Rocket Comics #2 - pt. 1

I don't recall a thing about reviewing #1 of this series, which doesn't bode well as we begin issue #2...

We start with Rocket Riley and pals crash landing on a surprisingly solid and foliage-covered Saturn. We can't necessarily call this bad comic book science, though; the term "gas giant" didn't even exist until the 1950s. 

YES! Oh, sorry, I got excited because this new alien starts with a Z, so I don't have to quickly add it to the Mobster Manual Vol. 1, which is just a few pages away from being completed now.

We don't know anything about Zarno yet except that they must fly very quickly, or have a higher chance of surprise, for it to pounce on Griselda before Rocket can shoot at it.

Sadly, the Zarno is shot dead on the first try on the next page and we learn nothing else about it.

Now this is nice; the big globe with chairs in it is a sort of floating elevator that doesn't need a shaft. It's the kind of trapping that would be perfect for an ultra hi-tech hideout.

Not every villain is so considerate to tell you what you'll encounter in his dungeon before you go there. Oh, interesting, giant leeches and - WHOA! HARPY-VAMPIRES?? I've gotta see this...

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Huh, those do look like harpies. So they're harpies, and they have all the powers of a vampire? I've gotta put these in the Mobster Manual now. Sigh. More to do...

Oh come on! They're dead already? From an ice gun? Harpy-vampires must have some kind of special vulnerability to ice. 

Speaking of ice guns...it's powered by a detonator? Was the writer thinking of batteries, but couldn't remember the word?

Well, we lost the harpy-vampires already. Let's check in on the giant leeches and see if they're -- OH MY GOSH, the giant leeches are dead already too! How is he even killing them by hand? Are these some rare form of vertebrate leech and he's snapping their spines? Or is he squeezing them too hard, like a roll of Charmin's toilet paper?

In our next story, here's a pearl that's worth a fortune, when the average pearl is going to be worth $100. Statistically, the chance of its worth doubling that many times is highly unlikely.

Shadowy figures are a mobstertype since Supplement V. 

Lastly, this is a page from The Phantom Ranger. I'd previously added killer stallions to the Mobster Manual. I'll have to add a note about how lack of water and being driven crazy by heat can turn a horse into a killer stallion.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

 

Rocket Comics #1 - pt. 1

We made it to March 1940! At the same time, we're going into the future with Rocket Riley. I think I'm gonna get whiplash!

There's not going to be much Hideouts & Hoodlums content here today, more just frolicking in pure goofiness.

"How naive, Dad! Don't you know that the secret of exploding the atom will be made into a terrible weapon, not a tool for peace?"

Ah, how blissfully ignorant the next five years will be.

"I'm going to build a spaceship -- and mount it on my roof! I'm sure that won't harm the building at all!"

It seems crazy how gold is going to destabilize a nuclear reactor, but ignoring real world science, there is perhaps some logic to this. We know that mass can't travel at light speed, only energy. Three pages from here, we'll hear Rocket claim they are approaching the speed of light. What if the nuclear reactor isn't just powering the engines, but is transmuting the ship and its interior into energy? And the one element it can't transmute into energy is gold.

There's actually good science concealed on this page. Even the void of space isn't completely empty, and one of the biggest dangers of interstellar travel would be collisions with objects.

...Although, if they were being transmuted into energy for the trip, they would probably just bounce off the object. Not immediately fatal, but being thrown randomly off-course could be deadly in the long run.

There's a lot of aviation talk here that's surprisingly accurate; let's break it down. An aileron is a hinged flight control surface usually forming part of the trailing edge of each wing of a fixed-wing aircraft. Elevators are flight control surfaces, usually at the rear of an aircraft, which control the aircraft's pitch, and therefore the angle of attack and the lift of the wing. A heliometer is a refracting telescope with a split objective lens, used for finding the angular distance between two stars. An inclinometer, or clinometer, is an instrument used for measuring angles of slope (or tilt), elevation, or depression of an object with respect to gravity's direction. Laterals -- on a plane -- would be flaps on the wing that control lateral movement; lateral control on a spaceship would be something very different, like maybe mini-jets on the port and starboard sides. Ceiling, here, does not refer to maximum altitude, but to ceiling functions in mathematical formulae. 

Here we see the importance of commas; note that Prof. Sterling is not saying, "I must start the vacuum, retards, or we will crash!"

This is also where Rocket says they are approaching light speed, as I mentioned earlier.

That there are four moons means, if they are still in this solar system, they must have entered orbit around Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto. The surface clearly doesn't look like a gas giant -- though the dialog only says they entered orbit of a planet, not that they were landing on the planet; they could well be landing on a fifth moon.

Traveling to even Pluto at light speed would take less than five hours. They have clearly not left our solar system, because that would take over 4 years to reach the next closest star, Proxima Centauri, at that speed.

Now here's where things get really weird, as whatever world this is, is home to octopus men. They are encountered in groups of over 100 at a time.

Octopus men are fast on land, with a slightly faster move than normal humans (13-14?).

I'm not sure that's a sound tactic Rocket tried. By dodging, he makes two of the aliens crash into each. What is the other 100 doing, standing and watching behind them? I think Rocket really did fall, and the narrator is just covering for him.

Nope. Uh-uh. The wind resistance as they approach escape velocity would mean saving throws vs. science with a -11 penalty to keep from being blown off. Rocket should be taking 20d6 falling damage by the end of this page!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)