Planet Comics #3 - pt. 2

We're back and still looking at the debut of Amazona the Mighty Woman. Looking at this bottom panel, I was initially bothered by the fact that I couldn't tell which mobsters had been taken down by Amazona and which by Blake. Then I realized, it not only didn't matter, but this, in a nutshell, is the heart of what makes Hideouts & Hoodlums special. It's a game where fighters and superheroes can fight side by side and both feel important in the combat.

Interestingly, one power Amazona conspicuously doesn't display here is Outrun Train, needing to hop a ride to keep up with the fleeing car. Or maybe female superheroes suffer some sort of movement penalty while wearing heels?

We're going to jump ahead to the next feature, Red Comet. I don't particularly care for Red Comet, and this installment certainly didn't change my mind. The King of the Giants of Jupiter looks about as dangerous as your dad when company comes over but he doesn't feel like getting dressed. Red Comet himself isn't much better, remembering to put on his mask and cape, but forgetting the rest of his clothes other than his matching underwear. It's like a nightmare a superhero would have that ends in everybody laughing at him.

Perhaps most frustrating about this page is Red Comet's size-changing power. If he shrinks before climbing on the giant's knee, does that mean that the giant isn't really that big? Or did Red Comet just shrink down a little?

Whoa - things just took a super dark turn! Bear in mind, Golo hasn't done anything at this point other than threaten to invade other planets. Not a soul has actually been hurt yet; his threat has been less harmful than the average Trump tweet. Yet, Red Comet has slaughtered a whole squadron -- at least 15 giants, given my count from the top panel -- just to teach Golo a lesson.

Red Comet is using the Imperviousness power in this last panel, the only power that would protect him from all rayguns.

And lastly we're going to look at Spurt Hammond today. For once, I can say I'm glad to do so! There's some unexpected history with H&H here...

Way back before Comic Book Plus and the Digital Comic Museum were things, scanned comic books were still hard to come by. Some people, like Steve Rogers, made their own websites for them. Some people posted them to the files sections of various Yahoo!Clubs. And some people posted them on this new thing called blogs. I had chanced upon this story on somebody's blog around the time I was writing the second issue of The Trophy Case...wow, way back in 2010! So I wrote up the robots from this issue as vampiric robots from Mercury.

That third panel is swiped from a famous painting...but I can't remember what it is.

I'm actually not sure where I got the "vampiric" part from; it is described as "invincible" and "super" here.

This is not the only nudity you're going to see in this story...

The only thing more intimidating than a giant must be a nude giant. Anticipating Return of the Jedi, the giant is killed by the portcullis. The portcullis does a lot of damage, but then, it stabs him five times in addition to the crushing damage. It would likely have done less harm to a man-sized foe.

Let me see if I get this straight -- Spurt has the drop on them with a ray gun, then sits down his raygun so he can go in punching instead?

It "ought to," Spurt? So you're willing to experiment on bad guys with their own mad science machines, just to see what happens? I would make any Hero save vs. plot before doing this, as it reeks of being no better than the bad guys...

Although I was very generous with Hit Dice when statting this robot, a single shot from a raygun finishes it off. How super and invincible was it supposed to be again?

Ten years later, and I've still never used a vampiric robot from Mercury in one of my games...

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Planet Comics #1 - pt. 2

Here's something you didn't know would happen! Early in the 21st century -- like maybe 2018 -- interplanetary travel will become so commonplace that a single family might take their cruiseship out for a joyride to Uranus.

Now this is where things get interesting. The boy is a lone survivor in a savage land...adopted by a saber-tooth tiger. Could this have been the inspiration for the Silver Age Ka-Zar?

Luckily, Jupiter is not a gas giant at all, but a very Earth-like environment except for the gravity.

Auro appears to be using the powers Raise Car (to uproot a tree) and Wall-Crawling (to climb that sheer mountain).

Auro appears to be using the power Multi-Attack here. I have no doubt anymore that he would be statted as an alien superhero (alien because this isn't his home world and he has strange powers here).

These natives are ape men in all but name, no doubt the only line this sci fi Tarzan clone won't cross.

This page interests me for two reasons. One, how did Martha fix her plane? In the page I didn't bother sharing, her plane was hit by a raygun and fell into Jupiter's atmosphere because of some unspecified complication the raygun caused. So what could she have fixed from the inside? And should pilots always have a chance to fix a complication when their vehicle takes damage? This actually came up in my home campaign last session; the mad scientist's autogyro was shot down with a machine gun, but I gave the scientist a skill check to get it back in the air.

And then the other thing is the weakness in this plan. The "pretend to be captured" plan is an old cliche, but how can the King of Neptune be dense enough to think he has ape men from Jupiter working for him?

The Red Comet is billed as a mystery man and, I am hoping, we will soon see evidence that he belongs to the mysteryman Hero class.

Spider-people "return", though they look a lot different than they did in the Basil Wolverton story in Amazing Mystery Funnies. Their webs are somehow so powerful that rayguns cannot blast through them.

Okay, The Red Comet is decidedly not a mysteryman; he's superhero all the way! Here he wrecks things on the steel nets and covers 50 miles in seconds. That second feat has to be the Race the Plane power, as there's no way size alone would give him the ability to move that fast. In fact, though he may well be using an "infra-atomic space adjuster" as a trophy item that lets him Enlarge like the magic-user spell, the enlargement would not be responsible for any of the things he pulls off here, and might just be flavor text.

That Red Comet is back down to normal size again suggests to me that Enlargement must have a duration. Or maybe it's a giant spider-man? I'm not sure at this point.

There is no result on the grappling table for "tied up like a pretzel," though I kind of wish there was now.

His shrinking ability seems much less impressive than his growing ability, as shrinking ability usually is. Diminution seems to only grant him a better chance of surprise, while Enlargement lets him...well, let's say squashing hundreds of spider-men takes a considerable number of combat turns, even buffed with both Multi-Attack and Flurry of Blows.

This page interests me for two reasons. One, Red Comet finds it easier to bust through 20' of solid rock (using his wrecking things ability, or maybe the power Dig) than it is to bust through 20' of spider-man web. The web gun, then, in addition to being a powerful entangling weapon, seems to also be able to generate walls equal to a Wall of Force spell.

The other thing is Red Comet's "Robin Hood"-ness, which I guess places him in the Chaotic Alignment category.

This is Captain Nelson Cole of the Solar Force, and this building is amazingly unharmed after rockets are shot out into space from the side of it.

150,000 miles from Earth is closer than the Moon. The enemy is really close!

Magnetic rayguns can sort of act like tractor beams, I guess.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)