Zip Comics #3 - pt. 2

It looked like Steel Sterling's third adventure was all wrapped up last time, but that was just a breather before giant mosquitos turn up! Giant mosquitoes have been in Hideouts & Hoodlums since 1st edition, and I'm glad to have an illustration for them now. 

I don't think stuffing the bad guy into a super-Howitzer should make it backfire in any game this side of Toon. We could say this speaks to Steel's willingness to murder his enemies but, given the lightness of tone in this story, I think we can chalk this up to the hero being aware of the trope that says the master villain always escapes his apparent death. 

I'm guessing the $10,000 reward for Steel Sterling is not for the murder of the Black Knight, anyway.

The Scarlet Avenger's plane isn't quite VTOL, but only a special trophy plane can take off with that short a runway.

It's really unusual for a master villain to break out the giant pterodactyls first thing, instead of throwing a few human hoodlums at the Hero first. 

I wonder what that ray does that is attracting the pterodactyls (probably pteranodons). Makes things smell like pteranodon food?

Panel 4 reminds me of my current D&D campaign, where the main villain can grant monsters magic resistance. Immunity to paralysis seems awfully specific. Making unexpected changes to monsters can definitely liven up an encounter with familiar mobstertypes.    

I was on board with this story up to the second panel of this page. Now, I would be fine with the mastermind being a woman, that is really different and unusual for a comic book - but dressed like a cocktail waitress? And her name is Texa?

So, Texa is a genius, right? What does she think his clothes are made out of that they would smoke that much? ...A smoking jacket? 

I like the concept of a capsule parachute, and really it's not that much more fantastic than the Flash being able to store his costume compressed in a ring. 

I also like the concept of the Scarlet Avenger being able to outsmart Texa because he works with a team and she only works alone, but I'm put off by the execution. 

"Faster! Faster!" 

"But, boss, we haven't had a break all day. What about labor laws?"

"I said faster! How are you going to work feverishly and talk at the same time?"

The way Texa and her henchmen are dressed you'd think there was kinky stuff going on here...

"Prepare to shower them with the liquid gas."

"You mean...water?"

If the sleeping gas was turned into a liquid -- in order to speed delivery? -- then how does it put the soldiers indoors to sleep? Does the liquid quickly evaporate after it falls and retains all its properties in its gaseous state? Because that's kinda cool...

Speaking of science...wouldn't the magnets pull the zeppelin down, rather than pull tons of metal and stone up? 

Magneutralizing? There already is a word for this, diamagnetic. 

By coincidence, exploding bubbles was an example of a dungeon trap listed in the original Greyhawk supplement. I'm pretty sure this is a coincidence...

 

We'll leave off here (it's Thanksgiving and I have pie to go eat soon...) with one page of Nevada Jones. There's not much to discuss here, except that I did my duty and searched the Internet for about five seconds and couldn't find any sign of a real town called Rattleweed, which probably speaks well for the real West.

Also, although there are a lot of racist assumptions going on here, they occur so early in the story that we can surely expect a plot twist in the next few pages. We'll see...next time!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Zip Comics #3 - pt. 1

Yay, it's Charles Biro's Steel Sterling! Panel 2 is packed with detail. Steel looks so cool in that suit. The way Steel amuses himself when he's bored is a trait we seldom see from action heroes, and the third identity was super-original at the time (we can call this the "Mike Murdock" mistake now, in hindsight).

"Notorious" is an odd term to use here. Steel isn't wanted by the law that I recall from issues 1 and 2, so I think what she means here is "famous" or "most talked about."  

Brazonia is Brazil, that's an easy one. Orio is a little trickier, since Brasília is the capital of Brazil. It's certainly unusual, from a RPG campaign perspective, to send your Heroes to another continent already on their third adventure, but there's certainly strong precedent for it, going back to Superman's trip to South America in his second story. Biro's Steel Sterling is very much intended to be his answer to Superman, with the invention of the twin used to solve the question of how the maskless superhero goes without being discovered, and Steel conquering South America around the same time in his career. 
 

I can't figure out what city "Colosso" might represent; it doesn't match any of the big city names in Brazil I know. 

Winged tanks should not be a thing, but golden age comic book writers really seemed to love them.

That is a long range for that magnetism power. It's impossible to say how far exactly, but those planes could be anywhere from 100-1,000 feet away already.

Foreign nations always seem to be turning their defense over to Americans; at least Steel used some powers to impress them first. 

Okay, sometimes Biro is moving too fast for his own good. Steel has been given 12 hours to stop Dr. Yar, so instead of looking for Yar, or questioning that pilot he captured (unless the plane crashed and the pilot died...?), he decides to keep up his second secret identity on a long boat trip. So long that it takes him 12 hours to get back to Orio? Or did Yar break his word and attack early (that does seem very villainous)?  

Here's a surprisingly tough call -- if Steel is wrecking the hatch on a tank, is he wrecking a door or a tank? When it's too tough to make a call, go in the middle; Steel is wrecking the hatch as if it was a robot.

Taking over the winged tank instead of wrecking it seems sound strategy. And you get a trophy out of it afterwards!

I'm not sure what tactical advantage the protective circle would have...but tank pilots can make mistakes and this was clearly a mistake, grouping up like that.

Steel survives the explosion thanks to the Invulnerability power. The fact that he's now worried about being hurt by fire proves that powers have limited durations, especially since Steel got his powers in the first place by diving into molten steel (we even saw a replay of it on page 1!).

Steel is going to regret wrapping himself in asbestos someday -- but nobody knew that in 1940. At the time, fashioning himself an asbestos suit out of the lining was quite ingenious. 

I'm a little apprehensive about allowing Heroes to catch missile weapons in mid-air, unless they are superheroes buffed with one of the Race the- powers, or perhaps some other related power -- I could see maybe Improvise Missile Weapon being rationalized, if Steel were catching it to then use as a missile weapon.

The range seems really impressive on those oil ball canons, but if Steel has seen the trajectory of enough of them, I could see letting him find the source with a successful Intelligence check.

Although the narration in the final panel says Steel is breaking into a building, it appears he is breaking through a fence outside the building. Steel walls wreck as tanks, but a steel fence, I might treat that as a truck instead.

Okay, I've had my fair share of quibbles with this story so far, but this page is gold. Henchmen with lightning guns! Steel showing a vulnerability to electricity (or at least thinking he is). Steel's smart tactics -- bringing down the roof to get at the villains out of range, and smashing through a wall to help surprise the main villain. Alligator men (anticipating the Monster Society of Evil?)! Although, between "Oogle gop!" and that suspicious looking seam between shirt and pants in panel 7, I have a sneaky suspicion these are just human hoodlums in costumes. 

Biro also anticipates something that at this time isn't yet true about Superman's stories: here the Black Knight is behind every plot, even in disguise, much like Luthor will later be in Superman stories.

Little details like how Steel recharges his powers from the static electric charge he gets from running his fingers through his hair help me really appreciate this feature. In H&H, you don't need to have a visual gimmick to activate your powers, but if you as a player decide to have one, it is up to you to play it consistent.

It looks like I was wrong about the alligator men being guys in costumes, unless those are amazingly good costumes. I would probably treat them as lizard men instead of statting alligator men separately. And yeah, I can definitely see 6 lizard men being able to take down one superhero with grappling attacks, particularly if the superhero has no good combat-related buffing powers left.

That the sound carrier looks like a giant megaphone is one of those comic touches that tells me Biro isn't taking this story too seriously, and neither should I.

The deathtrap is a good one, particularly for superheroes who can so easily wreck open doors...

 

But I'm skeptical about this solution. Does pushing a drill through a wall really not apply unusual pressure to the wall? In an instance like this, where I'm unsure if I should have a trap go off or not, I might allow the hero a save vs. science to answer the question for me.

Sterling's aim being perfect is worth noting because unbuffed superheroes don't get the bonuses to hit that fighters do. A lucky roll, or was he holding onto the Bulls-Eye power? 

I'm amused by how the colorist often doesn't know what to do with Biro's sometimes sketchy art style. When he doesn't draw lines on the sides of Steel's head in panel 1, suddenly he has no hair there anymore! And the colorist has no idea what to make of that guard. 

Things get really dark in panel 8 -- the Black Knight/Dr. Yar has apparently convinced Dora's father to concoct a chemical weapon, even after telling her father that he plans to use it on Dora. BK is either extremely convinced that he's broken the man's will, or isn't all that worried about whether whatever's in that cocktail will work or not. Perhaps it's just one last attempt to torture the old man before escaping.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

  

  

Zip Comics #2 - pt. 2

When we left off on this story the other day, I was talking about how, game mechanically, Steel Sterling could get out of these chains without wrecking them. And yet, for some reason, he doesn't. He doesn't for a very long time, even allowing himself to be dropped out of the plane. It's a very odd sequence in an otherwise very enjoyable story. There is no reason Steel's magnetism-based powers wouldn't make escaping this very easy. I can almost believe that he is playing possum, thinking the Black Knight is taking him somewhere important to give more of his plot away. Then he can't escape during the villain's monologing because he blows his saves vs. plot and can't interrupt the monolog (this is officially in the Hideouts & Hoodlums rules!). A 3,000-foot drop would do 30d6 damage, which would still only render unconscious if this was not clearly a deathtrap, and that changes how damage works.

Magnetism is really just a label pasted over Steel's Superman-like powers; there's no reason I can think of why magnetism should make it easier to fall onto an iceberg, or how he's pushing two icebergs apart, unless there's a lot of iron content in that ice.

An iceberg can easily weigh 100,000 tons, so tipping one over is going to require a high-level Raise power buffing his strength. I'm still tinkering with a more uniform structure to the Raise powers, now leaning towards something like this:

Level 1 - 1 ton
Level 2 - 10 tons
Level 3 - 100 tons
Level 4 - 1,000 tons
Level 5 - 10,000 tons
Level 6 - 100,000 tons

It's rare when a henchman looks cooler than the main villain, but we have another example of that here. This supervillain, let's call him Liquid Fire after his weapon of choice, looks plenty intimidating! I'm not even sure what this stuff he's squirting is, as we're still two years away from Napalm being invented (I had no idea it was so early). The concept for Napalm has been around since antiquity, with Greek Fire, but I wonder if that was where Biro got the idea here, or if the concept for a modern version was floating around before Napalm...

Anyway, it's worth mentioning that any defensive powers that buff you from hit point loss do not protect you from other attack forms, like blinding attacks -- which is precisely why Steel has to dive in the water.

A yacht like that probably weighs about 35 tons, putting it in the level 3 Raise power category, or Raise Trolley Car. The description for Raise Trolley Car even mentions being able to shake out occupants.

The end of that story is confusing...how is Steel's job finished, if he just leaves Black Knight standing there with his anti-aircraft gun? Did he use Turn Gun on Bad Guy between panels? Or did Biro simply run out of panels to tell his story?

Speaking of stories, we're going to jump into the Scarlet Avenger's story in progress. SA, aka Jim Kendall, is kinda all over the place, stylistically. He keeps skulls around him to seem scary, then keeps electrical equipment around him to look nerdy. He uses "phono-vis" -- yet another television-radio trophy item -- to contact some of his operatives, but he also uses carrier pigeons to reach other ones.




For a mysteryman who should only be 1st level this far into his published career, SA sure has a lot of powerful trophy items at his disposal. Here he is, driving his rocket car, with a "super-solaric heat ray" apparently attached to his windshield (or maybe it pops up out of the hood, we really can't see it). The heat ray uses wrecking things, and can wreck at least up to the cars category.

It's usually the main villains who wear hooded robes, but this guy in panel 2 talks like he's just a lieutenant. This guy's no dummy, though, he bought a robe with pockets!

Yeah, that's not how a bullet-proof cloaks would work, unless it's got some mad science inertia dampening field around it. This is far from the first time armor has defied physics in a comic book, nor the first time bullets have.

I've never treated racketeers as a separate mobstertype,

and I probably still won't since I don't see them doing anything here ordinary hoodlums can't do.

The chief looks suspiciously like a KKK member who left something yellow in the white wash.

Hoodlums don't have a very good chance of carrying trophy items, but when they do it makes them much more dangerous. Note how the hoodlums divide their tactics; two are grappling, one is clubbing from behind, and the fourth is using the sleeping gas spray can.

I still don't like the Scarlet Avenger feature very much, but I have to say I like panels 6-8 here. The door in the extreme foreground gives a subtle sense of place, and the panel compositions on the next two are above average too.

At 1940, mustard gas was probably still the most deadly gas known to man -- unless this was a fictitious chemical agent.

One million volts sounds like a lot, but we can make Tasers that can discharge more than that these days. I don't think it's the electricity that lets SA bust through that glass.

A million volts could, I suppose, kill someone, but I think it's more likely to just knock them out.

That last panel makes me think the chief is hiding, but he passed gas and that's how SA is going to find him...

As your last resort you pull out your magnetic ray that can wreck through walls? That wasn't your first choice when you were put into the glass cage with mustard gas? There's something very comic book-y about that, though...enough that I feel like maybe Heroes should need to save vs. plot to use their most effective attack mode first.

How long can SA hold a million volt charge, when he keeps discharging it on people? And what about when he climbed in his car, wouldn't that ground his charge? The science here is a bit beyond me.

I get deja vu reading a lot of these Western stories, but none as much as this issue. Every facet of Nevada Jones' transformation into a Lone Ranger clone seems calculated for maximum rip-offidity.

All these Western tropes, despite their commonness, don't necessarily make much sense. If you're an outlaw trying to look less suspicious, it seems like a wearing a mask is the exact opposite direction you should take.

My favorite part of this page is the arrow pointing to the final panel, foreshadowing the arrow that strikes the dying man in the back.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Zip Comics #2 - pt. 1

I'm pleased today to return to another of my favorite golden age heroes, Charles Biro's Steel Sterling. We're probably not going to skip a page of this story -- mostly because there's good content for Hideouts & Hoodlums-related discussion here, but also because it's a good adventure yarn.

And it starts fast! After a one-panel summary of Steel's origin (and a chance to see him naked), we launch straight into a prison break! But which prison? Can we find a specific prison by a river with housing nearby? It would seem a near-impossible task if I was looking at the whole country. However, in #1 I grabbed onto a tiny clue that Steel is based out of Texas. There is only one river, the Trinity River, that I can find in Texas that had jails near it. Of those four jails, are any of them near housing? Of them, Ellis County Jail looks closest to Riverside, Texas. That Riverside is 270 miles from Beeville, Texas, where I think Steel's first adventure took place, would only be an issue if Steel could not fly fast -- and we'll see that

happen very soon in this story.

We've seen Heroes pushing instead of doing damage before, but Steel pushing nine men at once is probably a first. It's certainly possible by the rules, if Steel is using the Flurry of Blows power, and choosing to make each hit a pushing attack. Normally, you would only be able to hit people in melee range with you, but for pushing, it makes sense that you could push people behind the people you're pushing.

There is zero game mechanic difference in H&H between slapping and punching, and Steel's punch would not have killed that guy.

Steel has Imperviousness activated for crossing the courtyard. Or is is Invulnerability? He may be needing that shortly...

Maybe I don't know cars well enough, but I cannot figure out what those things are on the side of the car in panel 1. Giant segmented worms? They're gone by panel 4, so...

Panels 2-3 would be tricky to replicate in H&H. The grenades wrecking the wall is easy enough, but determining where the debris goes is trickier. To be fair, I would position Steel on a map of the courtyard first, and then roll randomly between compass points to see where the majority of the debris falls.

How much damage should tons of brick and debris do when it falls on you? One of the underlying mechanics of H&H is that 30 lbs = 1 hp. If I calculated damage by weight at this rate gradually, 2 tons of debris could do a total of 133 points of damage. If I calculated it exponentially, doubling weight per point, that would be no more than 9 damage for 2 tons, so perhaps a range of 2-9. Anywhere in between those two seems
fair to me, but it seems that Steel took a major beating here if he

was only buffed with Imperviousness.

I love the flavor text in panel 5, that Steel has to use static electricity in his hair to jump start his powers. Here he's clearly using Race the Train.

Falling 300' would have done 30d6 damage, which Steel would have survived while invulnerable, but the prisoner in the car wouldn't. Instead it seems he used Feather Landing.

One nice thing about prison breaks is, you don't have to bother leaving crooks with evidence at the police station, since they already want them back.

This is a real curious first panel. Zooming "across the continent" to Alaska makes me think my Texas guesses were all wrong and Steel was on the East Coast after all.

Did Steel really zoom there with "lightning speed?" He can't arrive too quickly, because the escaped cons got there ahead of him, traveling by conventional means.

Let's still assume Steel is coming from Texas; that means the distance involved is roughly 4,000 miles (if NYC, add 360 miles to that). If he was using the Race the Plane power (which seems to make the most sense, going along with flying), it would need to last for 16 rest turns, meaning Steel would need to be a minimum of 13th level, as the duration on that power currently stands.




Of course, another possibility is that he took conventional travel most of the way to Alaska, and then "zooms" in by his own power only towards the end.

The crew is a mix of pirates and thugs, with that guy holding the harpoon gun under one arm probably being a higher-level fighter/leader. The harpoon gun definitely looks like a trophy weapon, probably doing at least 2-8 damage -- if Steel wasn't buffed with a protective power. Too bad he decides to wreck it!

Wrecking a propeller is treated only as a machine, whereas wrecking the entire boat would have been a tougher category.

In the golden age, if you meet a villain twice, he becomes your arch enemy. Repeat engagements are that rare!





Fake iceberg hideouts is very ingenious by 1940 standards, when most villains were still using warehouses. And having five polar bears in room 1 really sets this as a high-level hideout!
















In actual play, these polar bears would be a lot tougher, but because this is a golden age story, they go down quickly in one hit each. Of all the ways H&H purposely chooses not to emulate the actual practice of golden age comics, this one is probably the most dramatically different.

This page does illustrate, though, that grappling moves can be reversed between turns.

What material is that wall made out of, that it would break away like that? And the wall is so thin...

Most players would, if their Heroes saw that much gold, would immediately start thinking about how much XP all that gold is worth.

Apropos of current events, Steel is tear gassed. No doubt this was intended to show that Steel has weaknesses, but a H&H player knows this only shows he missed a saving throw vs poison.

On taking a look at that pile of chains, one could be forgiven for thinking that's overkill. I'm not sure how heavy a 7' tall pile of chains is, but I'm guessing it would be enough to pin down an ordinary man. A superhero probably doesn't need a Raise power buffing him to get that off, though; I'd either allow it instantly, or require a save vs. science, depending on the superhero concept and how strong we pictured him being. And, for non-superheroes, I would probably go with the saving throw.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Zip Comics #1 - pt. 1

At last we get to Steel Sterling, my favorite MLJ character and, with Crimebuster, one of my two favorite Charles Biro heroes.

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This is the moment of John Sterling's transformation and Steel Sterling's origin. Normally, this would just be backstory and assumed successful...but what if this worked like Traveller and origins were generated by random rolls, with a chance of failure? What if John had died during character generation?

It is not where I plan to take Hideouts & Hoodlums, but it is still thought-provoking.

===

Could this be Beeville, Texas? Beeville is a real place, but a village of less than 7,000 people in 1940.

"Running his fingers through his hair" is a trigger that is never mentioned again. There is no game mechanic for superheroes to have to trigger their powers, not the way magic-users need components/requirements, but they could need requirements, at the player's choice.

The power he activates is Race the Train, though with an elaborately "scientific" explanation -- flavor text -- for how he catches up to the car. He then wrecks the car, a difficult feat for good men, but I already expect I'll be granting him a few brevet ranks, since so many early superheroes are "played" that way.

Nigh-Invulnerable Skin, combined with using himself as a living shield for the hoodlum. But is there another mechanic at work here? Since it's a trope of the genre that the bad guy gets iced before he can be spill on his boss, Steel might have had to save vs. plot in order to save him.

Steel is now using Race the Plane, explained with the flavor text of magnetic attraction. Next he uses Electrical Resistance, a 3rd-level power that made it into the 2nd edition basic book from 1st ed's Supplement III.

I would not require a wrecking things roll for a superhero to get through a barbed wire fence. Maybe a non-superhero, as a door, or a door at a +1.

Heroes have the same protections from both arrows and bullets, but panel 5 makes it clear that Steel is buffed with Imperviousness. 

Steel made his save vs. plot to shoot bad guys -- a very rare sight for a superhero!

While most other superheroes were fighting generic bad guys, Steel starts out with a real supervillain. Not games mechanics-wise, perhaps, since he doesn't exhibit any powers or wrecks things, but he has the costume, the trappings -- including relying on traps! -- and the habit of always coming back that mark a supervillain.

A 100' pit trap is a very dangerous trap, inflicting 10-60 damage, and the slimy walls ensure that no basic skill check will allow climbing out.

The rats are large rats -- not even giant rats -- so they probably have no more than 1 hit point each.

While door thickness doesn't matter for wrecking things, wall thickness certainly matters, with a -1 penalty per extra foot of thickness.

A clever use of wrecking things! Biro was already thinking of things to do with superpowers that Siegel hadn't thought of yet.

Steel uses Extend Missile Range I to let the Black Knight have it!

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Making the villain fall into his own trap. Classic.

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Steel does not use his magnetic power to follow the car this time. Is that because he's expended all his powers for the day already?

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Another clever use of wrecking things -- yes, you can wreck part of a thing -- and doesn't count against his powers for the day. It looks like he was saving one last power -- Nigh-Invulnerable Skin, and uses it for his bold getaway.

Police motorcycles get "borrowed" so much in comic books, they might belong on the starting equipment list!

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As you can tell, I really enjoy these early Steel Sterling stories. I hope it's not too long before I get to the next one!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)