Zip Comics #3 - pt. 3

We're still looking at Nevada Jones, and there's a few interesting details here. One is the entrance to the hideout, only accessible from a narrow ledge. This would make for a challenging encounter area if the entrance was guarded.

The way the horse is saddled is an interesting and unusual clue that something is wrong in this scenario.

That's some Spider-Man-level agility Nevada Jones shows there -- he doesn't actually fall 100' into the saddle (the man and horse would both take 5-30 points of damage and Jones would have no testicles left), he appears to be doing something even more impossible. He falls 100' until he's next to the saddle, then grabs onto it and swings himself onto it.

The only way I would allow this to happen in Hideouts & Hoodlums is if he was using the mysteryman class, or the old cowboy class from 1st edition, had a lot of unused stunts (5+?), and offered to spend all of them on this stunt.

If you plan on introducing a non-Hero character earlier in the scenario so they can turn up later as the surprise villain, it probably is not a good idea to use an obvious name for them, like Doc Poser. 

 

We're going to jump into the next feature in progress, Kalthar the Giant Man, King of the Jungle. I've written before about Kalthar and how his height seems to be no more than flavor text explaining his powers, like in panel 4 when we learn Kalthar's flesh becomes like granite while he's bigger. So his density increases even faster than his size? Is that why he tops out at 15' tall, because if he grew larger he'd be too dense to move? It also tells us, from a game mechanics perspective, that he's activated his Nigh-Invulnerable Skin power.

White men and guns. Ugh! And what's up with how that gun's discharge is drawn in panel 8? It always looks like it's backfiring.

Taking weeks to recover from 1-6 points of damage doesn't track with how healing works in H&H, though it's possible Kalthar is just enjoying being nursed. 

Interestingly, Kate taught Kalthar the meaning of "golden" and "tablets," but failed to teach him when to use "I" vs. "me." 

Kybys is fictional, as you would expect from a lost city. 

The two lions are a wandering encounter, and it's interesting that only the male lion chooses to fight, as if random encounter reactions were rolled for each of them.

The good look we get at Kybys, with its domes and spires, begs the question - who built it, and when? It looks vaguely Islamic, and more medieval than prehistoric. A written language is more likely to have been composed later rather than earlier. Why gold tablets instead of paper or parchment, though? 

I might need a new power called Danger Sense for superheroes that stops them from being surprised -- though we don't get to see it in use here, as Kalthar is surprised before he can activate any new powers.

That stonework looks medieval to me, and the Romans used lots of domes. Could these be Roman ruins? 

"Science, ha ha! Gravity is hilarious!"

Panels 7 and 8 look pretty sexy -- until you think about how Kalthar lives in the jungle and probably has lice in that long hair of his. You better hope that's a grain you pulled out of his hair, Kate!

Game mechanics-wise, there is no reason why Kalthar should need the grain to activate his powers or wreck things, except that if he established that once then his Editor can demand consistency from him. 

Kalthar uses Improvised Missile Weapon to catch the dome and hurl it back, but either a very high level version of the power, or the tower was full of dynamite. Check out that explosion! 

We're going to end this post with one glance at the next story, War Eagles. I don't have much to say about this page except that I'm pleased that the activities of the two heroes have consequences, in this case, the Germans flying in larger numbers to defend their planes. I expect there to be a lot of this during the course of an H&H campaign, to the point where history itself could be changing. 

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Zip Comics #3 - pt. 2

It looked like Steel Sterling's third adventure was all wrapped up last time, but that was just a breather before giant mosquitos turn up! Giant mosquitoes have been in Hideouts & Hoodlums since 1st edition, and I'm glad to have an illustration for them now. 

I don't think stuffing the bad guy into a super-Howitzer should make it backfire in any game this side of Toon. We could say this speaks to Steel's willingness to murder his enemies but, given the lightness of tone in this story, I think we can chalk this up to the hero being aware of the trope that says the master villain always escapes his apparent death. 

I'm guessing the $10,000 reward for Steel Sterling is not for the murder of the Black Knight, anyway.

The Scarlet Avenger's plane isn't quite VTOL, but only a special trophy plane can take off with that short a runway.

It's really unusual for a master villain to break out the giant pterodactyls first thing, instead of throwing a few human hoodlums at the Hero first. 

I wonder what that ray does that is attracting the pterodactyls (probably pteranodons). Makes things smell like pteranodon food?

Panel 4 reminds me of my current D&D campaign, where the main villain can grant monsters magic resistance. Immunity to paralysis seems awfully specific. Making unexpected changes to monsters can definitely liven up an encounter with familiar mobstertypes.    

I was on board with this story up to the second panel of this page. Now, I would be fine with the mastermind being a woman, that is really different and unusual for a comic book - but dressed like a cocktail waitress? And her name is Texa?

So, Texa is a genius, right? What does she think his clothes are made out of that they would smoke that much? ...A smoking jacket? 

I like the concept of a capsule parachute, and really it's not that much more fantastic than the Flash being able to store his costume compressed in a ring. 

I also like the concept of the Scarlet Avenger being able to outsmart Texa because he works with a team and she only works alone, but I'm put off by the execution. 

"Faster! Faster!" 

"But, boss, we haven't had a break all day. What about labor laws?"

"I said faster! How are you going to work feverishly and talk at the same time?"

The way Texa and her henchmen are dressed you'd think there was kinky stuff going on here...

"Prepare to shower them with the liquid gas."

"You mean...water?"

If the sleeping gas was turned into a liquid -- in order to speed delivery? -- then how does it put the soldiers indoors to sleep? Does the liquid quickly evaporate after it falls and retains all its properties in its gaseous state? Because that's kinda cool...

Speaking of science...wouldn't the magnets pull the zeppelin down, rather than pull tons of metal and stone up? 

Magneutralizing? There already is a word for this, diamagnetic. 

By coincidence, exploding bubbles was an example of a dungeon trap listed in the original Greyhawk supplement. I'm pretty sure this is a coincidence...

 

We'll leave off here (it's Thanksgiving and I have pie to go eat soon...) with one page of Nevada Jones. There's not much to discuss here, except that I did my duty and searched the Internet for about five seconds and couldn't find any sign of a real town called Rattleweed, which probably speaks well for the real West.

Also, although there are a lot of racist assumptions going on here, they occur so early in the story that we can surely expect a plot twist in the next few pages. We'll see...next time!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Zip Comics #2 - pt. 3

We're going to spend some more time on this issue even though, let's face it, it was really only worth reading for Steel Sterling.

We're still on Nevada Jones and...Dice is okay with serving a masked man in his saloon, but it's the "halfbreed" he has trouble with? And this is doubly weird because this is the only time in the story Little Joe is referred to as a half-breed. Is he really only half-Hispanic, or was the author so racist he assumed Hispanics were all half-breeds?

But perhaps the toughest question I have about this page is what an "alkali eater" is. I had to do some reading for this one and, apparently, "alkali" is a term for baking powder, and at least until the 1920s, people thought you should eat baking powder for an upset stomach. I'm so glad someone invented Tums!





I skipped a few pages about the fire and how it was used to cover up a double murder. The clue at the scene was a big piece of ripped fabric. Thank goodness the villain didn't bother changing his vest, despite it having a big and obviously incriminating tear in it.

Again, that's not my real issue with this page. The more troubling thing is that Little Joe murders the villain in cold blood, and only gets a scolding for it. Instead of standing trial he gets a free pass for being the Hero's supporting cast...but that's some messed up ethics there.

We're going to have to swallow hard on some racism for this story too. There's also a lot of almost-nudity on display here. But your takeaway for this page should be that elephants can make grappling attacks, as long as their opponent is also larger than man-sized.

Of all the pages on this post I have problems with, I think I have the most with this one. Kalthar wakes up and says Mano the Elephant "has been slain." Then he gets up and says, "I shall avenge you, Mano!" ...to Mano, "leader of the herd, and only survivor." So...Kalthar only thought Mano was slain? Is this Mano's ghost before him? If all the other elephants are dead, why is it only Mano Kalthar gets upset about? Were all the other elephants jerks and had it coming to them?

Speaking of jerks...Kalthar captures this one native working for the white raiders, questions him (on the previous page I skipped), and after pumping him for information carefully ties up to a tree branch so Kaa the Snake, or some other jungle critter, can come along and feast on him later.

I think the one saving grace of this story is the idea of the bad guys casually chucking dynamite around, which raises this from a low-level scenario to a challenging scenario for mid-level Heroes. At least until the Heroes get their hands on the dynamite.

This is very Hideouts & Hoodlums-like, with the superhero vulnerable until he's had a chance to activate a defensive buffing power (by swallowing certain grains, though that is likely just flavor text). To protect him from dynamite, the buffing power has to at least be Imperviousness, if not Invulnerability, meaning Kalthar is yet another superhero with brevet ranks boosting him past where a superhero should be, experience-wise, after just two appearances.

Hmm...I'm dubious that polo tactics would translate well to air warfare, but I'm not Mike Carr so I'll just let that go as being outside my area of expertise.

The most useful thing about this feature so far has been the captions that explain what planes we're seeing, but we only get this once in this issue, for the Nazi Messerschmitt Pursuit planes. Despite the Germans having the advantage of surprise, it looks like the British have superior numbers -- I count 12 to 9 - so this could be anyone's victory.

Perhaps most interesting on this particular page is a Hero giving advice to a non-Hero, and the non-Hero just choosing to completely ignore it. Sure, this is exactly what would happen in real life if some kid tried to tell his commanding officer what they should do, but it's very rare for comic books.

The casualties are surprisingly high in this story, with eight dead men on the good guy's side, and this has everyone on edge. The two Heroes aren't getting along and, even though they are quickly promoted to squadron commanders, their colonel tells them the news like it's a punishment.

It's also surprising when the boys try to turn down becoming squadron commanders, and it made me wonder what I would do in a H&H campaign if a player refused the level title associated with their next level ("But I don't want to be a commander!"). Do I hand-wave the level title away, or do they reject the new level and stay where they were? I did elude in the 2nd edition basic book that, at higher levels, there would be more than just meeting XP requirements that would need to be met to level...though I haven't actually worked those out yet.

Whoa...Tim went out with Tom's girlfriend, pretending to be Tom the whole time? That's pretty risque; I remember some direct-to-video movies in the 1990s that were like that...

(Scans courtesy of ComicBookPlus.)

Zip Comics #2 - pt. 2

When we left off on this story the other day, I was talking about how, game mechanically, Steel Sterling could get out of these chains without wrecking them. And yet, for some reason, he doesn't. He doesn't for a very long time, even allowing himself to be dropped out of the plane. It's a very odd sequence in an otherwise very enjoyable story. There is no reason Steel's magnetism-based powers wouldn't make escaping this very easy. I can almost believe that he is playing possum, thinking the Black Knight is taking him somewhere important to give more of his plot away. Then he can't escape during the villain's monologing because he blows his saves vs. plot and can't interrupt the monolog (this is officially in the Hideouts & Hoodlums rules!). A 3,000-foot drop would do 30d6 damage, which would still only render unconscious if this was not clearly a deathtrap, and that changes how damage works.

Magnetism is really just a label pasted over Steel's Superman-like powers; there's no reason I can think of why magnetism should make it easier to fall onto an iceberg, or how he's pushing two icebergs apart, unless there's a lot of iron content in that ice.

An iceberg can easily weigh 100,000 tons, so tipping one over is going to require a high-level Raise power buffing his strength. I'm still tinkering with a more uniform structure to the Raise powers, now leaning towards something like this:

Level 1 - 1 ton
Level 2 - 10 tons
Level 3 - 100 tons
Level 4 - 1,000 tons
Level 5 - 10,000 tons
Level 6 - 100,000 tons

It's rare when a henchman looks cooler than the main villain, but we have another example of that here. This supervillain, let's call him Liquid Fire after his weapon of choice, looks plenty intimidating! I'm not even sure what this stuff he's squirting is, as we're still two years away from Napalm being invented (I had no idea it was so early). The concept for Napalm has been around since antiquity, with Greek Fire, but I wonder if that was where Biro got the idea here, or if the concept for a modern version was floating around before Napalm...

Anyway, it's worth mentioning that any defensive powers that buff you from hit point loss do not protect you from other attack forms, like blinding attacks -- which is precisely why Steel has to dive in the water.

A yacht like that probably weighs about 35 tons, putting it in the level 3 Raise power category, or Raise Trolley Car. The description for Raise Trolley Car even mentions being able to shake out occupants.

The end of that story is confusing...how is Steel's job finished, if he just leaves Black Knight standing there with his anti-aircraft gun? Did he use Turn Gun on Bad Guy between panels? Or did Biro simply run out of panels to tell his story?

Speaking of stories, we're going to jump into the Scarlet Avenger's story in progress. SA, aka Jim Kendall, is kinda all over the place, stylistically. He keeps skulls around him to seem scary, then keeps electrical equipment around him to look nerdy. He uses "phono-vis" -- yet another television-radio trophy item -- to contact some of his operatives, but he also uses carrier pigeons to reach other ones.




For a mysteryman who should only be 1st level this far into his published career, SA sure has a lot of powerful trophy items at his disposal. Here he is, driving his rocket car, with a "super-solaric heat ray" apparently attached to his windshield (or maybe it pops up out of the hood, we really can't see it). The heat ray uses wrecking things, and can wreck at least up to the cars category.

It's usually the main villains who wear hooded robes, but this guy in panel 2 talks like he's just a lieutenant. This guy's no dummy, though, he bought a robe with pockets!

Yeah, that's not how a bullet-proof cloaks would work, unless it's got some mad science inertia dampening field around it. This is far from the first time armor has defied physics in a comic book, nor the first time bullets have.

I've never treated racketeers as a separate mobstertype,

and I probably still won't since I don't see them doing anything here ordinary hoodlums can't do.

The chief looks suspiciously like a KKK member who left something yellow in the white wash.

Hoodlums don't have a very good chance of carrying trophy items, but when they do it makes them much more dangerous. Note how the hoodlums divide their tactics; two are grappling, one is clubbing from behind, and the fourth is using the sleeping gas spray can.

I still don't like the Scarlet Avenger feature very much, but I have to say I like panels 6-8 here. The door in the extreme foreground gives a subtle sense of place, and the panel compositions on the next two are above average too.

At 1940, mustard gas was probably still the most deadly gas known to man -- unless this was a fictitious chemical agent.

One million volts sounds like a lot, but we can make Tasers that can discharge more than that these days. I don't think it's the electricity that lets SA bust through that glass.

A million volts could, I suppose, kill someone, but I think it's more likely to just knock them out.

That last panel makes me think the chief is hiding, but he passed gas and that's how SA is going to find him...

As your last resort you pull out your magnetic ray that can wreck through walls? That wasn't your first choice when you were put into the glass cage with mustard gas? There's something very comic book-y about that, though...enough that I feel like maybe Heroes should need to save vs. plot to use their most effective attack mode first.

How long can SA hold a million volt charge, when he keeps discharging it on people? And what about when he climbed in his car, wouldn't that ground his charge? The science here is a bit beyond me.

I get deja vu reading a lot of these Western stories, but none as much as this issue. Every facet of Nevada Jones' transformation into a Lone Ranger clone seems calculated for maximum rip-offidity.

All these Western tropes, despite their commonness, don't necessarily make much sense. If you're an outlaw trying to look less suspicious, it seems like a wearing a mask is the exact opposite direction you should take.

My favorite part of this page is the arrow pointing to the final panel, foreshadowing the arrow that strikes the dying man in the back.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Zip Comics #1 - pt. 2

I went into my last post on Zip Comics having already read and knowing that I liked its flagship character, Steel Sterling, but now we'll dive back in and look at some features I never read before.

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Mugsy is gag filler, and I don't always take the prices listed in gag filler seriously, but charging per pound for pet dogs sounds logical and a good rule of thumb for finding the price of animals in the future.

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This is our next serious character, a pulp-/serial-influenced Hero called the Scarlet Avenger. Steel Sterling was well-thought out, Scarlet Avenger not so much -- the opening caption explains how his face is paralyzed and he can't smile, and he smiles on panel 3.


SA is one of many inventors of paralyzing rayguns, as well as the webcam chat, by 1940.

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We don't know how many operatives SA has, but it's at least 12. That's more Supporting Cast Members than most Heroes can have, but this is why 2nd edition distinguished between SCM and hirelings/employees.

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I'll say this -- Sledge Hammer and Joe Dragon are pretty good villain names. That's even a pretty good villain throne -- oh, I'm sorry, that's Scarlet Avenger's chair!

I believe this is the first, but certainly not the last, bulletproof cape in comics. I'm not sure which is more unrealistic, that weaving steel into a cloth cape will deflect bullets, or that a cape with steel woven into it would billow like that.

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Regardless, we have our traditional options for how SA's gear works -- this is either a trophy item that can be taken off and shared or it's flavor text describing how SA's powers work (if he were statted as a superhero, though I'm hesitant to do so). It could even be flavor text just describing why the bullets didn't hit when the player made his save vs. missiles to dodge gunfire.

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And, because golden age comic books were seldom consistent, the player doesn't even need to use the same explanation next time it happens!

SA has a webcam and an electric car!  It's like he was born in 1980!

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The hypnosis machine seems fanciful in design but, again, could just be flavor text describing how SA uses his hypnotism skill. 

Now, here's where it starts getting tough to just explain away SA's abilities as flavor text. That magnetic ray duplicates the power Raise Car -- again, making SA seem very superhero-y.

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Man, SA is really brutal at murdering bad guys. He throws a car on top of them?

SA uses either the disguise skill or the Change Self power.

The paralysis raygun affects up to four targets at a time (slightly better than the Hold Person spell). This is most likely an actual trophy item, since we saw him inventing it during his downtime before the scenario began.

But then we go back to flavor text; game mechanically, I think SA is just searching for secret doors and saying he's using the magnetic ray to do it.


That's all the pages of Scarlet Avenger I'm sharing. It's weird; thematically, he seems so much like a mysteryman, but this story is practically begging me to stat him as a superhero (much like Centaur's Masked Marvel).

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This is Nevada Jones, Cattle Detective. It's exceedingly violent, with Nevada being shot and nearly killed, on another page his horse is shot and killed, and then later Nevada is knocked out. This time, it will take Nevada a whole week to recover from being reduced to zero hit points. Perhaps because of his injuries we can overlook him calling Irene an idiot, though he's verbally abusive to the villains too and later calls the Mexican bad guys "greasers."

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Here's an interesting twist; Kalthar is a "king of the jungle" character, but he's got magic grains that make him a superhero. Well, maybe they do...so far, they just make him taller, and that's not enough to be a superhero; he could still be statted as a fighter with the great height just being flavor text.

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So where does it take place? The Arabs would be concentrated in North Africa, but jungle adventures don't make a lot of sense in North Africa. Maybe we'll get more clues as we go...next time!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)