Fight Comics #3 - pt. 1

This could be the last comic book I read at the age of 48. Will Fiction House do right by me?

George Tuska's Shark Brodie is on the island of Tahilla, a fictional South Seas island.

Taverns are a great place to sit and listen for rumors, no matter what milieu your campaign takes place in.

Urban Dictionary has some pretty disgusting suggestions for what "angel cake" is slang for. In this case, I think Brodie just means they don't look like angels.

It takes five-to-one odds to take Shark down, which is pretty good considering Shark should only be a 2nd-level fighter by this point.

Deathtraps involving tides are surprisingly rare to this point, but sharks are a dime-a-dozen. Now, defending yourself from a shark by kicking it, I don't think I've ever seen that before or since...

 ...so it's disappointing that the shark is ultimately dispatched with a cliched knife.

Non-superheroes being able to wreck rope bindings is possible in 2nd edition Hideouts & Hoodlums, but conditions are far from ideal for it by the time Brodie succeeds. I would give him increasing penalties each turn as the tide rises, until he finally got a lucky roll.

Does Shark not own dry clothes to change into?

 Moving on to Saber, the future hero of 1998! Here, America is attacked by an air force. And what an air force! Can you imagine how tough a plane would have to be to fly straight through a skyscraper without being damaged, or even knocked off its flight path?

So, when did Saber start investigating the ranks of the Army and Intelligence Department? Just this morning? They must not be very large departments in 1998.

 Okay, I've got some problems with this scene. If this traitor knew the planes were coming, why is he hanging around to watch? Is Saber only lucky to be standing that close to the traitor while using his Detect Thoughts power?

The coordinates given here don't point to anywhere specific.

Saber has invented a Helm of Thought Casting.

Complications in aerial combat usually occurs only between planes, but anti-aircraft guns can cause complications too. Losing a tail fin can force you to land.

Where was this American air force when the enemy air force was attacking? There seems to be no fighter planes present in either air force, only bombers. So whichever air force has the higher ground automatically wins.















I think that's enough of Saber for today. Let's peek in on the Kayo Kirby story. Lead-filled gloves cause more serious damage than normal boxing gloves, though really, punch someone enough with even normal boxing gloves on and you can do serious harm. I think we can say that lead-filled gloves do normal weapon damage instead of punching damage.

The thing that tickles me about this page, though, is that the would-be killer's name is Slam deMan. If I was ever to become a wrestler, I would go by the name Slam deMan.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Fight Comics #2 - pt. 2

I really expected Saber to be a one-shot, but he's back -- and wearing more than his underwear this time!

Yes, while other Heroes are gathering information and following leads to uncover spies, Saber just has to walk into a room and immediately senses them. I wonder if we need a Detect Spy power, and not just Detect Evil...

So often the term "freeze" is not literal when applied to paralysis, so it's somewhat novel to learn that the paralyzation raygun the Antarticans are using is actually a freeze ray.

Saber doesn't even have to fill out paperwork to requisition an electro-heat ray gun. He just asks for it and he gets it!

You can tell the filler strips by how they stretch out a story by enlarging the panels. There is little here that warrants a three-panel page -- though I do like the visual of the fore-mounted ray guns on the submarines, all firing in the reader's direction...

No one knew about climate change in 1940. Imagine, expecting there to be ice around Antarctica in the future!

Although called a ray gun, the "electro-heat" seems more like a protective feature of the submarine. Resistance to Cold?

Remarkably, the crews of these submarines are still alive, despite being underwater for who knows how long in paralyzed submarines.

Yes, it seems like a strategic victory, blowing up the munitions plants and air bases...but if the Antarcticans put those things within their city, and you blow up the city...war crimes? A far more satisfying story would have been Saber infiltrating the city and sabotaging the munitions plants and air bases from within.

What a drop in art quality poor Kayo Kirby endured this month! William Willis does us no favors on this sketchy, near background-less work. The story is surprisingly deep, with Kayo almost losing the will to live after his career tanks, but making a comeback after a new manager shows he believes in him.

I wonder what drug this is, that a little drop mixed in water can make a boxer this much. At the end of the story, when Kirby realizes what had happened and catches someone trying to drug his water again, he forces that man to drink it and that man drops on the spot. Powerful stuff!

This is Kinks Mason. A ketch is a two-masted sailboat.

Sargasso is a legitimate problem for sailing ships, but this seaweed seems intentionally grabbing the board. I can't decide, though, if I would stat Slimy Seaweed as a mobster, or treat it as an environmental hazard...

Seaweed Men seem like an unique spin on mermen. These creatures are half-plant, half-animal, with their heads in a literally vegetative state to varying degrees. They must be tough too -- three of them are able to overpower Kinks before Kinks can even draw that knife at his side!

Hmm...whirlpools acting as underwater solar panels? Underwater chlorophyll factories? Ah, comic book science...

Men can be transmuted into Seaweed Men, leaving me to wonder if any seaweed men evolved naturally, and if not, who created the first ones? We also see what a fully transformed seaweed man looks like. We might call the queen a Half-Seaweed Man and stat her at 3 Hit Dice, while a full Seaweed Man would maybe be 5 Hit Dice...?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Fight Comics #1 - pt. 3

I somehow skipped this page of Kayo Kirby last time, even though there's something rather interesting here. In the consummables subsection of the trophy section, there should be an entry for adrenalin, with the benefit being that it gives you 1-6 bonus hit points temporarily.

This is the unfortunately named Kinks Mason. Kinks is a test diver, wearing a new kind of diving helmet, when he gets caught in an apparently supernatural undertow that pulls him deep underwater (supernatural because, just panels earlier, he announced he was only two fathoms, or 12', deep).

Here we find it's pulled him into a lost world setting that's a bit unusual, being in an enormous air-filled grotto deep underwater. The barrier of sunken ships blocking the entrance serve as a nice transition between worlds.

A carnivoplant looks a lot like the creeper vines I introduced in first edition.  This is a large, maybe even a huge creeper vine and with 5 vines I would give it 1-3 attacks per turn.

The phosphomites are tougher to stat. They look like giant sea urchins, so they probably do sea urchin-y type stuff in battle. They appear to be helping Kinks, but maybe they are just a wandering encounter that turned up in the middle of combat and attacked a random party.

The goor are definitely non-humans, though I don't see any particular way to stat them except maybe as orc substitutes. It's interesting that the first of the Gor novels, Tarnsman of Gor, is 26 years away at this point.

By virtue of having rescued a princess (I guess) of the Procono people, Kinks is suddenly an admiral leading their navy. The navy rid on the back of giant "tauserus", which look vaguely like large Plesiosaurs, and are big enough to have tank turret-like structures mounted on their backs (though it's not clear how they keep from falling off...unless the tanks are somehow grafted to their skin...?). Anyway, that's a pretty powerful navy for a 1st-level fighter to be leading!

Note the map showing, roughly, the layout of this hidden realm.

Granted, Kinks did put himself at considerable risk in that scenario, so giving him the chance to leave with all the gold he can carry may seem like an okay reward. Gold was worth $34 per ounce in 1940, so if he left with 50 lbs, that would be over $27,000 -- way more than he needs to level up. So, it's really up to the Editor if he wants Kinks' player to have that much this soon...

This is Big Red McLane, and I love how all he has to do to get a job in 1940 is to put up his dukes. I think that's how we know Mr. Farlow is a plot hook character instead of a random character who would have rolled on the encounter reaction chart for this job interview. "Oh, no experience? (*rolls*) Don't call us, Mr. McLane, we'll call you."

Here I'm stuck wondering a couple of things. Is cutting down a tree so that it falls on someone an attack, or a trap? Does the lumberjack roll to hit (attack), or does Big Red roll a saving throw (trap)? And either way, how much damage should a tree falling on you do? If falling does 1-6 damage per 10', is it safe to assume that a 60' tall tree should do 6-36 points of damage?

Big Red is certainly a capable fighter. He appears to be making two attacks simultaneously each time, which is odd. In the first battle, when everyone is fighting unarmed, then Big Red is entitled to two attacks, but I don't think my rules let him split them between targets like that. And in the second battle, when people are using improvised weapons, that should slow the combat down to 1 attack per turn (oh...unless improvised weapons should not count against that -- I like this idea, because it allows barroom brawls with the occasional chairs and bottles to proceed at the same pace).

Note that Big Red can hit hard enough to knock his opponents prone. The punching rules don't account for that yet (unless these gangsters just happened to have 3 hit points or less), and it's something I'll have to work on (maybe for a future supplement, unless I accumulate enough material to need an Advanced Hideouts & Hoodlums Editor's Guide someday).

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Fight Comics #1 - pt. 2

Last time, we were about to meet the newest hero of futuristic 1997. It's this guy, Saber -- which is, admittedly, a pretty cool name for a Hero -- and you can tell he's a Hero because these U.S. government guys say so (U.S. government guys are all good guys in comic books) and because, well, he's almost naked. In addition to being athletic (high Dexterity score) and has a great mind (high Intelligence score), he has telepathy, which sounds a lot like psionics -- remember the 1st edition psionics system from Supplement III?

I would hand-wave the leaping over the desk thing; if he has enough Movement to get around the table so he could reach melee normally, I'm willing to accept the leap as flavor text.

Saber is pretty vicious -- I noted that the officials have to pry him off the spy or Saber might have beat him to death. No one offers to get him a shirt or pants.

750 MPH was considered near-impossibly fast circa 1940; this speed was not reached until 1947, and not publicly known about until 1953.

"Teloradio" seems like a common cliche of science fiction, combining the television with a telephone, or webcamming, as we call it today.

It will be interesting if we see exactly what the "destroray" does exactly. It sounds like something that would have came out of G.I. Joe...

"Deland" is a strange spelling for Clinton, who was of course the U.S. President in 1997. The actual Secretary of State was Madeleine Albright, so Fight Comics got that even more wrong.

It's curious how the Alaskan uniform looks so Russian, if Alaska is under U.S. control in this future. Maybe control was only recently wrested away.

One-man submarines are as old as 1776. The submarine sled is different in that it seems to be a submersible motorboat, something we still don't have in 2018.

Still no one has suggested that Saber put on a shirt yet.

Saber's sub sled crosses the 827 miles between Washington, D.C. and Bermuda in three hours -- meaning the sled can go 275 MPH, a water speed record that was not broken until 1964, but even now never maintained over three hours.

Rewards can come in all forms for a successful adventure. Here, Saber not only gets to be head of the Super-Intelligence Department, but they give him a shirt! (The first one would come with an XP reward; the second one...not so likely.)

This is Kayo Kirby, which looks like it's going to give us a combination of the crime fighter and sports genres. Note that Kirby manages to force morale saves on the thugs only by injuring them, not by knocking at least one of them out first.

Now, this page gives me a thought...what if coach was a Supporting Cast Member type, who gave Heroes advice while fighting, and it gave them a +1 bonus to hit? That would be pretty cool (though dangerous for the coach, bringing him along into hideouts!).

In my current campaign, there's a jail overcrowding problem that my players have had to deal with in creative ways, including this one -- just letting crooks go with a warning. Not every encounter needs to end with mobsters going to jail.

And this page made me think of something I've never considered for a game mechanic. What if Heroes needed supporting cast to be present in order to fight at maximum effectiveness? Could players who insist on their Heroes being lone wolves suffer a -1 penalty to certain rolls, like attacks and saving throws? I'll have to give it more thought.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)