Fantastic Comics #5 - pt. 2

We're back for round 2 of Samson vs. Eelo! Although he doesn't look like your "traditional" merman, I'd already decided last time I would stat Eelo as a merman. So panel 1 is either proof that mermen have great swimming movement rate, or this is the first clue that Eelo is actually a supervillain buffed with the Race the Train power.

I've seen some interesting rayguns in golden age comic books, but an underseas gun is a new one. A heat ray shoots heat. What is this one shooting out? Underseas? Is it just a water pistol?

That is some significant wrecking going on there. A submarine weighs a couple of thousand tons, so we're talking battleship category. 

But a hero shouldn't have to do everything; eventually moping up the enemies gets to be rote, or antic-climactic. It's good, then, to have the "cavalry" come in and mop up the remainder, or the remaining sub in this case.
 

I like most of this page. Samson, stoically guarding the two reunited lovers...Eelo, almost heroically, pulling himself up for one more contest with Samson (Eelo must be a supervillain with a few more powers at his disposal, to think he has a chance here)...

And then Samson just hits him and kills him. Ugh. Death-Dealing Blow needs to be its own power. It would be more powerful than Super Punch because Super Punch just does a bunch of damage to knock out virtually any foe, whereas Death-Dealing Blow must make you save vs. plot or die. So, a level 5 power? Maybe level 6? At this point, Samson only should have enough XP to reach 2nd level, so he's either been gifted more brevet ranks, or he's had more all this time and was actually holding back.

Like with ultra-powerful magic-users in the comics, one could ask me, Scott, if superheroes are this powerful, then don't you need more power inflation in even the early levels for Hideouts & Hoodlums? Good question, random stranger, but two explanations for this: 1) the superhero class is based on the first year of Superman stories, before all this power inflation happens, and 2) there are certainly elements I don't want to emulate about the early comic books because I just don't like them. These include done-in-one-blow fights and grossly overpowered heroes.

"Mercury is getting closer to the Sun every year. Eventually it will be destroyed by the - ah, I'm just kiddin'. Mercury is in a stable orbit and is gonna outlast both of us, baby." Apparently Flip just likes to periodically test how gullible Adele is.

Now I'm being flip, but this science is so bad it actually makes me mad that anyone would write it in a book children would be reading. What if they repeated this nonsense in class?

You know...you'd think someone brilliant enough to invent a fourth-dimensional projector would figure out a way to put two separate seats into it. I suspect Flip just uses this as an excuse to get all hands-on with Adele.

I don't even know what I'm looking at with those aliens. Are they giant pigeon angels with halos? Are those beanie copters?

Darn, I was just getting excited about statting Mercurian pigeon angels, but those are just thought-wave helmets. 

Whoa, I thought the misogyny in this issue was just going to be subtle, but this just got way over the top. Not cool, giant pigeon angle impersonators! But what do we think about Flip now? Is he off the hook for sparing her feelings, or should he be honest and tell her that the aliens are women-bashing in front of her? 

A thought about the architecture: at first these look like Earth skyscrapers, but if the natives are birds...what if these "buildings" are actually solid perches for the natives to roost on top of?

Nice...looks like I'm getting something cool for the Mobster Manual after all out of this issue. Heidites are D&D basilisk-like monsters, but instead of having a petrifying gaze attack, they exude green slime from their skin! From a D&D context, this potentially makes them even more dangerous than basilisks. 

Heck, I'm so excited, I just added it into the manuscript now! *sigh* Now to fix all the layout of the book after it...

 

Jumping ahead to Golden Knight, we have a lot of people in chainmail here. Except the girl, of course, who is for some reason in a 20th century bathing suit instead of even a dress. The chainmail is AC 5, but it exists almost as flavor text -- if you hit the target, you can stab right through the chainmail as if isn't there.

I had commented recently on a Facebook post about monster tactics in D&D that the DM has to have some latitude for deciding how advantageous to make those tactics, that the Editor had to stop short of making them so advantageous that the players will switch to the same tactics.

Here, we see entangling with nets giving great advantage. The Golden Knight, despite having a sword in hand, can apparently not cut his way out, or stab through the nets. Now, if this is simply a failed saving throw, and the player knows it, maybe this won't become his next character's main tactic. But if nets work like this every time? Then he will, and he'll expect it to always work for him too, and should. 

Other than that, what bothers me most about this page? The spaghetti straps on The Golden Knight's tabard? The Gothic style of the castle in medieval times? The fact that the castle is brightly painted all over? Okay, it's actually all three.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.) 

Fantastic Comics #5 - pt. 1

That's one big Samson! And this is one nice opening page, establishing our hero, our villain, and the setting, as the scenario gets quickly rolling along.  

Zanbar is just a lazy substitute for Zanzibar, which is also an island in the Indian Ocean.

There was a time when I would have statted Eelo as a merman...but now we have fish men in the Mobster Manual.

But already, on page 2, the fictional geopolitical landscape gets a little confusing. Zanzibar was a British protectorate, so Malajaca is either the name of the British colony there, or maybe it's the name of a neighboring island and Marie is just vacationing on Zanbar/Zanzibar. 

The amphibian henchmen are likely the same race as Eelo -- but not necessarily! I could see an underwater hierarchy where Eelo is a merman, but he can boss around fish men. 

That Eelo thinks he can interbreed with surface humans further suggests to me he is a merman, since we already have precedent for Namor (admittedly from another company) being half-merman.

 

You'd think Eelo would be able to grapple at least one of those girls before they all escape through the window, but he might be waiting for his wedding night to touch them, and his henchmen are all out of range. 

So, islands don't just float on the surface of the water like that. In all but the cartooniest of Hideouts & Hoodlums campaigns, I would refrain from messing with geology like that.

Here's my second clue that the three girls are vacationing on an island not their own. If her father was on the same island, and the islands is that small, you wouldn't need a telegraph to reach him.

The surface area of Zanzibar is 2,654 sq. km, so that island cannot be Zanzibar after all.  

Eelo seems to be an overreactor. Girls jilt him? He sinks their island. To punish the girls...he puts them in a trap that looks like it could kill them? 

That is an amazingly accurate teleporter, able to sit Samson down in a specific boat in an entire ocean. How does the Brun know where the boat is? It's probably best not to question things like that...though it's always possible that the seismograph is so sensitive that it can sense where boats are displacing water?

I find it very interesting that Samson has a blanket around him in panels 2, 3, and 5. What happened? Like the Teleport spell, is there a chance of failure and Samson appeared in the water next to the ship? Did he ask for the blanket so the crew would not get jealous of his amazing physique? 

Ceylon is what Sri Lanka used to be known as, so it's especially interesting that we've had fictional or half-fictional country names so far, and yet here we get a real one.

There's really no reason why the underwater pressure should be sapping Samon's strength, but not the amphibians, and no weakness to water pressure ever comes up again, but this is the beauty of game mechanics with unpredictable, random results -- that when the unexpected happens because of bad dice rolls, you have to explain/rationalize it in-game.

I really like Alex Blum as an artist, but I like him best for his layout work on inspired pages like this one. Panel 1 reveals so much about the characters from their stances. Eelo's dramatic posing in panels 1 and 2 remind me of 1960s Marvel Comics. Samson looks incredible powerful in panels 6 and 7 as he tears the torture apparatus apart and then stands over its wreckage, but the highlight of the page is being dropped down a chute into the deathtrap, as the deathtrap is slowly closing. 

Also note this implies a multi-level hideout.

I don't normally spend this long on admiring the artwork, but look at how panel 1 here zooms out from panel 7 of the previous page. Look at how practically Steranko-esque that 2nd panel is! Look at how panel 5 only exists to show a change of scene, in an age when many comic book panels were background-less. Admire the detail-planning that went into establishing that Eelo's machine has to be started with a key before the levers work. Admire the dynamics of Eelo leaning back, to show us he is about to pull the lever, instead of showing us a moment earlier when he was simply grasping the lever. Observe how the waves of pressure are illustrated in panel 8. 

Game mechanics-wise, I'm not sure how to handle thrusting one's way against pressure, except maybe by Strength checks.

I really don't get how the pressure creates a pathway to the sub, or what that even means. 

I have been grappling with where the "Maljacan fleet" comes from, but I think I've finally figured it out - Maljaca is Malacca, a small (at that time) British protectorate on the Malay Peninsula. I don't know why we're back to fictionalized names again. Now this makes sense, as the British Empire did have a formidable navy that would give even Eelo pause.

Samson sure gained on the sub quickly. He is likely boosted here by the Race the Train power. But how does movement translate underwater? I've never published specific rules on this, I don't think. 

Swimming speed should be 1/3 land speed...though I would be willing to consider it if a player argued that the Race the powers do not consider terrain. 

Turning the torpedo around sounds like the 4th-level Turn Gun on Bad Guy power. I've previously established that Samson started with five brevet ranks, so this should come as no surprise.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)
 

 

Fantastic Comics #4 - pt. 2

Picking up where we left off with Samson...it's a good thing Samson didn't kill off Professor Brun last time, because Brun has invented the transporter! Seriously, this works just like a Star Trek transporter dissembling and reassembling molecular structures in different places. It gets Samson from somewhere in eastern Europe to Russia at the speed of teleportation.

Wrecking a factory is in the category of battleships, out of range for superheroes level 1-4, but pretty easy for one of Samson's brevet rank-boosted level.

Decomposing ray? It's an unfamiliar use of the word, but it's not technically incorrect, if the ray is breaking Samson into his component molecules. But, on the return trip, should that be a synthesizing ray putting him back together?

That is it for this month's Samson adventure. Now, this month's Flip Falcon might look, on the surface, as if "Orville Wells" (actually Don Rico) was tripping on acid, but what he'd actually done was steep himself in pulp fiction, while at the same time anticipating science fiction to come.

First up, we've got atomic weapons and ray guns that do damage, but not the catastrophic damage we know atomic weapons really do.

The three-armed aliens anticipate Larry Niven's three-armed aliens, but also the many three-armed races of Professor Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne. It's hard to say what their magno suits and ray guns do, except in the general sense of providing better Armor Class and damage respectively. It also appears the suits let them fly.


"Dictascopic" isn't a word; Don may have meant "diascopic."

I've written before of the enigmatic slave-giants. They have mainly observed things before, anticipating Marvel Comics' Watchers, but at the size of Marvel's Celestials. Why this one throws them miles away, and arranges for them to somehow land safely, will never be revealed.

"We're lost, Adele. I don't recognize this place," has got to be the most remarkably understatement ever while floating through outer space.

It's very rare for a scientist to get something wrong in the comics, but this illustrates there is always a chance of failure.

The path has a Rainbow Bridge vibe to it, and the future men with their weak bodies reminds me of the Kaldanes from Thuvia, Maid of Mars. Their bodies are vulnerable, being little more than skeletons held together with skin, but the mechanical hands attached to their chairs are very effective as long as they are attacked one-on-one.

Up to five future men are encountered on this page. Although I'm calling them "future men" because of a plot twist that hasn't revealed itself yet, the story calls them "terrible things," "insane men,"and "dreadful claw men." 

For being a million years in the future, you'd think these guys would have more advanced traps than a portcullis.

"Life vest" seems accurate; the claw men (that one's starting to grow on me) don't seem to have enough organs left inside them to keep them alive without their protective vests.

So these guys have a time machine, but never thought to use it themselves?

I like the artwork on that second panel.

This is from Golden Knight, though you wouldn't guess that from the top tier, which shows a girl wearing an extremely anachronistic dress.

The father's curse is an intriguing one, but if he's powerful enough for a curse like that...why doesn't he have the power to just go down the well? Curses like that are plot devices, not covered by spells that player-controlled magic-users can learn.

Apparently all you needed was a stout rope to get down the well...

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Fantastic Comics #4- pt. 1

Alex Blum's first work in comics were these early Samson stories, and they are pretty good stuff. It is believed that Will Eisner, Alex's boss, wrote these stories, but I suspect he had a hand in the layout of this story as well, as ingenious as some of it is. Follow along and decide for yourself!

First of all, check out the amazing detail work on that smashed robot! This is, perhaps, our best glimpse ever at how an artist in 1940 imagined the mechanical insides of a robot would look like.

Samson never actually wielded a flail in combat -- but wouldn't that have been cool too?

That's right -- Samson doesn't just wear a furry loincloth into combat, he wears only that while casually strolling around town too. I have a theory, though, that Samson's look is only meant to be symbolic; that he doesn't really appear like this in public, but is shown to us this way because this is how we see him, as the Hero.

Note the imaginative panel layout at the bottom, with the island superimposed over the map showing where it is. That is genius, and has Eisner's handiwork written all over it.

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Game mechanics-wise, Samson is buffed both with Raise Car and Different Physical Structure (to help him save vs. the deadly gas) on this page.

Narrators are usually prone to hyperbole, but this one was modest on page 1 when it said the robots were twice human size. On this page, the robot appears to be more like three times human size.  That makes them giant robots, and normally 15 Hit Dice. Even one is a tough encounter; bear that in mind as this story progresses.

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It's really hard to pin down a nationality for Rigo based on just the name, but we'll see shortly who "Rigo" really is...

"No man made weapon can harm my creation" could well be hyperbole, but we do see the robot is nigh-invulnerable, which means at least an Armor Class as low as 3.

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Dragor is who now? Oh wow, yeah, Dragor was the Hitler stand-in in Fantastic Comics #2! That's a cool little bit of continuity I almost missed!

I love this ingenious top panel!

Maximillian looks very Germanic to me, but Rigo is nearly a dead ringer for Stalin in that second panel. Since Samson has already bested Germany two issues ago, it makes sense he would tackle Russia this time around.

Don't miss the implications here -- Eisner and Blum just killed off Stalin.

We also see that giant robots can be voice-activated, and that they can be encountered in groups of up to -- 5,000??  5,000 15 HD robots? That's one messed up challenge level. I mean, maybe 3+ Heroes, all level 21+, could handle this, but I would never throw this against a single Hero of any level.

The first panel here needs to be seen as symbolic only; clearly that robot at the bottom is not so huge that it can literally reach over and crush a skyscraper in its hand as it walks past. The 2nd and 3rd panels, though, are probably meant to be literal, and are pretty grim and violent. These giant robots main attack forms are squeezing and stomping. I would not treat squeezing as a grappling attack, as there's clearly no way those women (or the natives we saw this happen to earlier) can reverse the hold and throw those robots on the ground.










If Rigo is Stalin and the robots come from Russia, then this gorge must be somewhere in the Ural Mountains? Samson is lucky to have found a place where he can strategically bottleneck the robots. I guess traffic was too heavy on the roads for the robot army?

Now, what is poison gas supposed to do to robots? Is Samson leaving this incredibly gullible old man in front of the robot army to get killed off, so he can't make any more deadly inventions?

Players should be rewarded for coming up with ways to use their wrecking things ability to do secondary damage. Here, it stops three robots. Only 4,997 more to go! The story doesn't tell us how Samson stops the rest, though I suspect they are programmed to try and go around rubble and simply keep falling off the cliff, one after the other.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Fantastic Comics #3 - pt. 1

We're back to Fox's Samson, and in this installment the raygun in that little plane can cancel the gravity on something weighing up to 160 tons. Compared to that, Samson breaking the lock off a door with his bare hand doesn't seem quite so impressive (a 1st level superhero could do that!).

Any of the defensive buffing powers could be in play here in panel 1.

I've written before about how darkness seems to be the best protection against superheroes, and for now I have no intention of introducing a power that would allow superheroes to see in the dark.

There is no game mechanic for superheroes accidentally wrecking things. More likely, though, the player chose to wreck the door, and then pretended it was an accident for his Hero.

Samson either uses a Leap power or he's an alien with natural leaping skills. How Jean gets on the ship if Samson doesn't leap with her is unclear.

Samson's booming voice has a peculiar effect, either producing a slew of positive encounter reactions all at once, or perhaps he's activated a power which does that (Commanding Voice? Mighty Shout?).   

Panel 4 gives the power Hold Breath a fairly specific duration. If time is measured in exploration turns, then this works out with the duration I gave the power already.

As for what he's using once he's underwater...it's clearly a reversed application of Raise Ocean Liner (or Push Ocean Liner, as it was called in 1st edition, but should be changed so all the Raise powers start the same).

Now, this is why I described the ray as gravity canceling instead of magnetic. And, apparently, it can only lock onto one object at a time, so as soon as it locks onto Jean, it can't affect the ship anymore (had Samson realized this, he could have floated up there in her stead and wrecked the plane, instead of holding the ship down.

In evidence is the power Race the Plane.

It's hard to imagine how that secret hangar remains secret...

Samson uses the power Wall Climbing, and then wrecking things to pry open the giant secret door. Steel walls are wrecked as if tanks, while doors are wrecked as the simplest category; I would compromise halfway and treat this as the robot category.

Samson seems to be using Imperviousness against the bullets, though catching bullets is usually a sign of using the Race the Bullet power.

I don't have much to point out about this page, except that Samson looks somewhat hilariously like a surfer in panel 2.

Having supporting cast around can be handy when you need someone to call the police for you.

Samson is clearly making his saving throw vs. science to counter the raygun's effects on him.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Fantastic Comics #2 - pt. 2

Here's the Raise Bridge power being demonstrated. Thanks Samson!

That is a strange-looking armored car. Armored cars have been a trophy item since Book II: Mobsters & Trophies. It's kind of odd that Dragor shows up just then, so close to where the fighting was, but it's awful handy for the plot.

This is Stardust's story, though he's not in it yet. This is a pretty major plot, with maybe the first Presidential kidnapping in a comic book. The fake bomber started out as a seaplane.

Weirdly, Japs come from Capania instead of Japan.

It's not clear what these black-light bombs are, since they appear to be releasing smokescreens instead of darkness.

Stardust uses Teleport without, apparently, even being anywhere near the scene (though maybe he is, but just invisible. Who knows with Stardust!).

The bad guy's name is actually Rip-the-Blood. Rip has a machine that somehow detects Stardust's approach because of his ...speed? So it's like a Radar gun for Stardust.

It's hard to figure out how this windtrap works, exactly. The whirlwind effect seems like it would hold someone there, like a Hold Person effect.

The high-power fusing ray uses the wrecking things mechanic.

The boomerang ray is the 4th level power Turn Gun on Bad Guy.

We don't really get to see what the blood-drying needle bombs do, but they do make people "helpless."

Then we get a Fly power, or maybe a spell, coupled with the spell Invisibility (it's definitely not the power Invisibly Fast, as Rip is still visible).

I would allow the munitions factories to be wrecked as battleships. We don't know if Stardust crashes into them or wrecks them at range, though Rip's ignorance seems to imply they were wrecked at range.

Mass Teleport, that can affect up to 10 people at once? And makes stops along the way? That's got to be a 9th level spell. I wonder, though, if maybe a lot of Stardust's tricks are illusions and he just likes messing with people before he throws them off cliffs?

It's interesting to me that, to emulate some golden age stories, Hideouts & Hoodlums has to be modified to be more like Dungeons & Dragons. Chainmail armor is considered trophy armor in H&H, but would be purchasable starting equipment for The Golden Knight.

Traveling is going to be much more challenging in The Golden Knight's time as well, which is what makes it especially odd that The Golden Knight seems to have landed in Cairo, to head cross-country towards Israel, whereas most of crusaders followed the Balkan route around the Mediterranean.

It's unclear how many knights Richard brought with him, but only four are ever pictured with him. That means the Saracen force they encounter is at least 50 men strong. Without magic support, that seems like suicidal odds, unless some of the Western knights are very high in level.

That the battle ended with the deaths of all the Western knights but Richard suggests fanatical morale on the part of his followers. There must have been quite a few morale saves before it was over.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)