Amazing Mystery Funnies #19 - pt. 2

We're back, looking at Basil Wolverton's Space Patrol. Or is that pronounced Spaaaaace Patrol!? Last time, I was talking about Mercurians and lamenting that there was nothing unique enough about them to warrant statting them, but here we learn that Mercurians have thick rubbery hides - enough to warrant an AC of 6, 2 Hit Dice, and maybe even a -1 to blunt damage attacks against them, I'm thinking.

Last time I speculated about how I'd stat the Mercurian Mole-Men, and suggested they should be faster than normal. But if they can't catch two men in heavy armor, then I'm going to actually downgrade them to a Move of 9, while keeping their sleight of hand skill. And maybe they need some kind of burrowing skill - not that we see them use it, but because they are mole men?

Dryaks are going into the Mobster Manual first chance I get. They're enormous; I'd guess that critter must be at least 7' in diameter and 50' long (including the tail)? And if an atomic needle pistol can't pierce its hide, we may be talking an AC of 1 or lower! It attacks by bite, which probably does significant damage (maybe 3-18 points?), and I'd be willing to assign it at least 10 Hit Dice based on its slight resemblance to a D&D remorhaz. 

Interestingly, the dryak is not immune to fire, which you'd think would be a prerequisite for living on Mercury, but that's not the worst plot hole here, as our two heroic law enforcement agents, instead of trying to bring the criminals to justice, decide to roast them in a volcanic eruption. Hey, less paperwork, right? 

I think the obvious explanation here is that this story is too big for its page count and corners had to be cut sharply at the end. A lot of golden age stories suffer this. For a Hideouts & Hoodlums campaign to emulate that, scenarios need to have strict time limits, instead of continuing on to the next session, with the Editor wrapping it up by the most expedient method possible before the session ends. With no consequences (other than maybe missing out on collecting more treasure and trophies...)! 

sigh. After Basil Wolverton art it's a little hard to look at The Inner Circle again. At least I get to show off my high school-level French skills. The clerk is saying "You have your permit now." The native boy says "with me!"

Angcok Island is a fictitious name, which is just as well since it sounds ridiculous, and this is when there are real islands off Madagascar with names like Big, Crab, Klang, Pisang, Pom Pom, and Wan Man. This is one of those situations where you can't win; if you used a real name, people would probably assume you're making it up anyway.

On this page we learn a trick for how to make a compass screw up. There's also an interesting twist with the woman in the party, as we learn here she is an unwilling accomplice. It also seems to give our bad guy no allies, making this a pretty easy scenario.

 

I like how the native, instead of shooting gibberish like "Ooga booga," speaks perfectly fluent French. "Go!" he shouts. 

I'm sure it was difficult to find photo references for the natives of the islands off of Madagascar back in 1940. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I found one in a minute-

-and as you can see the artist did get the details about half right, according to the natives of Borneo. 

I'm not going to bother with the rest of the story -- it takes a racist turn as the good guys side with the bad guy to kill a bunch of black people because, you know, it would have been too easy to just turn the bad guy over to them and solve everything without further violence.

So instead we'll just into the next feature, Fantasy Isle (formerly called Tippy Taylor after its star). Tippy is exploring a natural cave complex that may or may not be the entrance to Hades. 

Witches are shown to be pretty dumb and easily fooled here. Demonstrating no special abilities, I think we're going to just ignore this story in any future write-up of witches as a mobstertype. 

Nor should we be very impressed with that grim reaper character who is easily pushed off a bridge. I think I just found another example of fake undead! 

The fairy tale giant seems a genuine threat. I think I need to include a percentage chance of them being encountered a sleep, like D&D dragons.

There are times, I'll confess, when I just want to throw up my hands and quit. To truly emulate some of these comic book stories, every bad guy -- even if it's a giant -- needs to have no more than 3 hit points. Because just about everything goes down in one hit! 

Buck up, Scott. Look! A Potion of Invisibility that doesn't turn your clothes invisible. That's a trophy item we haven't seen before (but looks very familiar from the first live action Fantastic Four movie...).

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

 

 

Amazing Mystery Funnies #19 - pt. 1

Followers of Great Scott! Press are probably aware that I've been working with the Fantom of the Fair much more recently than the last time he came up on this blog. This is ahead of where I am in reprinting his stories and...whew, this one is probably going to need some serious reworking before I would use it. I was never a huge Paul Gustavson fan, but I like his stuff a lot more than whatever fill-in artist this is (I've seen on Comic Book Plus this might be Al Anders or Will Roland). 

I think it's interesting that the Fantom has left New York for Maine because, in my fiction pieces detailing some of his backstory, he came to New York (and the new world) through Newfoundland and spent some time there, and maybe this was him heading back that way. Also -- plug here for the next issue of Funny Picture Stories where that Newfoundland story will be published -- plug plug! 

This is convenient, but also really weird and creepy, that the Fantom was hanging out in this guy's house for no other reason than to eavesdrop on his conversation with himself. 

But how "near" does the Fantom need to be to hear that? There is no exact limit in the rules for distance, but a common sense ruling from any Editor should tell you he would need to be inside the house or just outside an open window from the house at the furthest. But is the Fantom using a spell, like Clairaudience? Or a magic crystal ball off-panel to scry? But that still brings us back to the question: why was the Fantom monitoring this man?

I like the carnival setting because it seems a natural progression from stories set at a fair. 

Just like it's hard to believe the Fantom just happened to hear that conversation, suspecting Professor Trepper was a near-impossible leap in logic without using some sort of magic spell. Divination? 
 

The narration of panel 5 is interesting. Is the narrator unsure if the Fantom was surprised or not, or is only talking from Agar's perspective? 

Trepper has called in some roustabouts to help him, but as soon as one of them goes down the rest all fail their morale save, which was probably a single roll for the whole group. 

We're going to jump off of that pedestrian story and gaze upon the works of Basil Wolverton. Ooooo.  Ahhhhh. Seriously, those panels 5 and 6 are gorgeous. I've got nothing game mechanic-y to say about this page, so just enjoy.

One of the standard tropes of bad science fiction is to take Earth resources, give them an extra adjective, and then try to pass them off as something exotic and alien. True, green diamonds would be something new on Earth and probably really valuable, but what practical value would they have worth interplanetary travel for...?

We now know Mercury stopped being volcanically active 3.5 billion years ago, but Wolverton was right about it having volcanoes!

We learn that atom-needle pistols are more powerful than flame guns.

Thermo armor -- trophy armor that makes the wearer immune to heat damage.

I wonder how much $1 billion will feel like in the future. Assuming inflation never ends, I'm guessing it's going to be worth more like millions today, and that makes interplanetary diamond mining even less plausible. 

But -- oooh! We get a new monster, the vulkite, which looks exactly like an alien wyvern.

Here we get an explanation for what atom-needle pistols can do -- the ammunition explodes (like little atomic bombs?) once they're inside you. That seems like it must do a lot of damage -- at least 4-24? 

We also learn that vulkites have really good Armor Class because of their "heat-hardened hide" -- so maybe 1 point better than a wyvern -- and they are probably immune to heat and fire too. 

It's weird how a wooden door is surviving just fine on Mercury...

Mercurians are sure cool-looking and quite villainous, but stat-wise I can't see any reason in the story to stat them as anything other than human. I mean, he might as well be human since he can't do anything special.

Now, Mercurian Mole-Men, on the other hand, are really sneaky and have "deft movements." I would probably give them a low AC, fast Movement rate, and a good chance to pick pockets or perform sleight of hand.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Amazing Mystery Funnies v. 2 #12 - pt. 2

We return to Space Patrol to find the space bandit (which is like a normal bandit, only encountered in space and with a spaceship instead of a horse) Kosterman has already failed a morale save despite not having even entered combat yet.

A shock gun seems an odd name for a weapon used to wreck spaceships, but perhaps the blue flame somehow delivers a violent shock that shakes ships apart. Here, the ship is only partially wrecked.

Right now, wrecking things is an all-or-nothing mechanic. One would have to revise it to three categories to include a "partially wrecked" column.

I think this is our first scenic view of Venus in all of comic books. We get a good sense of the flora and fauna. Of course, the only detail Basil gets right is that the air isn't breathable.

Venus got a write-up in Supplement III: Better Quality, where I tried to compromise between the factual Venus and the comic book Venus, while keeping to the side where it was inhabitable enough a place to go and have adventures. The comic book version I was working from was the Fawcett comics' version; next time I write a gazeteer for Venus, it will have to include a lot more details from Basil's vision of it.

The Venusian Spider-Men will definitely need to get statted for the upcoming Mobster Manual. They are only vaguely spider-shaped, with their legs being more like tentacles that they use to grapple tree branches and victims. They seem to travel only via brachiation.

We will have to wait and see what all Kosterman's flame gun can do; it could be statted as nothing other than an acetylene torch with some space-age flavor text added.

Here we see that spider-men prefer caves to jungle dwelling when it comes to lairs, that they strew bones around their lairs, that they eat humans (though I don't agree that makes them cannibals), and we see that they use simple stone age technology.

This is a page (likely a Sunday page) of Don Dixon. You have to read carefully to pick out which character is the merman because this merman looks just like an ordinary human, but simply can't handle the air pressure above water without a breathing helmet.

This is one of the more obscure strips by Harry Francis Campbell. I love his John Law, Scientective, and thought John's prototype, Dean Denton, still had a lot of potential. Which makes it sad to see Jon Linton is so goofy. Though, to be fair, most attempts to depict the future in comic books tend to have looked pretty goofy.

Here, we learn that, by 2009 AD, we're going to have intercontinental rocket planes that can go 1,000 MPH (which sounds really impressive, but was possible by 1956), hooded robes are going to be stylish, and televisions (which already existed in 1939) will be called "visigrams."

It seems like Jon has performed some kind of aviator stunt here, but I think by now we know what the answer to aviator stunts are in most comic books; by 2nd edition Hideouts & Hoodlums rules, they must be simply the use of a piloting skill (and a successful roll).

As for thermite shells, one could make a case that they ignore armor and cover when attacking (all targets are AC 9, though still subject to other modifiers like the Dexterity bonus of Mysterymen).

Tibet? Green mist? Someone was reading Bill Everett's Amazing Man...

The Wall of Green Mist is actually a Wall of Force spell (or the power equivalent).

Tracking mundane resources like rations should only matter when Heroes are trapped in the wilderness, or spending long periods of time in hideouts. In an urban environment where food is plentiful, players and Editors can skip over detailing the mundane tasks of every day life like stopping to eat and drink periodically.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Amazing Mystery Funnies v. 2 #12 - pt. 1

I have been surprisingly enjoying The Fantom of the Fair, so I was wondering what this feature would do once the World's Fair closed down at the end of the year. It turns out he wasn't so tied to that location after all, as he's already just packed up and gone off to Pennsylvania to fight crime!

Swinging out of nowhere to save a falling woman is pretty typical comic book fare, but on just the page before this, Jane was using that whip on her employees! Things aren't cut and dried here; should The Fantom be rescuing Jane, or her employees from her? It would be interesting if a Hideouts & Hoodlums Editor had been running this and intended for the player to do the later, but the player misunderstood the situation and did the former. Editors need to be flexible in what players can justify as good deeds, and award them with XP accordingly.

I'm tempted to say this is evidence of a new power called Unpassable. You would not be able to move past the Hero and the Hero could block an area 10' wide. It would probably be a 1st level power.

The Fantom probably gets called a tough guy because he's using the Get Tough power -- which makes sense; he can now transfer his extra damage into feet pushed, via the pushing rule for combat. He must also be buffed with Multi-Attack, since he's able to push multiple opponents at once.

I don't think we need a power for swinging. I do like that this combat takes place both horizontally and vertically. Multi-level encounter areas give the Editor and players that much room for creativity.

I've written before about using saves vs. plot to see through disguises, which would also apply to recognizing voices -- but the real reason I shared this page was so that I could rant about the changes made to the Fantom strip in this issue. Before, the Fantom did not appear to be masked -- his hair was visible in silhouette, and he was always somehow magically in silhouette no matter what the lighting, and with his blue costume and red cape...he could have been Superman. Now, he's very clearly not and is so much less interesting for it.

We've briefly seen Daredevil Barry Finn on this blog before, though he really seems more like a soap opera star than a daredevil. We first met Frogga back in issue #5 and he seemed more monstrous; here he's a comic sidekick character, despite being an artificially created merman.

Frogga fights a huge octopus (which, if we keep the large/huge/giant dynamics, we know falls halfway between the other two Hit Dice-wise).

Oil of Corrosion is a powerful consumable trophy that destroys everything it touches and does at least 1-6 points of damage to living targets.

Basil Wolverton's Space Patrol debuts here (Basil Wolverton's debut too!).  We see here how cleanly Basil lifts the tropes of the cowboy genre and transplants them in space, from the patrolling lawman and loyal sidekick, to bank robbing, to chasing bandits.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)