Amazing Mystery Funnies #19 - pt. 4

 And we're back, looking at more of Jon Linton today. Maybe it's worth reminding novice game Editors that it is important to make sure your non-Hero characters fail, so the Heroes can succeed instead.

I get that it's more dramatic to blast the ceiling away (even when it doesn't make sense to do so; I had this issue with the TV show 24 in the past...), but isn't Jon worried about debris falling on his own workers? Better unionize, people! 

The N in N-ray could stand for nitrogen; well before the nitrogen bomb, nitrogen was already being used in TNT and other explosives. The next page suggests it stands for neutrons, though. Which is interesting, because we were much further away from neutron bombs than nitrogen bombs in 1940.

20,000 MPH is super-fast, barely attainable by today's technology (we can only achieve it with satellites in outer space). That's (roughly) Mach 27, traveling through Earth's mesosphere, and...well, I'm not qualified to say how safe that would be, but with so much at stake in this story, I think it's certainly reasonable to take chances!

References to atomic power might seem visionary for 1940, but New York Times articles from then were already pretty specific about how atomic power would work -- "We have been brooding over the atomic power houses which are to do away with coal and in which uranium-235 is to sputter array in water and make energy so cheap that it will hardly pay to read meters..." (https://www.nytimes.com/1940/06/09/archives/science-in-the-news-atomic-power.html)

I'm less convinced by the science behind "Jon! We're dropping!" Wouldn't an equal and opposite reaction push them backwards instead of downwards? Unless...instead of being repelled from the force field, maybe the field is draining power from the rocket? But since it's an atomic-powered rocket, that's some impressive energy draining!

Spoiler: Jon saves the day, but Satan Rex escapes to fight another day.

But not to fight Speed Centaur, who is busy knocking hats off of bad guys. I find that image funnier than it probably deserves, particularly since, on the other side of the panel, Speed is kicking that guy so hard it probably would kill someone in real life.

The reference to a previous adventure, as vague as it is, was pretty rare in the golden age. Continuity didn't get talked about a lot because it was not assumed anyone was keeping back issues. 

Panels 4 and 5 serve to remind us that Speed is completely naked most of the time. I find the concept of centaurs disturbing on all kinds of levels, and this is just one of them.

I can just imagine the future producer of the Mister Ed TV show reading this as a boy and thinking, "Hmm, a talking horse..."

I cannot figure out why Simp and Flame are in quotation marks, while Speed and Reel are not. Simp and Reel are both nicknames. Flame is the horse's real name. Is Speed Speed Centaur's real name? Does that make Centaur his real surname? This feature makes my head hurt.

"I know, Reel, but they're only the hirelings! I want the big shot of this racket."

"But couldn't we have followed them and seen if they let us back to the big shot?"

".......Why do you leave all these decisions up to me? I'm just a horse with half a human on me!"

"Dope" is slang for a variety of illegal drugs, including marijuana, opium, and cocaine, so it's hard to say exactly what's in those pills. It probably is not marijuana, as I doubt you could infuse enough into a pill form to significantly affect a horse. 

Although Speed is acting like he spotted the pills before eating out of the feed-bag, he's sure acting like he's high on something -- because this is the second time he let the bad guys just get away.

Second spoiler: Speed wins!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

 

Amazing Mystery Funnies #19 - pt. 3

No, "Arrows of Doom" isn't a Fantastic Four adventure (though wouldn't that be cool?). There are British research foundations, but not one called British Research Foundation (that I've found). Bwana is used as a form of respectful address in parts of Africa, so it's a weird name for head hunters. Matadi is the chief sea port of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the capital of the Kongo Central province.

Larry does something you don't normally see in these short adventures -- collecting rumors about the scenario before he heads into it. 

Though we're told that's a giant python, it doesn't look any larger than normal pythons, which can reach 15' in length. 
 

The arrow in panel 2 is puzzling. Did it pass through his shirt before going up into his head? 

You shouldn't be so surprised, Larry; poor Magu has already succeeded at three morale saves this adventure and his time was up. Speaking of Magu, that's apparently a real name you might find in countries like Tanzania (there's a Magu District in Tanzania).

But what is Larry holding over Magu's sleeping bag? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with what's being said in the panel. 

Just as I'm thinking about congratulating the author for his research, I'm forced to deal with the trope of bad guys being willing to kill everyone but the hero, who gets captured instead. Or is there some subtle racism here, that it's only black guides getting killed?  I think it's impossible to call here, because we can't see if the two men accompanying Ronald are black or not. Maybe Larry's guides were just unlucky.

It's really hard to take a villain like Debree seriously -- but what to make fun of first? Should I be making cheese jokes? Debris puns? Laugh at his outrageous mustache? 

Igor is not, as you may have guessed, an African name, but I think we can forgive this, especially if Debree is the one who named the 'holy lodge.' 

People who don't want to sound racist have always had a hard time figuring out how to describe people without sounding racist. Dark? Black? Granted, Larry is tied to a post that's about to be lit on fire, so he doesn't really have time to ask for the man's name...and yet, Larry does manage to fire off a pretty long speech instead...

Here's an interesting twist on the Western hero. Is it a modern hero or a 19th century hero? It's so hard to tell with the Mythic West, though a clue may be the posters on the walls advertising the menu, which seems more like a 1940 thing, as well as the price of 25 cents for bacon and beans.

I never would have thought of this -- and I'm not sure if it's really legit -- but maybe the next time I've playing in a game where I need to find out if someone's been out riding on his horse recently, I'll check the horse for sweat. Of course, this may not prove useful results on a hot day, or if the horse is sick...

It seems like everything has been wrapped up neatly -- unless the three robbers recant their confessions in front of the mob, or tell a new lie and implicate Jim. That is one mercurial mob. Maybe they don't care who they string up, they just want to hang somebody today! In a RPG like Hideouts & Hoodlums, you can roll randomly for encounter reactions of every individual in the mob, group them into sets of five and roll for every set, or just roll once for the whole mob. 

Wow. I did not see that twist ending coming! The Headless Horseman's a horsewoman!

This is Harry Campbell's Jon Linton (it's different from Dean Denton and John Law because it takes place in the future!). I like the building of suspense on this page with the running countdown. Harry always tries to add more realistic details to his stories than the typical comic book writer, which I appreciate, but without inches of latitude and longitude, those bombers are going to have an awful huge swath of Asia to search for the hidden city. 

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.) 

 

Amazing Mystery Funnies #18 - pt. 2

We're still looking at Jon Linton's adventures in the future; a future where men wear robes and women wear short skirts.

It seems like a huge design flaw that Satan Rex's atomic power plant is controlled by two exposed electrodes. I was going to say the place should also have some fail-safes in place, but I suppose the power shutdown is a fail-safe, preventing something worse like a meltdown.

I don't think any 1940 writers knew about meltdowns yet...and yet, Harry Campbell did seem to have more knowledge of science than your average comic book writer of the time, so...?

I just complimented Campbell for his smarts, but there seems to be a glaring mistake here; two pages back, Jon learned the systems would need 30 minutes to reboot, and here the "wall of force" is rebooting well before then. Of course, maybe Satan was smart enough to have a back-up system kick in for the force wall.

It's interesting that Campbell calls it a wall of force and not the more common term, force field (in use in science fiction going back to 1920!). Wall of Force is, of course, a magic-user spell as well.

The second to last panel spells out that the Scientist class normally takes a week of downtime to invent something, but has a chance to kit-bash something in just a day.

The Mount Wilson Observatory telescope would be the largest in the world until 1949. I'm not sure where the "6,000 billion million miles" came from, but researchers could see nebulae over 5 trillion miles away.

The "reveal houses on the moon, if there are any" is as optimistic as telepathic television-phones.

Bill and Davey is an odd duck, a comic strip coming from a minor league syndicate that was picked up by both Dell and Centaur (though neither for long). It's hard to see what they saw in it -- unless they just picked it up cheap.

There were headhunters, and cannibals as well, on the Solomon Islands, so while the depiction of Ajax might seem racist, the description isn't. 

This is Tippy Taylor on Fantasy Isle, a non-subtle rip-off of Swift's Lilliput. This scenario should be a cakewalk for even a class-less half-pint; since I'm still working on the assumption that 1 hit point represents roughly 30 lbs. of mass, and a 6" tall person would weigh less than an ounce, then Lilliputians...or Fantasy Islanders don't even come close to having a full hit point, or being able to do any damage themselves.

The tank poses more of a threat, even scaled to tiny size. Since it's the size of a gun, I would allow it to do a full 1-6 points of damage if it shot Tippy in the leg.

That must be a 3' high jump by Tippy. Impressive! 

This is John Degen, Private Detective, from a one-shot called "The Fiend of Halwith Hall." Shadowing someone, by car, on a country road, should be a basic skill check.

John is smart to head straight to the cellar, as most of the good stuff in a hideout is underground.

John has a skeleton key, a minor trophy item that gives him a bonus to skill checks when opening locked doors.

Here we have a mad scientist with the emphasis on mad. Like many mad scientists, he wants to do a brain transplant. Now, he might be just a raving loon, or maybe he has the science to do it; we never do find out.

Two wolves are unusual pets for a mad scientist.

The pit trap in the driveway is very unusual. It also doesn't make a lot of sense, since the car was parked when John goes inside, and is in the pit trap after he gets out. Maybe it took a long time for the weight of the car to activate the trap?

That's a lot of blood loss, to make the gunpowder too wet to burn. The Hideouts & Hoodlums rules don't account for blood loss and there's no way to make yourself bleed faster to foil traps.

Wow, that is one dark ending. It's rare for Heroes in comics to fail, but John not only failed to save this poor guy, but we find out just what horrible fate befell him.

Lastly, we're going to look at a verbose page of Larry Kane, investigating "The Ghost of Kirkwood." There's a pretty good set-up for a haunted house scenario here, with lots of rumors being supplied on this page.

My curiosity has been aroused too, but it's late and I'll read the rest next time!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Amazing Mystery Funnies #18 - pt. 1

Speed Centaur? Really? You're going to make me read Speed Centaur, first thing? Sigh..

Now, to be fair, this scenario seems as preposterous on the face of it as a centaur superhero. What would the Axis Forces possibly want with U.S. horses circa 1940? It turns out there actually is a real story like this.

"Hop on my back and ride me, trusty sidekick!" How did  Fredric Wertham miss this?

What the waaah? Since when can centaurs fly? I guess I'm modifying the centaur record in the Mobster Manual again!

I've never heard of such a killer horse -- but killer horse seems almost like a worthy mobstertype for Hideouts & Hoodlums! It also appears here that killer horses can attack with both 1 bite and 1 kick in the same turn. Speed beats the killer horse with grappling.

I'm interested in this page for the first panel. Reel is able to gamely perform a move worthy of a movie stuntman; but keep in mind Reel's training is as a cameraman. So when did he become such a capable acrobat and marksman?

On an earlier post, I speculated about Supporting Cast and at what point they can become classed and I may have missed the obvious; as soon as they become Supporting Cast to a Hero, they become important enough to gain a class, even if they only had a mundane profession before. 

Killer horses will chase after you if you run!

...It's been as hard as ever taking Speed Centaur seriously, but perhaps this could illustrate, instead, that Supporting Cast animals can be given very specific and out-of-their-character tasks, like running down and trampling someone.

Phew! Moving on to The Inner Circle now. There's not a lot of game-relevant material here, although I'm curious to see if any of those newspapers really exist...

Long before The New York Bulletin became a fake newspaper in the Marvel Netflix Universe, it was a real New York newspaper, running from 1840 to 1850! There was a London daily called The Courier, but I can't find that there was a London Daily Courier. The Montreal Post-Telegram is completely bogus.

Next, I'm noticing how widely different the value of the gold stolen is between countries. How close are those exchange rates?

No, there was $4 to the pound, so the London Daily Courier should be reporting 200,000, not 250,000 pounds. The Canadian numbers are even worse; the Canadian dollar was only worth 10% more than a U.S. dollar in 1940, so the Montreal Post Telegram should say 55,000, not what looks an awful lot like 500,000!

I tried to also do a little research on why damage to the conning tower, specifically, would keep a sub from being able to submerge. I don't think it's because the hit was on the tower, per se, but any hole in the sub is going to take on water.

Leaving those Circle Boys behind on their boats, let's jump ahead to Jon Linton, the thinking man's Buck Rogers (well, sorta...).

I suppose there's something comforting in knowing that notes handwritten in cursive are still going to be a thing in the future.

Jon's trick here seems a bit too obvious to me, but I suppose when you're dealing with a narcissist like Trump -- er, I mean Satan -- it's easy to play on his vanity and get him to think you're on his side.

In game play, this can be difficult, particularly if the player and Editor don't see the character's motivations the same way.

If the Editor felt, Jon's player is misinterpreting what I'm going for, he could prompt his player with a skill check or Wisdom check (we've talked about unofficially using ability score checks in H&H before) and correct him if he succeeds - or, simply change the way the villain's character to match player expectations, if that makes things easier.

I love how Harry Campbell, even if he doesn't always get the science right, certainly makes a game try of it. Here he fairly accurately predicts safe atomic energy plants, with 2 million volts being possible if the plant has up to six transformers. He also accurately understands reboot time.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Amazing Mystery Funnies v. 3 #1 - pt. 3

This is Don Dixon, in a rather exciting but hard-to-follow installment. What I do know is that a dam breaks and an enemy army is wiped out by the ensuing flood. The question for me to ponder today is: is there a way to work out how much damage being hit by water should do?

Yes, there should be a way to work out a formula for how much a certain volume of water weighs, factor in the speed it hits you, and assign it a number of dice of damage. I think it would be high. But there are other things harder to factor for, like the chance of drowning, or the chance of being slammed into a solid object. For attacks this unpredictable, that's why we have a saving throw system. So this should be a save vs. science to avoid death for everyone caught in the path of the floodwaters.

I suspect this will be a stand-alone story and, judging by the crude artwork, its cancellation would be a mercy killing.

We've seen lots of trophy planes by January 1940 already, most of them being faster, but none of them have had silent running yet. It seems like that would be really hard to do with a plane, but I certainly see the value of it, when wanting to fly up to a hideout unannounced.

Sorry, I'm going to make you look at the amateur artwork on this page just for the last panel and the assertion that "they have no chance to use their guns." Should that be true in Hideouts & Hoodlums? Well, it sort of is, if the other side won initiative and rushed into melee before you could get off your missile fire. This is why it's good to let an entire side go before the other side in order of combat.

Not always is "hideout" an analog for "dungeon" -- sometimes it really is a dungeon! And this is another example of why I had to break down and open up wrecking things to all classes in 2nd edition.

Note panel 6 and, if you can follow this narrative, a pilot's plane is missed by anti-aircraft shells, but the shrapnel from the explosion still pierces the cockpit and knocks out the pilot. This is evidence that cover does not protect you from area of effect attacks.

This is Jon Linton, and he's pretty lucky because before he goes on an expedition he gets a map of the whole place from a handy non-Hero character. Most Heroes don't get a map to work with at the start of the scenario, but are asked to draw their own -- and, indeed, this exploration component is a vital part of what makes a RPG Old School.  I also think this is a great page of building suspense. 

Wow -- not only do we get to see the map, but we get the scale for the map too!

This is why you put bosses at the end of hideouts, because the Heroes need to gather XP and level up before they can face them.

The iota-ray tube is not unlike a magic wand that combines Hold Person with wrecking things.

Speed Centaur is still in his medieval lost world. We see lots of lances on display here, but also a "mace" being used by his supporting cast member Reel -- though it looks like it would more properly be called a flail, making it one of the earliest, if not the first, flails in comic books.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Amazing Mystery Funnies v. 2 #12 - pt. 2

We return to Space Patrol to find the space bandit (which is like a normal bandit, only encountered in space and with a spaceship instead of a horse) Kosterman has already failed a morale save despite not having even entered combat yet.

A shock gun seems an odd name for a weapon used to wreck spaceships, but perhaps the blue flame somehow delivers a violent shock that shakes ships apart. Here, the ship is only partially wrecked.

Right now, wrecking things is an all-or-nothing mechanic. One would have to revise it to three categories to include a "partially wrecked" column.

I think this is our first scenic view of Venus in all of comic books. We get a good sense of the flora and fauna. Of course, the only detail Basil gets right is that the air isn't breathable.

Venus got a write-up in Supplement III: Better Quality, where I tried to compromise between the factual Venus and the comic book Venus, while keeping to the side where it was inhabitable enough a place to go and have adventures. The comic book version I was working from was the Fawcett comics' version; next time I write a gazeteer for Venus, it will have to include a lot more details from Basil's vision of it.

The Venusian Spider-Men will definitely need to get statted for the upcoming Mobster Manual. They are only vaguely spider-shaped, with their legs being more like tentacles that they use to grapple tree branches and victims. They seem to travel only via brachiation.

We will have to wait and see what all Kosterman's flame gun can do; it could be statted as nothing other than an acetylene torch with some space-age flavor text added.

Here we see that spider-men prefer caves to jungle dwelling when it comes to lairs, that they strew bones around their lairs, that they eat humans (though I don't agree that makes them cannibals), and we see that they use simple stone age technology.

This is a page (likely a Sunday page) of Don Dixon. You have to read carefully to pick out which character is the merman because this merman looks just like an ordinary human, but simply can't handle the air pressure above water without a breathing helmet.

This is one of the more obscure strips by Harry Francis Campbell. I love his John Law, Scientective, and thought John's prototype, Dean Denton, still had a lot of potential. Which makes it sad to see Jon Linton is so goofy. Though, to be fair, most attempts to depict the future in comic books tend to have looked pretty goofy.

Here, we learn that, by 2009 AD, we're going to have intercontinental rocket planes that can go 1,000 MPH (which sounds really impressive, but was possible by 1956), hooded robes are going to be stylish, and televisions (which already existed in 1939) will be called "visigrams."

It seems like Jon has performed some kind of aviator stunt here, but I think by now we know what the answer to aviator stunts are in most comic books; by 2nd edition Hideouts & Hoodlums rules, they must be simply the use of a piloting skill (and a successful roll).

As for thermite shells, one could make a case that they ignore armor and cover when attacking (all targets are AC 9, though still subject to other modifiers like the Dexterity bonus of Mysterymen).

Tibet? Green mist? Someone was reading Bill Everett's Amazing Man...

The Wall of Green Mist is actually a Wall of Force spell (or the power equivalent).

Tracking mundane resources like rations should only matter when Heroes are trapped in the wilderness, or spending long periods of time in hideouts. In an urban environment where food is plentiful, players and Editors can skip over detailing the mundane tasks of every day life like stopping to eat and drink periodically.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)