served at 10, way later than any dinner I've ever eaten.

Shiera calls Carter's costume "robes."

Shiera gets them invited to dinner with Alexander by revealing Carter is Hawkman to him. Alexander, more like a Bond villain than a comic book villain, offers Hawkman $1 million to not interfere in his plans, and genially tells him he can visit anytime. Indeed, security is so light at Alex's mansion that Carter is able to sneak back in and test if the machine will work on ninth metal (Carter carries around a small sample).

We learn that ninth metal is not composed of atoms (but are not told what it is composed of. Solid energy?)

Hawkman arms himself with a trident and net, even though Shiera recommends a sword. The trident and net are also both made of ninth metal (not all his weapons are, apparently).

Showing off how well-read he is, Carter makes a reference to "fling the gage," a way to say "give an ultimatum" that comes from the poem "In the Vanguard" by Scottish poet Alexander Anderson.

Hawkman is still low level; he gets beat by a single mad scientist armed with only a pistol, and has to be saved by Shiera.

In one of the earliest examples of superheroes keeping trophy items, Hawkman keeps one of two weight-increasing machines left in Alex's mansion (after wrecking the other with an axe so no one else can have one).  

Next up is Johnny Thunderbolt, which has not yet been shortened to Johnny Thunder. Johnny "accidentally" casts Charm Person four times, on two police officers, a complete stranger, and a boxer, to get them to do what he says. When he finds a bully harassing a lady and makes him bounce across town into a hospital. It's more difficult to say what spell that would be. Telekinesis, possibly, or a new spell called ...Compel Movement? It would be a 2nd level spell that makes 1 target move in a certain direction for the duration. He also casts Fear, which makes four people run away from him.

The woman Johnny rescued immediately becomes his temporary supporting cast member, since she thinks he's cute.

The newspaper headlines make it clear that Johnny is in New York City.

Previously reprinted by Dell, Rod Rian of the Sky Police is in these early Flash Comics. This installment sets the time of the strip at 2500 AD. We also learn that telurium is a metal only found on the Moon, and that Earth has a world government that uses earthons instead of dollars as its currency. 10,000 MPH is a very fast speed to be approaching the Moon; most Moon landings arrive at around 5,000 MPH. The remainder of the pages are the same ones reprinted in Dell's The Comics #7, and feature the Mephisians.

The Demon Dummy continues the melodrama of Harry Dunstan, a ventriloquist whose sanity crumbles after losing the love of his life last installment.Talking to himself through his dummy, Harry convinces himself to become a destitute drunk and get himself arrested, so he can exact revenge while in jail. We also find out that "hooker" used to also mean a "good, stiff drink." 

In The Whip, Rod Gaynor buys the old villa that the original Whip was said to have owned 100 years ago. The place has a reputation for being haunted, supported by doors that swing open on their own (as the building shifts, perhaps). There is also a wandering encounter in the house, as Rod and his servant Wing meet the sheriff inside.

The Whip is opposed by The Association, a group of rural mobsters. They spend $10,000 to hire five assassins, who apparently work for $2,000 each.

Fighting the assassins, the Whip is able to entangle one of them with his whip and hurl the man against the wall hard enough to hurt him. That's tricky to emulate with game mechanics because the entangling attack and the hurling attack should be two separate attacks, giving his opponents twice as long to shoot him. As the Editor, I would consider how much damage the attack would likely do in total and, seeing how it would not be much, would condense it into a single punch attack (with the rest just flavor text).

The Whip entangles a second assassin with his whip, jumps out the window, and that pulls the assassin out the window with him. I would treat this as an opposed grappling attack, but with circumstances giving the Whip a +2 situational bonus.


(read at fullcomic.pro)

Flash Comics #1

All-American Comics, which will become half of DC Comics, debuts one of their better titles this month with Flash Comics #1.

This was the birthplace of several major DC franchises, most notably the Flash. I had reviewed the Flash story already in the very first issue of The Trophy Case, though not with the level of specificity I've achieved since on this blog, so I will have some more notes here.

First off is some more consideration of where the Flash's stories were located. I had written before about how the Flash could have been a Midwestern hero. He does move to New York City to attend Coleman University for his graduate studies, but at the start of his origin story, Jay Garrick (the Flash) went to Midwestern University -- and there was a real Midwestern University already in 1940, then in Chicago, Illinois.

Jay is so addicted to cigarettes that he has trouble waiting for his smoking break; indeed, one could argue that it is Jay's anxiety about being without a cig for so long that leads to the accident that gives him his powers.

Professor Hughes, the teacher supervising Jay's experiments, and at least one doctor at this unnamed Chicago hospital, are the first to learn Jay's secret, even before he tells his friend Joan. Then he reveals his super-speed to an entire football stadium, completely tossing out the pulpish trope of keeping a secret identity.

An entire year seems to pass during The Flash's origin story!

How fast is the Flash? A caption already describes him as moving at the speed of light, but it sure seems like the Flash only sprints at under Mach 2; that means he's using the Race the Bullet power.

Next up is Cliff Cornwall, Special Agent. Cliff is revealed to already have some field experience, as the Army borrows him from the FBI for this mission because of his reputation.

Cliff requisitions a monoplane fighter, with a machine gun mounted over the single prop, for the flight out to Alaska. And he's just 1st level?  I suspect some brevet ranks here.  I also can't identify the plane type. It looks like a Blohm and Voss Ha 137 because of the wing configuration, but that was a German plane.

The biplane that attacks Cliff gains surprise, demonstrating that surprise rules even apply to vehicular combat.


Mount Logan is a real location in Alaska; it is the highest mountain in Canada and the second-highest peak in North America, after Denali.

It seems awful convenient that the enemy aviators who shot down so many planes then left them all lying in a valley, still flyable, and stocked with bombs. But it is still a smart tactic of Cliff's to bomb the enemy runway first, so none of their planes can take off.

Cliff's reward for helping the captured Army flyers escape is to get more work from the Army in the future. He also got a Supporting Cast Member out of the deal, Lys Valliere, an Alaskan native who can shoot, fly a plane, and doesn't mind being called "honey girl."

The Hawkman is next. Carter Hall is said to be a wealthy research scientist, though this origin story does not specify the science. Later stories will tell us it is archaeology, though perhaps metallurgy would be more appropriate. Also, like Jay Garrick, we see Carter Hall is a pipe smoker.

Carter has discovered the "ninth metal", that defies gravity; this is a reference to the John Carter of Mars books and the metal hull of their airships.  We also find out later that ninth metal repels electricity, though I don't know how many comic book writers have remembered that since.   

Magic is subtle in Hawkman's world; his knowledge of his reincarnated past comes to him like a dream, and Hath-Set's most impressive spell seems to be Darkness 15' Radius.  Borrowing a trope from science fiction, magic is said to be one of the "older sciences."

At least one of the soldiers fighting Prince Khufu (Carter) is armed with what appears to be a period-accurate khopesh sword.

Abydos is a real place, and is indeed one of the oldest cities of ancient Egypt. Khufu apparently ruled from there.

The hawk helmet is implied to be an Egyptian relic, a ceremonial mask of the Egyptian hawk god.  The hawk god is called Anubis by the narrator, though who he meant was Horus.

On the other hand, perhaps Carter's field of study is electrician, as he invents a "dynamo detector" that tells him exactly where his enemy is using one, miles away.  It isn't clear what Dr. Hastor's plans are, exactly, or how channeling electricity through subway tunnels is going to help him rule the world. I guess extortion is his game? 

Hawkman's initial weapons are a wooden quarterstaff (wise against a foe wielding electricity, I suppose) and a crossbow.

It is unclear what caused Carter, Shiera, and Hastor to all remember their earlier reincarnations around the same time. 

Johnny Thunder's real name is John L. Thunder. He was kidnapped by Badhnisians in August 1918, for having been born at precisely 7 am on the 7th of July in 1917.

The island kingdom of Badhnisia is fictional, as are their enemies, the people of Agolea. But we know this is somewhere in Asia because a woman flees from their war with Johnny to nearby, and real-world, Borneo.  

The story picks up with Johnny at the age of 23, in 1939. He inadvertently casts Charm Person to make a man "go jump at a duck."  He inadvertently makes a falling man stop falling with Levitate. On another day, he inadvertently casts  Gust of Wind by telling two Badhnisian agents to "blow away."

There is no mention or appearance of Johnny's Thunderbolt in this story. For now, Johnny's power only works one hour per day, which does not exactly fit with how magic-users work in Hideouts & Hoodlums. But Johnny is still clearly a magician.

Johnny has two siblings who we only hear about.

Next is a one-shot story called "The Demon Dummy."  The villain is a corrupt (private) detective and the hero is a ventriloquist.  But this is no hero like Dean Denton; our ventriloquist gets framed for murder, arrested, and pines for the girl he lost until finally being released from prison the month after she died.

In the time of Zorro, or circa 1840 anyway, El Castigo -- The Whip -- also protected the people of Mexico.  He could use a whip to disarm a gunman or unhorse a rider.  A century later, Rod Gaynor is a bored rich boy on the road, brought by random coin tosses to the real community of Seguro, California (though, here, it seems to be an incorporated town). He is moved by the plight of the local poor and the legend of The Whip and dons century-old gear just in time to stop a lynching.

As The Whip, Rod can entangle someone with a whip and drag them.  He can make a horse break down a door.  He defeats the corrupt sheriff (equal to a captain, so 5th level?), though a lot of that is because of superstitious locals shouting that this is the ghost of The Whip unnerving the sheriff.

Don's disguise is supplemented with an outrageous fake accent.  Marissa, a local girl, guesses Rod is the new Whip.  Rod also has an Asian manservant named Wing.          

(Flash story read in Golden Age Flash Archives vol. 1; the rest read at readcomiconline.to.)