Speed Comics #7 - pt. 3

 We're back with Ted Parrish, the Man of 1000 Faces as he crosses over into a wizard duel in a Ditko-esque magical landscape...oh, what's that? Scarlo is jumping and not flying in panel 3? Panel 6 is just horribly drawn, with a big, long perspective line inked as it vanishes into a solid chimney and the rest of the roof behind him just vanishes because the artist got lazy? Well, that's disappointing.

Speaking of disappointing...as the Editor in a Hideouts & Hoodlums scenario, it behooves you to ensure that the players feel like their presence in the scenario made a positive impact; that they wouldn't have been better off just standing back and letting the police do their job. You know, like how Ted totally bungles capturing Scarlo alive here, when the two officers might have stopped him had Ted not got in the way. 

But there will be times when the dice rolls go so badly for the players that terrible results will happen, and then you need to have in-game consequences. You know, like how Ted must surely be wanted for manslaughter now.

Now we're going to jump all the way to the last page of Biff Bannon. Dick Briefer is going full-on Mad Magazine (only 11 years earlier) here with the frantic pace, zany humor, and exaggerated violence. That got me thinking about the H&H rules for modifying campaign mood to fit the style of comic book story you want to tell. If you wanted to run combat in zany mode, maybe every attack should push at double distance in addition to damage (instead of replacing damage), and you could hit as many targets as you want with the same attack so long as the method or results would be funny and inventive. 

I don't think this would work for campaign play, as there would soon be no suspense about whether the good guys win (it wouldn't be funny if the bad guys could hit as many people as they wanted), but it would be fun to try in a one-shot scenario.

And now I'm jumping full steam ahead into Lt. Jim Cannon and the mystery of the needlessly elaborate plot device. I mean, you can sink a ship with icebergs, or you can sink a ship with mines, but does putting the mines on the icebergs really do any extra good? If anything, it makes the mines easier to spot, which is what happens here.

Maybe I'm just so incredulous because Devilfish is such a non-threatening name for a villain. Anything-fish doesn't sound villainous. "You may call me...the Goldfish!"

That does look like a really long submarine. The longest submarine in WWII was Japan's I-400-class sub; at 400' long it held the record for two decades.

This is from Landor Maker of Monsters, and this installment is a weird, soap opera-y one that our Hero (and his girlfriend) doesn't barge into until the second to last page. What's interesting here is that Creeta is clearly an android, with steel wires controlling her body inside, and her weakness is the screw in her neck that ...well, I'm not sure how it kills her exactly, but turning it seems to do a lot of damage to her.

Bob Powell seems to be really rushing the art here too. He could do much better.

This is from Munson Paddock's Mars Mason. Mars is an interplanetary mailman because, you know, we're never going to have some kind of electronic delivery system in the future. Comic book science is as goofy as ever here, with that heat radiation wave that is somehow different than radio waves, but that's nothing compared to a ship from Jupiter leaving after a ship from Earth and moves fast enough to intercept it before it reaches Mars. I think we're going to have to accept that the Jupiter Men have extremely long range teleport technology. 

What really works here is the creative alien design work and, even more interestingly, the villain name Killraye. That is great and suddenly I want to use it (though I'd probably drop the e).   

This, this is one of the reasons why the AH&H Mobster Manual is still not done after all these years. I'll be reading "new" comics and it's the same old human bad guys, blah blah blah, and I'll be thinking I've seen everything new I'm going to see -- and then Mars Mason fights Jupiter Men. Now the Mobster Manual has to include these! This is marvelously inventive, with the spiky heads and strange growths in their faces (are those fangs? Short tentacles? Something else? Who knows!). Their bodies seem to be separated into two halves sort of shaped like wings, which would seem to make sense for a lifeform evolving on a gas giant (if the gravity wasn't so crushing), each side ending in five appendages like giant fingers. Each appendage ends in a tool, either a club or a hook, that I'm guessing are not natural (but you never know in comic book space).  

This first panel makes it look like their heads can detach. Maybe the heads are the only real part and the rest of the body is just something they wear? Crazy.

Almost as exciting is the multi-ray torture machine. Which ray will it be? Sounds like this item needs a random table, although apparently the differences are just flavor text and all of them eat out your vital organs. 

If you're feeling cheated because Mars has to get rescued, keep in mind he's only a mailman. 

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Speed Comics #6 - pt. 4

One last visit to this issue, and we'll resume where we were with Lt. Jim Cannon of the British Navy. This page will give you a good sense for how hard it is for a low-Hit Die mobster/low-level villain to hit a target. Jim isn't far off when he mocks Devilfish for not being able to hit the broad side of a barn.

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While this author was spot-on last time with the British using 15-inch guns, the Germans had already switched to metrics by then. These German "6-inch guns" were really 15 cm naval guns, and yes, the Germans were using those (the scale being to the ammunition, of course, not the gun itself!).

However, there seems to be significant artistic license going on here with the "torpedo cruiser." I've seen no pictures of torpedo cruisers that looked like small motorboats, nor have I seen any that launch from the bow of the boat yet.

Moving on, we're going to look at a super-creepy installment of Landor, Maker of Monsters. Voldemort's Dad here has created a new mobster-type, the cat man, in the most disturbing way possible. He's apparently shrunken a woman's body down to the size of a large cat, say 3' tall, traded her head for a real cat's head, and made it so that it would act in very un-cat-like ways, like listening to you when you tell it to do something.

So they just happened to be within sight of Landor's castle. Maybe not the safest place to take your niece for a picnic? And if they know this is Landor's castle, why do they leave it unguarded? Or why not buy it and raze it to the ground? Or convince the nearest municipality to annex the land and rezone it?

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Cat-people are good for fighting half-pints and small dogs, but pretty useless against full-grown men. I would be generous giving this poor thing 1-1 Hit Dice.

The hammer toss is an unusual grappling maneuver, but I'm not sure if we need to add it, as this could be replicated with the throw result. In game play, I would say Torrence's player asked if he could throw Landor into the generator and make it explode. The Editor then said, let's break this down mechanically; you can roll to grapple Landor, then you can roll to hit the generator with Landor, then you can make a wrecking things roll vs. the generator. Torrence's player then got some pretty good dice rolls!

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"If only we could be sure! If only...we could wait for the fire to die out and then check the ruins for his remains. Or watch the entrance and see if anyone comes out..."

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Moving on to Smoke Carter, we find some unusual clues to find at an arson scene, including blood, a counter cut away with an automatic inserted in the opening (like finding a trap), and a letter addressed to himself from the arsonist (not generally a good thing to be carrying when you're committing crimes, but it makes things really easy for your players!).

Guard dogs makes a lot of sense from a mobster's perspective, though it makes things tricky during game play -- do you discourage your players from beating up on dogs and make them outsmart them, or let the players play out the encounter anyway they want (spoiler: odds are 50/50 they will beat up the dogs)?

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Hey...where did Smoke get those steaks from? Are you telling me he routinely carries steaks around in his car for emergencies just like this?

And lastly, we're just going to peek in on Spike Marlin, with a more whimsical than normal adventure courtesy of George Tuska (whose figure work is as stiff as ever here).

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Spike pulls off a coupe most players of H&H would be envious of: a two-man press gang fails to capture him, so he beats them up, disguises them, and sells them back to their own boss -- netting him XP and $!

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Speed Comics #6 pt. 3

We're still looking at this month's Crash, Cork, and the Baron adventure and, as always, talking about comic book stories and how to emulate them using the game Hideouts & Hoodlums.  If you don't play H&H, you're still welcome to stick around and look at the pretty pictures.

Under most circumstances, and as we've talked about many times on this blog, H&H makes no distinction between subdual damage and lethal damage; the only time injuries kill is when the character is already unconscious or in a deathtrap. So the question here is, is Crash in a deathtrap?

No, the natives' intentions are to torture Crash, not kill him, so this cannot be a deathtrap. Indeed, rather than full damage, it appears that the natives are being careful to do less than full damage.




I hesitate to allow either side, players or Editor, to have such control over their damage that they can specify an exact number of points of damage they want to inflict, but misusing or under-utilizing a weapon should make it work like an improvised weapon, which do half weapon damage.

I really hate how this story ends. They threaten the chief, feed him a baloney story about how oil pipes leaking into their drinking water isn't bad for them, and then apparently get him addicted to cigarettes to force compliance. I just...ugh.

So let's move along and look at Ted Parrish, Man of 1,000 Faces.

Right off the bat, I'm wondering about that fall. Is Ted -- disguised here as Pedro -- really knocked unconscious by that, or just pretending? Ted is a 2nd level mysteryman by now, so it seems awfully humiliating to have a 10' fall knock him out. On one hand, maybe he's feigning unconsciousness, so no one can ask him any probing questions about where Pedro had got off to, but on the other hand, maybe the Editor wanted him unconscious so he couldn't do anything that would derail the story before the sub reaches Central America.

So, the next question I have is -- where is this? What Central American country was producing oil circa 1940? With some effort, I was able to find that Mexico started drilling for oil back in 1916, but I can't verify any other countries were drilling that early.

Even this page, which talks about a jungle, does not invalidate Mexico as a likely suspect. Though one normally thinks of Brazil both in terms of jungle and oil, Mexico has the smaller Lacandon Jungle within it.

And look, the ol' stick in the mouth trick!

Moving on, this is Dick Briefer doing Biff Bannon. For humor, the superhero-soldier turns out to have a fear of public speaking. But what does that mean, in terms of game mechanics? Is this evidence that Biff has a low Charisma score? Perhaps Biff's player really wants Miss Lee for his supporting cast, and is afraid of messing up the recruitment roll?

This first tier is rather remarkable. Firstly, it's a stirring mini-speech about the value of integrated public education to combat racism. I think that was Dick's genuine intention, as the second remarkable thing about this tier is panel 2, and the black boy who is drawn completely normal (or as normal as Briefer's highly stylized art allows). Remember, this is a time when even artists as progressive as Will Eisner were drawing black people in minstrel show style.

I'll spare you from the strange subplot that gets Biff put in a dress and wig. The important thing here is the sheer mass of improvised weapons half-pints can use, including things I never thought of, like B-B guns, firecrackers, blowguns, and inkwells. The inkwells come with a little something extra, the chance of producing a blinding attack, but I would say that's pretty unlikely; maybe if the inkwell hits on a natural 20.

This page is noteworthy because the mobster in panel 2 acknowledges that they live in the same world with Shock Gibson. So many characters lived in their own isolated universes before this, even in the same anthology title.

This is Lt. Jim Cannon of the British Navy. By "15-inch guns" it probably means the BL 15-inch Mk I naval gun. "It was the first British 15-inch (381 mm) gun design and the most widely used and longest lasting of any British designs, and arguably the most efficient heavy gun ever developed by the Royal Navy. It was deployed on capital ships from 1915 until 1959, and was a key Royal Navy gun in both World Wars," according to Wikipedia.

Leaving your big, protective ship, and putting yourself in harm's way in a shot-range plane or a torpedo launch seems like a terribly unsound tactic, and yet what else can a Hero do? Share XP with everyone on board the Hood? Not likely!

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)