Thrilling Comics #3 - pt. 6

It's hard to believe there is so much we need to go over from this one issue, but here we are, squeezing out a few more pages for a 6th post!

We're still on the Rio Kid. I like this one story detail, where Keller has been trying to legally acquire that land all this time, but when he faces a last minute inconvenience his true nature is revealed and he tries to bully his way past it.

I can't be certain, as I've seen that trick shot stunt in a lot of cowboy stories, but this might be the first time I've seen a pen shot out of someone's hand. Considering that the Rio Kid is maybe five feet away from Keller, at most, and could simpy grab the pen away, makes me think Rio is just showing off. 

Panel 6 is confusing, as Rio appears to be gunning down Keller, but it is just someone else wearing the same shirt as Keller, because Keller shows up again in panel 7. It also looks like Rio is shooting the bad guys in the back as they're fleeing, but it's really just that one guy who has his gun in his hand. Rio "generously" allows the others to escape because they are unarmed. 

Panel 7 has several examples of hard cover. 

I had to look up "cayuse." According to Wikipedia, "Cayuse is an archaic term used in the American West, originally referring to a small landrace horse, often noted for unruly temperament. The name came from the horses of the Cayuse people of the Pacific Northwest."

If I was to do a cowboy-themed supplement someday -- which I've not ever fully ruled out -- I wonder if tough cowhands would need to be statted. They definitely are weaker than deputies.

Panel 6 confuses me. Does Kid Rio have some past with Keller we don't know about? Because it seems like Green has a score to settle with Keller, not Rio.

Bear with me on this -- this final feature is ridiculously racist -- but it is actually the first appearance of a pegasus in a comic book, not counting the pegasus-unicorns in Action Comics #6.

I like the quest - to bring back milk for undernourished children everywhere - and it seems very appropriate for a high fantasy scenario with half-pint protagonists. 

I'm also willing to forgive the racism on this page.  Assuming this is all in Marco's imagination, including Snowball, and Marco's only exposure to black people is from comic books, then it is entirely possible that he would imagine a black person looks like this.

I can't resist commenting on this page. For one thing, Ice Cream Mountains is wonderfully evocative and would be a good addition to a Candyland-themed campaign setting.  While the narrator calls them the Ice Cream Mountains, Snowball calls them the Tutti-Frutti Mountains. My first thought was that Snowball is using the term as a euphemism for an expletive (like "rassum-frassum"), but I see no evidence that tutti-fruitti was ever used as an adjective with negative connotations before the 1970s.  Tutti-frutti, as an ice cream flavor, has been around since the 1860s.

I also had to look up if there had been a particularly bad blizzard in 1899 or if that was a made-up detail. Sure enough, it was real!

I am tempted to stat snowmen as a mobstertype...

5,000 miles is just a fraction of the distance to the Moon. Not that the snowman is wrong; since we are already in the Milky Way Galaxy, you are there whether you go 5,000 miles or 1 mile.

The idea of an alien species that simply chooses not to age is an interesting one, more so than the Libertarian fantasy of a utopia the goat-riding baby alien espouses. Also more interesting is that the alien is riding a goat at all, which makes me think of Thor and his goat-drawn chariot.

Final feature! Now how the robbers think thousands of dollars is "the world's richest haul." This is entirely appropriate for a non-serious scenario.

$1,000 is a very generous reward for the theft of thousands of dollars and quite the xp boost for Buddy Braver. We also learn that a box of candy costs 50 cents. 

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Thrilling Comics #3 - pt. 5

We're back, and so is The Lone Eagle! Here we see the Lone Eagle being overcome by four-to-one odds, which I find refreshing, even if it will not be the norm in this adventure from here. Perhaps he levels up quickly! 

Note that LE isn't placed in a deathtrap, but just left behind and they assume he's dead. Who has time to check for a pulse or watch for breathing? 

Now panel 6 is a big mystery, though you might not have realized that it was Where is this "no-man's-land"? You might assume, like I did, this is France - but this was published in February 1940 and Germany did not invade France until May! In February, the world knew Hitler had his eyes on Norway, but most of the fighting in Europe was taking place between Finland and Russia. This panel is like someone wasn't paying attention to current events and just, by coincidence, predicted the future!

I'm amused how Lone Eagle, clearly an Air Force guy, is able to commandeer a tank just by pointing at it. "This isn't Hertz, Lone Eagle!" that officer should be saying (fun fact: Hertz rent-a-car goes back to 1918!). 

I'm calling shenanigans on being inside an exploding tank and emerging unharmed, unless Lone Eagle is secretly a superhero buffed by the Invulnerability power. I think 8-80 points of damage, for being caught inside when a tank explodes, seems more than reasonable.

How did Lone Eagle catch up with Brent? If Brent was there some time ago, asking for the fastest route to German Intelligence, why is he still wandering around the battlefield? Or, if the soldiers didn't believe him and took him into custody - again, how is he now wandering around the battlefield? I feel like we missed at least three pages of Brent's daring escape from confinement.

Lastly, I'm again amused, this time by how Lone Eagle has a secret pocket in that jumpsuit. Come on, LE, the "secret" compartment is one of those huge, obvious cargo pants pockets above your knees, right?  

Great, thanks to this page we need to address the unpleasant subject of torture. Comic book heroes get tortured more often than I enjoy seeing. The goal is never to beat the hero unconscious, but to break his spirit and make him act unheroic. But how to handle that as a game mechanic? It might make sense to consider the whip damage subdual damage -- the hero can no longer resist if he reaches zero hp -- but LE just got over 100 lashes and I'm guessing he doesn't have over 100 hit points. I think how I would handle this is, every time the hero is reduced to zero hp, he has to make a save vs. plot or be broken by the torture. If the hero makes the save, hit points are effectively restored to full and the process can start again. 

But even if the hero is broken, what does that look like? Is the player forced to roleplay blubbering? A player could simply spare himself the headache of the game mechanics and chose this, as it's not really a consequence. But what if the hero lost something crucial - like experience points - if broken? There is precedent for energy draining in the game and, while it's purely supernatural, torture is a draining experience too...

One can't help but wonder what the warden was doing, taking a late night stroll without guards through the prison...but before that is the mystery of how LE got out of his cell. Did he use wrecking things to bust the door down?

Nope, nope, nope - unless that plane was planning to drop a person onto the roof of the train, there is no way LE should be able to leap up to the plane. I can no longer ignore that LE is clearly statted as a superhero, despite his lack of a proper costume and other genre tropes. 

That a superhero could have so much trouble with a single pilot is very much in keeping with how I pictured the superhero class balancing out in H&H; being a relatively weak fighter when not buffed with combat-related powers. 

But he's not just a superhero; it seems pretty clear that he's going to win this 6:1 dogfight (spoiler from next page: he defeats three and then escapes), which suggests to me that he's at least a 3rd level aviator, in addition to at least a 1st level superhero.

I do like the smart tactics of the Germans - trying to stop this unstoppable killing machine indirectly rather than continuing to approach the train with that field gun on it.

There were a lot of comic books published around this time that proved to be prophetic, not that it was hard - during WWII, if you imagined the worst scenario possible, that usually happened sooner or later. This comic predicts a German invasion of the Netherlands three months before it actually happened. Apparently the Dutch failed to believe Lone Eagle's warning. 

Again, this story predicts the bombing of London seven months before it happened. It predicts the bombing of Berlin by four months, though clearly the author is wrong that bombing Berlin first stops the bombing of London.

"Gee, good thing you told us not to miss, Lone Eagle! We were aiming low for a 50-50 success rate!"

A 50-50 success rate is, of course, the norm for 1st-level characters in H&H.

Yes, the British RAF did use some American planes, but most of them were British-made. The implications of this story are, of course, that the English can't save themselves withou the U.S.'s help (again, largely true), and that Americans would seem like superheroes on the battlefield with Europeans (this is just propaganda).

Moving on, we return to what I have long dubbed the Mythic West, a "demi-plane," if you will, that allows for "Wild West" action in the modern day. 

Nueces, Arizona, is not a real place, but is likely named after Nueces County, Texas. 

Panel 3 has some rather disturbing implications.

I had to look up the use of punchers here. From the Internet: "In those early days of cattle drives the cattle were not particularly eager to enter loading chutes or box cars, so the cowboys poked or punched the cattle with long poles to get them in to the cars. The term was first recorded in 1880 and soon became a synonym for all those who worked cattle."  I don't think "Fork-D punchers" has any special meaning, other than they work for the Fork-D ranch...

I had to look twice to verify this, but the guy in the fight at the bottom isn't the Rio Kid; he's just some guy who's about to become Supporting Cast, and is probably at least a 2nd-level cowboy, given how well he's doing in this fight.

Boy, this is one violent comic book! This page is a nice reminder, though, that not everyone in a given organization is going to be the same Alignment. Here we have a Lawful jailer having a disagreement with the Chaotic sheriff. Turn this around when you're stocking your hideouts - make sure there are the occasional Lawful hoodlums who may turn on their bosses and help the Heroes!

Shooting a rope, while riding on horseback, would normally require a natural 20 on an attack roll (at least while I'm running the game) - but this is why the cowboy class, when it resurfaces in 2nd edition someday, will still need to have stunts. 

Tombstone is, of course, a real place. It is likely a portal site that exists in both the real world and the Mythic West, so one could leave Tombstone heading into either.

(Scans courtesty of Digital Comic Museum.)

 

Thrilling Comics #2 - pt. 4

We're still looking at The Woman in Red as she investigates at a hospital, and talking Hideouts & Hoodlums game mechanics.

The one benefit I've seen so far to WiR dressing as a vigilante is, when she comes out of the costume, she's unrecognizable and doesn't have to make a disguise skill check.

Grabbing the canopy is a normal attack roll. The Editor has to wing the Armor Class based on how fast WiR was falling past it. Since it looks like she fell no more than 30', I'd say AC 7. Of course, the Editor does not have to put a canopy there, but a player can request one and, if the Editor is feeling half-generous, allow a save vs. plot for there to be a canopy between the window and the ground.

It's hard to make out that figure in panel 3, but it looks like the killer is wrapped up like a mummy. So...stat as fake undead?

Note the wisps of smoke around the police officers in panel 5, suggesting that they have been shooting at her, in the hallway of a hospital! This is so typical of the mysteryman genre, that police are ineffectual against crooks, but super-dangerous when they turn on the Hero.

The basement of the hospital is now more like a traditional hideout, with long, dark corridors and cell-like doors. A morgue contains lots of good, atmospheric dressing for a hideout.

A maniac might be a workable mobstertype. He seems at least as tough as a thug, but also has the ability to rip costumes off.

It's rare for radiation to be treated realistically in a comic book at any decade, so it's nice to see radium having an effect on someone. It must have also affected the morgue attendant's brain, since he doesn't apparently recognize a Geiger counter.

Geiger counters should be a mundane trophy item Heroes can collect.

Here's a question to ponder: is the rattlesnake a wandering encounter, the woman in trouble, or both together? Setting up wandering encounters as a rescue situation is a good way to let your players net additional XP!

"You spoke your piece" is just the kind of phrase you'd expect in a western.

There's some interesting slang on this page. A "waddy" was a cowboy, in this context, and not an Aboriginal war club.

This page makes me nuts. The top tier is all about confronting the killer, and then the store veers off into this sub-plot about capturing wild horses. The timing of it is terrible, but the idea of having sub-plots ready that your players can go do during less busy times in the game is a great idea.

Speaking of great ideas...setting off dynamite in the vicinity of the wild horses you want to capture alive? Probably not one of those great ideas...

This is from Tommy Dolan, Ace Detective. It's a confusing story that seems to be about an undercover detective pretending to have shot a cop in order to get in with a vamp who knows where treasure is buried, but not all of that is very clear up to this point; confusing things is that even the captions keep referring to Tommy as his alias, Terry.

Under dashboards is a good place to look for hidden weapons.

The "Lambeth Walk" is "an exaggerated rhythmic swagger, with plenty of arm swinging, copious hat-play, and elements of slapstick," according to the Londonist.com. 

There's some interesting chemistry between detective and vamp here, and lots of good pulpish dialogue, like "You hold all the cards," "I'm nothing but a stooge for a blonde," and "grab yourself a chunk of ceiling!" Perfect for an urban campaign with lots of noir to it.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)