Fantastic Comics #5 - pt. 5

Oh boy, it's Stardust...

These guys are called "crime wizards," but as cool as that name sounds for a mobstertype, their ambition of either controlling or destroying all the wealth in America makes them sound more like Republicans. 

We get two mad science devices on this page. One is a tornado generator that looks kind of like a tree for some reason, and the other is invisible vacuum tubes that descend out of the sky and suck people up, but that makes it look like they're just flying off into the sky.

I think that last panel is to be interpreted as a collage of events occurring at different times, rather than the tubes being able to stretch that far apart at the same time.

The top of the Empire State Building seems like an odd place to ask them to drop off the ransom. Were they going to use the invisible vacuum to suck up the money? 

Stardust uses the 4th level power Turn Gun on Bad Guy to reflect the death rays back. Or does it have to be a higher level version to account for the range and the multiple rays reflected? Yeah, probably 7th level. I'll call it Turn Death Rays.

Here Stardust uses a Control Weather spell (he would be statted as a Magic-User/Superhero, since his abilities are all over the place). Or...could it be Dispel Science? That would be an interesting power to develop. Whichever it is, it stuns a crowd of traced faces.

An interesting wrinkle here is that at least one of the criminal wizards actually is a magic-user! Since he only uses Enlarge Person on himself, he may only be 3rd level - which seems like a really light challenge for our 18+ level Stardust. Stardust counters with Reduce Person, and it makes sense that Stardust, being higher in level, would be able to reduce Wolf-Eye further than he could enlarge himself.

More interesting, I think, is the throwaway reference to a "magic gland" -- which seems like perfect comic book logic for how certain people are able to learn magic and others can't.

Lastly, Stardust is probably just using Teleport spells to get everyone back home.

Now here's Sub Saunders and we have two unusual rays here. The first is a Water Breathing ray, which could well be our first non-combat, non-disrupting electronics ray. The second is some kind of suction ray, which could be handled like high-level Telekinesis, but to pull down a full-sized submarine might mean it is equivalent to a Telekinesis spell cast by a 100th level caster. We can just keep the mechanics very specific - the ray only works on subs, or some other type of ship, and pulls them down x number of feet. It's okay to tie an item to a specific type of plot.

Now this is unusual - we have a new variant of mermen who are called amphibious men, but they appear to just be perfectly ordinary men except for their ability to breathe underwater (and their predilection for helmets -- ooo, could those be magical Helms of Underwater Action...?).

Hmm...so, on all those ships he sucked down to his ocean kingdom, not one had a map already on board? That seems mighty suspicious, and I wonder if Kelpa isn't just giving him an absurd story to see if he can get Sub to go along with it. 

I like the idea of a swordfish pit, as it's a welcome switch from the shark cliche.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Fantastic Comics #4 - pt. 5

This is the last page from Captain Kidd, and the gorilla turning out to be hot babe in a bathing suit in a gorilla costume is a twist worthy of Shyamalan. Use it to keep your players on their toes!

Professor Fiend is surprisingly relevant again, with an explanation for how "undead" skeletons might come about through chemistry instead of magic (using comic book logic, of course!).

Although -- spoiler -- this story doesn't end well for the skeleton, it does make a curiously effective origin story for an undead superhero.

And now we get to the second Fletcher Hanks feature in this issue, Stardust. The unnamed mad scientist, called only "A mad giant experimenter" here, is one of the first physically imposing supervillains, even if he has neither a name nor long pants.

No one has ever come close to reaching the center of the Earth; 7.5 miles down is the deepest anyone has ever drilled.

This is likely the first reference to Lake Michigan in all of comic books. There is no way a volcano could form under Lake Michigan; the geologic prerequisites just are not there. A tiny volcano, Hicks Dome, does exist at the southern end of Illinois, but it is a volcanic pipe powered by gas. Volcanoes do throw up lava bombs, like pictured here, but while lava bombs are dangerous if they land on someone, the real danger from volcanoes is the ash plume they send out. If this really happened, Chicago would be buried in it, lots of people and animals would suffocate, and the city would need evacuating. 

Hideouts & Hoodlums has a wrecking things game mechanic, a Wreck at Range power, and a Mass Wrecking power at higher levels. What Stardust seems to be using in panel 2 is an as-yet unwritten Mass Wrecking at Range power.

At high-levels, a superhero needs to be able to not just wreck things into fragments, but to destroy them utterly, like Stardust does in panel 3.

How does Stardust know where the chemicals that made the volcano came from? Not for the first time, Stardust seems to be using some advanced version of the Detect Evil power that functions more like divination magic.

I find it comical that Stardust would be known as a "crime-buster" instead of the most dangerously powerful being in the universe.

I'm intrigued by how anti-ray rockets would work. Do they somehow home in on energy, like a heat-seeking missile? And how do the rockets make him lose control of his raybelt? We've never seen Stardust rely on buttons or knobs on his belt before. Maybe it requires concentration.

Wall of Dust is an unusual spell with what I would consider a limited degree of usefulness. One, it might throw off missiles that are tracking you, like chaff. Two, it might trick your enemies into thinking you've been turned to dust. I would treat this as a 2nd level spell.

Lastly, Stardust uses Teleport through Focus to step out of the dust in the room.

The "boomerang ray" works exactly like the power Turn Gun on Bad Guy.

Wrecking a chemical plant, in this context, is just wrecking a generator, since they are inside the castle and not talking about wrecking an entire building.

Who are the interplanetary police? If only we'd learn more!

Here we see a hi-tech trophy item (mad science category) give Sub the Water Breathing ability, as per the spell.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Fantastic Comics #3 - pt. 4

As 2018 winds down, we find ourselves still in February 1940 and this month's Captain Kidd story. Here we see the need for a voodoo doll spell in Hideouts & Hoodlums (though Supplement III had introduced the voodoo doll as a magic item, a perhaps equally satisfying solution).

Here we have our first hideout that is all in one tree, and I dare say I've never seen a rope ladder quite like that before (the rope makes up only the rungs, connected to the inside of the tree).

When has Kidd seen black magic before? It seems a stretch that he so quickly identifies the glass as Negus' wand (even I missed that, treating it as a new magic item just yesterday).

Negus' last spell is Smoke Image, one of the new 3rd level spells that debuted in the 2nd edition basic book. It's not clear what his intent with it is other than to try and scare off Kidd, but that's not easy to do when Kidd's plane is packing bombs -- bombs are one of the big equalizers for the fighter class.

Again I find myself sharing Professor Fiend, a joke feature with sometimes valuable lessons learned. Here, I was amused by the notion that Fiend might accidentally fall into a mirror, but floored by the idea that he could escape by scratching off the quicksilver backing, so that it would no longer be a mirror. And then bursting out the back, which was made of a separate material, was thinking outside the box, if you will, as well.

And now we get to Stardust, where Stardust is -- no, that's not a VR headset, but a crime-detecting ray view plate. At a range of millions of miles, it can detect when large scale crimes are about to take place on Earth.

Everyone always thought Thanos was a Darkseid rip-off, but it turns out that his "there are too many people" schtick came from The Demon here.

Space is big. Just the Moon is over 2 million miles away, so technically Stardust could be as close as the Moon.

"Undersea pressure-disturber" sounds like the kind of understated name a scientist would actually give a tidal wave generator. It's unclear if the undersea pressure-disturber also creates heat waves through vibration, or the Demon is describing two mad science inventions to his pal Max. 

If you can look away from Stardust callously crushing the Demon's chest with one hand, take note of the first two panels and Stardust's arrival. Is he the glowing energy star transformed into physical matter? Or is the glowing energy star a flavor text manifestation of his power, and what he's really done is Teleport through Focus, with his focus being the shadow on the wall? I'm asking because I seriously can't tell. Either way, it's a high-level power.

Anti-gravity will become a power, and reverse ray practically is already (Turn Gun on Bad Guy, but this would be a somewhat broader application than originally intended).

Sky Writing may need to become a power; it can't just be hand-waved as flavor text if the communication is important to the scenario. It would be 1st-level, though -- easily Stardust's simplest power to date.

And, lastly, we're going to jump into Sub Saunders. Sub's enemy, King Poseida, is using a hydro-vision like a television. A hydro-vision, I'm guessing, projects onto a wall of water?

Those are some crazy-looking mermen. Are those tentacles hanging from their chins?

That's one big giant octopus! Maybe 9 HD?

(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.)

Fantastic Comics #1 - pt. 2

When you need to stock a laboratory, you don't need to put too much thought into it; just put little items you know -- like light bulbs and switches -- and make them even bigger.

There is no use of a power implied here; Samson just steals a bomb and drops it off a cliff.  Conveniently, opposition troops are massing at the bottom of the cliff.  The entire army then loses their morale save at once, or so it seems. If this was a scenario, I would roll for separately by unit, so long as their sub-leaders were intact.

Samson has no qualms with killing, if you haven't figured that out already.

Oh boy -- Fletcher Hanks' Stardust!  Things aren't too crazy yet, but don't worry -- it's coming.

I'm not going to comment on the broadcaster's list of powers, as that's all hearsay. The weapons, though...

I have not given much thought to assigning game mechanics to diseases yet, but typhoid germs is a legitimately scary biological weapon that could be a good challenge for mid-level play.

Hot-X fusing liquid sounds like the "Adhesive X" that would figure so prominently in Marvel Comics later. Maybe melting/fusing liquids should have a wrecking things chance.

Atom-smashers are pretty dangerous, but not normally too portable. You never know in comic books, though.

Shredding guns is an oddity. Could that be like a needlegun, before there were needleguns?

Expanding bullets would be...exploding bullets? Or do they really just get bigger? I do tend to overthink things, but I suspect that would widen the surface area of the bullet and give it less penetration power.

This is also the first of many comic books to come where the President of the United States is targeted for assassination.

Stardust finally appears -- but is he superhero or magic-user? First he uses some kind of mass-weakening power/spell -- or is it Hold Person?  And then he teleports into the room, flies out, and turns invisible for no really good reason. There's power versions of most of those abilities, but as used here they look more like the magic-user spells.

Now, this is where Stardust starts to get really crazy. If this was a power, Anti-Gravity Ray would be able to affect up to 20 objects and alter their course "at dazzling speed", like Mass Telekinesis with a speed boost.  If this is a power, it's got to be a 7th level power. If it's a spell, this could be duplicated with the 9th level spell Wish.

Okay, here we've got a "boomerang ray" that seems a lot like the Turn Gun on Bad Guy/Turn Missiles power, a "magnetic ray" and a "suspending ray" that...well, both could be duplicated with the Anti-Gravity Ray power.

This "secret ray" seems like Phantasmal Image could duplicate it. Mass Teleport -- able to transport eight G-Men all at once -- is much more powerful and has to be an 8th level spell.

So, to stat Stardust -- for just his first appearance -- he has to be a 16th level magic-user/16th level superhero. That's a LOT of brevet ranks!

This is The Golden Knight. Normally, you have to search to find things; in H&H, you can't just be near a secret door and get a chance to find it. So this was a freebie from the Editor.

This is really interesting -- our Golden Knight encounters what looks like a dragon -- but it's called a firebat. So, it must be dragon-shaped, but too small to be considered a true dragon. And, I assume, it can breathe fire, though we don't get to see it do that.  I'm thinking of statting this with 4 HD (half a green dragon's stats, plus breathes fire instead of poison gas). 

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)