New Adventure Comics #27

This issue starts off with the latest installment in the Captain Jim and the Texas Rangers serial. Captain Jim and Bob have been looking for the kids Rusty and Spike for an awful long time now. Part of this is due to how good Rusty and Spike are at hiding, which fits well with the half-pint race introduced in The Trophy Case v. 2 no. 4.  The issue also comes up of gun range, and verifies that rifles have longer ranges than pistols. This is true in the real world, of course, but it's good to know what is factual in comic books and doesn't need to be glossed over in the abstractness of Hideouts & Hoodlums' combat rules.

Detective Sergeant Carey of the Chinatown Squad is still in China, where the soldiers there are the good guys and Carey and his friends are helping them root out bandits. The bandit leader, Sin Fu, has a lair inside a dormant volcano. The soldiers know about the cave complex visibly accessible from outside and have found the caves are all dead ends; the true entrance to his lair is a secret door made to look like part of the rock slope, and opens by being pushed in by a heavy weight (or much force). Sadly, the strip ends abruptly and we have no sense of what the interior of the hideout is like, save that is has a holding cell for prisoners (which keeps the army from just blowing up the volcano).

Captain Desmo fights with lengths of chain, snapping them like whips, in his installment.  Even improvised weapons should do normal weapon damage.

Just like Zatara four posts ago, Nadir the Master of Magic uses a gun in this installment -- though, really, Nadir hasn't cast a spell in so long we can barely call him a Magic-User at this point. He might just be a Fighter with a magic item or two.

(Available to read at Comic Book Archives)

New Adventure Comics #20

I didn't realize when I covered the October 1937 stories that I had access to New Adventure Comics #20, so I'm covering it just a tad out of order...

This page of Captain Jim of the Texas Rangers doesn't give us much of a sense of scale for that "gigantic" rattlesnake, but this could be the first giant poisonous snake in comics that isn't from a "tall tale"-like story.

This probably won't ever become an official Hideouts & Hoodlums rule, but if you ever miss a cowboy with an attack roll that's only 1 number off -- it should shoot off his hat.

There's a lot of grappling attacks going on here on this page. In some game systems, the player of Ian Murray would have to pick a different, specific grappling move each turn, each with different game mechanics attached to it. In H&H, the Editor has more latitude and is expected to describe the fight based on the dice rolls.  This seems to be a particularly vicious fight, so both sides must be rolling very well to hit and for damage...

There might be some exceptions I would make to my above statement, like in the case of a flip/throw attack, since this attack is unusual in that it leaves the opponent prone instead of held.

It's difficult to have a realistic rate of fire for missile weapons -- even for comic book realism -- and have any kind of game balance that would make Heroes reasonably choose melee over missile weapons. Here Ian cracks off 2-3 shots per combat turn with a single-shot rifle. Two shots would be possible if he was 4th level or higher in H&H.

This issue's installment of Federal Men is dedicated to the demonstrating the value of having half-pints as your Supporting Cast Members. Heroes like Steve Carson can recruit half-pints via ham radio! Half-pints loyal to Heroes are ever-vigilant for signs of crimes, and may be willing to put themselves in danger flattening tires and tripping robbers.

A history/technology lesson here from Monastery of the Blue God for anyone who had trouble picturing what a wireless radio looked like in the 1930s. This is not as portable as an iphone...

A patient Hero is just two lucky rolls away from finding the average secret door -- one roll to find the door and the second roll to find the way to open it. The impatient Hero, though (like Nadir, Master of Magic) finds the door, and then wrecks his way through it with a pick axe (using the non-Superhero wrecking rules, unless a Superhero obviously).

If there was a contest for best feature in this issue, The Adventures of Steve Conrad just won it. Behold the glory of natives riding trained alligators.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Archives)