Amazing Man Comics #9 - pt. 2

This is still King of the South Seas, and it's Junkins who crowns him! I've written before about improvised weapons sometimes doing only half a die of damage, but without any firm guidelines as to when. I'm afraid I still don't have firm guidelines, but a lot of it has to do with weight and how wieldy it is. In this case, that looks like a heavy kettle, easily thrown by its handle, so it gets a full die of damage, but a lighter kettle or one without  a handle would not make as effective a weapon.

I included brief rules on amnesia in 2nd edition, but really don't like the old trope of needing a second blow to the head to recover (Heroes would just hit each other right away) and opted for a random duration instead.

Jungle Battles is a bizarre little one-shot, and that's saying something because the comic book landscape circa 1935-1940 is littered with bizarreness. It starts with Jay jumping into the trees to save a person from this gorilla, then Jay feels sorry for it and helps the gorilla free itself from quicksand. Then, a stegosaurus just waltzes in and no one seems enormously surprised to see it, as if Africa was full of Jurassic-era dinosaurs.

In a rare instance of a dinosaur having lots of hit points (as they do in Hideouts & Hoodlums), the stegosaurus takes a bomb to the face, is stunned, then gets back up and shrugs off a rifle shot, and then only fails a morale check when more men come running.

Then the constrictor snake encounter just seems to come out of nowhere. I can't help but wonder if this was part of a larger story, but it was chopped down to fit three pages. Missing panels could have explained a lot more of this strange continuity.

The gorilla is recruited as supporting cast simply by being rescued (remember to make those recruitment checks, even if the players don't ask for them!).

Iron Skull's adventures now take place in 1970 instead of 1950. Retcon or time jump? Either way, it's the biggest of its kind yet in the early comic book medium. Since none of the supporting cast is the same, and Iron Skull is an android and would look the same anyway, this could well be 20 years after the previous issue.

Rocket planes -- or rather, jets -- are just months away from becoming reality in February 1940. Sound detectors had been around since the 1910s. So the technology level envisioned here for 1970 has barely changed at all.

Ray guns that kill motors are the oldest mad science trope in comics, so they don't need to come from 1970.

Dead Stick Landing was a stunt for aviators in 1st edition (and could be coming back in 2nd...).

Though Iron Skull is often depicted as a superhero, there are times when he is more like the fighter class. Here is a prime example, where he seems to be unable to wreck his way out of a net. Of course, Iron Skull might be pretending to be captured so he can get Ludwig to reveal his plan to him (which does happen, on the following pages we'll skip looking at).

By the way, it's extremely hard for one person to throw a net like that.

This is Magician from Mars -- the feature, not the creature shown here. What we're looking at is a new variety of elemental. Let's call it a fear elemental. It is summoned accidentally when a musician just happens to make the right sounds in sequence. It has a paralyzing gaze, grows larger the more people fear it (size based on crowd size). His size seems to max out at 120' tall.

"No Earthly substance seems to affect it" seems to suggest that it can only be harmed by magic weapons (generally always true about elementals anyway).

Jane's ability to match the elemental for size far exceeds what the spell Enlargement is usually capable of. We might need a higher level version (Super Enlargement?) that goes up to 120' tall (or taller? They look even taller than 120' in panel 4) and increases hit dice accordingly.

Before pointing out the impracticality of fighting in what Jane is wearing, keep in mind that the elemental is wearing a loose, baggy robe he could easily be tripping over.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Amazing Man Comics #9 - pt. 1

I don't know if 2019 is going to be an amazing year or not, but it's going to start amazing -- with Amazing Man!

It's been a while since we last checked in on Amazing Man (almost a whole year ago!), so you might need to pop back for a refresher course on how AM stole a German bomber and what fiendish plans he had for it. Geez, AM, even in wartime you're supposed to keep civilian casualties to a minimum!

As John Aman steers closer towards Chaotic Evil, two German pilots steer an intercept course. But only two? If John is as close to Berlin as he thinks, surely a whole squadron of ships would have scrambled to intercept him by now. Biplanes might seem antiquated, but Germany's air force did not see advancements in fighter plane design until 1941.

Now, John likely has no more than 30 hit points max, so there was little chance of him walking away from that crash. The fall itself, though, can't have done worse than knock him unconscious. The greater threat is the fire damage from the burning wreckage, as any additional harm once unconscious means death. Really, John would have been better off bailing out of the plane and landing separately (game mechanics-wise).

This may be the first and last time we read of John being Asian instead of Caucasian. He's certainly drawn as if Caucasian.

Surprise! John was only stunned and recovers, but with just 1-6 hp he is quickly brought back down again. Interestingly, it is not weight of numbers that takes him down, but the last one to hit him (the first two do not fare well in combat with John).

It's unclear if the Great Question can really will someone to recuperate faster over a distance of hundreds of miles, or if he's just making that up to get John out of bed. His TV does appear to have allowed him to watch John's fight, but this "crystal ball" mentality associated with television was so hard for people to break away from that we still saw it in the 1960s with Star Trek.

When I added weaknesses to Heroes in 2nd edition, I made them race-based because that worked, up until this point, in comic book history. We've previously seen Shock Gibson temporarily lose his powers in what seems like a freak accident (stepping on an electric eel, no less), but Amazing Man is the first human superhero (aside from Popeye) to sport a weakness that will consistently affect him.

It should come as no shock that hetrocoryn is not a real thing. Hence, Bill Everett could have AM encounter it virtually anywhere.

Also note that, instead of being cut off immediately to his powers, John only gradually weakens over a number of melee turns. What that means, game mechanics-wise, is less clear. Perhaps he loses access to one random prepared power per turn, and then wrecking things last once the others are gone.

AM is brought down this time with grappling.

Enough time has passed for his weakness to go away, but we don't know how much time.

Nazis are not normally shown to be conscientious about who they shoot, which is refreshingly nice.

Amazingly, this issue was on newstands around the same time as Germany and the Soviet Union entered into the German–Soviet Commercial Agreement, but Everett couldn't have known about that specifically, months earlier, when he was creating this story.

And we'll wrap up today with just one page from the second feature in this issue, The King of the South Seas. The story isn't clear how Doris lost consciousness just from being in a river with fast current. Perhaps she bumped her head on a rock, though you know how women were always portrayed as chronic fainters back then.

It's unlikely that saving people from drowning is what King feels like he was missing his whole life.

Only thousands, King? Not even tens of thousands? Doris could convince him to go straight right now if she just explained inflation to him.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Amazing Man Comics #8 - pt. 2

This is the original Cat Man again. From this page, we get a rare "dead or alive" bounty for $35,000 (that's a lot of xp for Lawful Heroes!). We also see that plot hook characters can turn up coming from any direction.

Cat Man uses his cat to poison bad guys. Technically, it gets around the rule that Heroes cannot use poison, though since a cat has low Hit Dice and a corresponding low chance to hit a target, it seems an impractical method of delivery.

Speaking of impractical, this character takes the age-old cliche of crime-fighting in a dress and crossdresses it. It still seems impractical, but at least a dress this concealing can hold a bulletproof vest under it. Typical of comic books, people in bulletproof vests are shown to feel no pain at all when shot.

This is from the serial The King of the South Seas. First we see an unusual improvised missile weapon, and one that looks so small you wouldn't think throwing it against someone's head would knock them unconscious.

We see pirates and natives working together, which is a good combination of archetypes for variety.

Next we see a character bleeding out from a head wound who faints from it. This isn't how hit point loss works for Heroes and mobsters, but Editors have more leniency for bending the rules when it comes to plot-useful side characters.

I've no idea why the boat blows up.

The jungle island is pretty big; if the boat is being rowed at 6-7 MPH, and it takes them 30 minutes to reach their destination in the heart of the island, it means the island must be at least 6-7 miles in diameter. And this is good, because if you're going to use an island as a "sandbox" setting, you need it to be spacious enough for lots of travel.

If the coincidence of the "King" turning out to be the old man's son seems too great for your liking, bear in mind that we still don't know this is true; we only know the old man thinks it is true. Editors can always introduce false information through characters to throw the players off.

In the "future" setting of the 1950s, people use televisions to call each other. Carl Burgos is only one invention off here, as what he's posited turns out to be true later for computers.

Game mechanically, all Dr. Magno has done here is a disarming attack. If played that way, then the magnetism power is only flavor text. But it's possible to have performed this feat with a telekinesis, or a magnetic control power too (though the later would only duplicate telekinesis in this case).

There are some superhero buffing powers that would have shielded Iron Skull from that throwing knife, but it seems unlikely that he would have them prepared for a trip to talk to the police commissioner, and cannot activate them at the same time as being surprised. So, either Iron Skull is not as surprised by the knife thrower as the panel would have you believe, or perhaps the Editor has hand-waived game mechanics for this scene, since the thrower only needed to send the message and was not here to kill him.

It's remarkable that Iron Skull fails to sneak into the second floor window, so he changes tactics dramatically and noisily crashes into the basement. He's definitely buffed himself defensively so he takes no damage from the fall, and uses wrecking things while falling to go through the door.

Of course, this just plays right into Dr. Magno's hands, as his electromagnets happen to be housed right in the basement. I wonder what effect they would have had on Iron Skull if he was still up on the second floor. In the basement, the effect is essentially a Hold Person spell.

This museum keeps $50 million in jewels on display. A Hideouts & Hoodlums player playing the numbers would wait to thwart Dr. Magno until after he's stolen the jewels and the museum has put up a reward -- even a 1% finders fee would be 500,000 XP (basically 1 free level), while Dr. Magno himself is probably worth just a few hundred XP.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Amazing Man Comics #7 - pt. 2

Dinosaur Forest puts forward an intriguing premise -- what if dinosaurs were common enough still that you didn't need to find a lost world setting to find dinosaurs? Here, Jay and Ronald are already following dinosaur tracks in South America as if that was the most natural thing in the world.

The cliche of the whirpool is to see them big enough to swallow a ship, but this is a small whirpool only large enough to unsettle a raft.

The crocodile is pretty unsettling too, but like all opponents in comic books it seems easily dispatched. And with just a knife, no less.

This page makes the knife fight even more extraordinary, as the crocodile is now a "great crocodile" -- which I'm guessing means larger than normal.

This is the second allosaurus in comics.

Or is it an allosaurus? Because that's clearly a triceratops, and the two species didn't live at the same time. But then, we're also imagining that it's normal for them to still be around in 1939, so...

This is from a story called "The King of the South Seas." It posits that a pearl diving company could make $25,000 a month collecting pearls.

The manservant is a pretty awful stereotype, but the lookout is a strong ethnic character. Lookouts will turn up as a mobster-type in H&H later, though it's cut from the 2nd edition basic book for now.  Maybe it needs to have some skill or ability about signalling others over long distances.

That looks like an autocannon/anti-aircraft gun/heavy machine gun on the deck of the pirate ship -- and, by my research, there seems to have been little difference between those three circa 1939. I mention it because anti-aircraft gun is getting an entry in the H&H 2nd ed. basic book.

Three stories in, we not only get an origin story for Iron Skull, but we finally find out when his stories take place. This is a pretty bleak alternate future, where WWII dragged on at least until 1950, and it is now the "future" of 1960.

The Iron Skull sounds like a cyborg, but "android" works just as well and is the race he'd be in H&H. Other than him, color TV is the only other advanced technology so far...

In the future, you don't need to pick up a source from multiple directions to triangulate its source -- you just use a radio direction finder. They must be hard to come by, though, since Iron Skull has one but the police force doesn't.

Iron Skull is a superhero, but he doesn't wreck his way in, even though he easily could. Going for stealth, he uses a window like a mysteryman.

I need to give at least one of the robot types in H&H a self-destruct option.

It only takes Iron Skull minutes to recover, though it isn't clear if he was unconscious or just stunned somehow.

Giants being create-able through mad science needs to be reflected in their mobster stat entry.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)