Jungle Comics #2 - pt. 1

Jungle Comics is what happens when a publisher (Fiction House) has one successful title (Jumbo Comics, packaged by the famous Eisner-Iger studio) and decides to launch another, but on the cheap. When Fletcher Hanks is your best artist (and you'll be seeing his contribution in a day or two)...

I was recently in a Q&A with Don McGregor on Facebook and I asked him about pushing the envelope for violence in comics. His response was that he wasn't trying to push violence so much as show that violence has consequences. Which is relevant here because violence is on display on practically every page of Jungle Comics, but a strangely bloodless violence, even when characters are getting stabbed in the face. I found some of these images too unpleasant for sharing on my blog, so you'll just have to take my word on the face-stabbing incident.

Today we're just looking at the first two stories from this issue, Kaanga and Red Panther (called White Panther last issue).

Kaanga is drawn by Ken Jackson -- often free of the constraints of any backgrounds -- and so stiffly that he can sometimes be mistaken for Fletcher Hanks (in fact, I'm not entirely convinced that Jackson isn't just a pen name for Fletcher, with someone else inking over him).

Compared to Kaanga, Arthur Peddy's work on Red Panther is positively dynamic, though still gory. Later, Arthur will join DC Comics and get to work on the squeaky clean later appearances of the Justice Society of America.

Now, let's talk about the pages! In the first one above, we get possibly the first instance of a stick holding crocodile jaws open in comic books. At least he doesn't kill it!

Ape men often look -- or are blatantly -- racist in nature, but this story skirts that problem by depicting the ape-men as white as they can get. Dr. Wratt may be the first mad scientist in comics who won't wear pants. Or shoes. Or socks. I think we can safely assume he's naked under that long shirt. Dr. Wratt may be evil, but he's not too evil; he operates on Kaanga using an anesthetic gas.

=====

Game mechanic notes: Sticking a stick in a crocodile/aligator's mouth requires a successful attack roll, followed by a failed save vs. science for the animal. The ape man achieves a surprise attack and lands a head blow that stuns -- unless Kaanga was just low on hit points from the crocodile fight, in which case Kaanga has been rendered unconscious at zero hit points."Torn legs" do not require miraculous cures in Hideouts & Hoodlums, just normal rest.

Wratt needs to only establish eye contact with his victim to hypnotize him, but we've had plenty of evidence of how easy it is to hypnotize people in comic books. He does have one limitation, though, he can only hypnotize someone to make them do something they already want to do (like escape the island). To "dominate another's will" he needs that big, stationary machine.

It's unclear if the machine does all the work, or if it only makes his normal hypnotism more effective.

A choke hold is a result on the grappling table in 2nd edition H&H.

Here is a very rare example of tripping two opponents at the same time.

===

Wait a minute...if the shore was that far from his lab, how did they see the hypnotized guy get torn apart when he "neared" the shore?





The island is in the middle of a lake (I didn't share the page that established that); the long suspension bridge is the only way to the shore of the lake. But couldn't Kaanga swim the lake...?

We see ape men can be encountered in groups as large as eight.

Are the crocodiles in the lake, a lagoon, or both?

Meanwhile, Red Panther is trying to save missionaries from headhunters.

===

A stunt never seen before, or likely since, in comic books, is swinging from a vine held in one's teeth and scooping up two full-grown people, one in each arm. I have toyed with the notion of restoring the multiple levels to stunts that they had in 1st ed. But how to distinguish 2nd level stunts from 1st edition ones? A thought I've had here is that a stunt should only be able to accomplish one thing, but a 2nd level stunt can accomplish multiple things (2? 3?) at once.

A skill check can discover a hidden trap if the Hero is actively searching for them, though Red Panther seems to just happen to spot one here as if by accident. 

A long established practice in RPGs is to combine traps with something to fight, such as a tiger in a pit trap.

===

It seems odd that Red Panther chooses to jump into the pit and kill the tiger, rather than simply reach into the pit and pull the man out. He could have even helped the tiger out and sicced it on the headhunters.

====

Red Panther is able to use a stunt -- cutting his bonds against the sword -- even though combat has already started because he has not yet taken a combat action.

This is not the first time the term "giant" has been used to apply to a combatant who is actually just normal-sized. This is why I was thinking of creating a pseudo-giant mobstertype.

A push attack does not need to be away from you; here it shows a push attack being used to move an opponent behind you.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Jungle Comics #1 - pt. 1

At long last we begin January 1940! With this "brand new" title from Fiction House!

Kaanga is a Tarzan clone with a few wrinkles thrown in. Note that he's not adopted by apes (Tarzan), nor by natives (Sheena), but by something that doesn't quite look like either...

First edition Hideouts & Hoodlums had an explorer class for heroes like Kaanga, but there's really little reason not to use the fighter class for him, so far.

Also note that Kaanga only needs "a few weeks" to learn English, so picking up new languages is something heroes can do on their downtime.

Kaanga's strength and leaping abilities almost put him in superhero contention. And yet...both editions of H&H have had rules for non-supeheroes to wreck things, and greater than normal leaping could also be a mysteryman stunt.

Here we learn that it was ape people Kaanga was adopted by. Ape people are statted already in 2nd edition, and this shows that they occur in numbers of up to 13.

I am not sure what to make of this backstory. White Panther and his father are the last of their tribe in the jungle...but they are whiter than whitebread, and the father looks weirdly Odin-like.

I like the unusual Macguffin of magical healing stones.

If you thought those ape men were racist, wait until you see these cannibals.

White Panther is clearly a superhero (or maybe a speedster from 1st edition!). He activates Race the Train to outrun the natives, and it is interesting that he uses his power only as a distraction instead of trying to use it to fight anyone.

It's unclear from panel to panel if White Panther is a naked albino or wearing skintight white clothes from head to toe. He also seems to have a magnetic disc on his belt that holds his dagger in place, which is pretty cool.

Apparently it wasn't hard to find the healing stones at all; you just had to keep wandering the jungle and the cave/mine is like a random encounter. Although the mine must have already been played out, someone was careless and left some healing stones just lying around.

Here's a reason not to carry guns in cave complexes -- gunshots apparently have a chance to cause cave-ins! Cave-ins are pretty brutal, delivering fatal damage for those who miss their saves vs. science, and tearing the clothes of even those who make their saves.

We can tell White Panther is low-level because he avoids combat whenever he can. He also doesn't know much about the fauna of Africa, since he calls that crocodile an alligator.

There are three crocodiles on the next page, so we know crocodiles can be encountered in groups of up to 3.

If we weren't sure if Kaanga was a superhero or not, there's no confusion where Fletcher Hank's Tabu is concerned. Tabu's magical sixth sense is the source of his powers, which include Outrun Train, Wall-Climbing (a 2nd ed. power), and ...well, moving silently is usually a stunt.

Here we see Tabu has access to the powers Leap I, Fly I, and some kind of super-swimming power (though maybe Outrun Train can cover this territory). He also demonstrates tracking, which was the primary skill of the explorer class. Maybe Tabu is an explorer/superhero character.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)