Fight Comics #3 - pt. 3

Oran of the Jungle is strong! He doesn't just break the ropes binding him to the wooden stake, he breaks the wooden stake. Oran is still a 1st-level fighter at this point, unless we're assigning him brevet ranks (maybe we do need to give him at least one, as he seemed so sure he had the "combat machine" ability of fighters over 1st level -- see the previous post). Let's assume he has 1 brevet rank and is actually 2nd level. Breaking the ropes would be a wrecking things roll vs. doors. Going for the stake is going to make it harder; let's say the machines category. Being a fighter, he only gets two dice for wrecking things, so he has to roll a 10 or higher to wreck the stake. Like I mentioned last time, Oran is very lucky with the dice!

Last thing I want to say about Oran of the Jungle - as much as I have problems with the story, I really like the art. Comics.org's experts think the artist might be August Froehlich, but they're not sure.

Now we're going to jump into the debut of a new feature, Rip Regan the Power-Man. This is very much an origin story, with Rip just being a class-less nobody at this point. For reasons we don't know -- we'll just have to trust his judgement -- Dr. Austin has chosen Rip out of all the people he knows to wear this power suit he invented. Unless...say, could Dr. Austin have invented more than one and doled them out to other do-gooders, without telling each of them about the others? Sort of hedging his bets?

Dr. Austin just might be prankster enough to do something like that. I am not convinced that it was more discrete to tell them through a loudspeaker to lay on a trapdoor than it would have been to just send them a note that tells them where the door to the stairs was. It's unclear who is laughing in panel 3, but my guess is that it's Austin laughing at them.

As for the suit itself, we're dealing with comic book science

 here, so we have to accept that chemically treated metal can make someone weightless. Or maybe Austin is pranking him again, because we don't see him weightless once in this feature once he's wearing it. Maybe what Austin means is that the suit is weightless; adds nothing to his encumbrance.

As hard as it is to take the power suit seriously, the explanation for how the electric eye sounds an alarm is quite reasonable. The prank chute appeals to my sense of hideout design too.

I'm less interested in the scenario that follows than in Rip's unusual motive for fighting crime -- essentially, the anti-crime fund is paying Rip to work for them the moment he accepts the power suit they funded.

The suit gives Rip the Super-Tough Skin power. That gives us two choices for statting Rip; he is either a fighter wearing a trophy item that gives him the Super-Tough Skin power once per day, or he is a superhero with two brevet ranks, making him high enough to take the Super-Tough Skin power on his own.

Moving on, this is Strut Warren. I thought the slang being thrown around might need some explanation. A leatherneck is a military slang term for a member of the United States Marine Corps, or of the Corps of Royal Marines. A rubberneck is a tourist. "Sloppysocks" is a little trickier. I asked the Golden Age Facebook group about this yesterday and the consensus was this either refers to their loose-fitting trousers, or the actions a lonely sailor might take alone in his hammock.

I really had this guy pegged as one of those brain transplant-type mad scientists, so that he wants to bleed Strut dry to make explosives from his blood is both novel and creepy, if not good science.

It's rare for a Hero to get robbed, but Strut's money here goes to the mobsters who attacked him (even if he was just holding it for someone else).

That's a really awkward third panel. Leglock may need to be added to an extended grappling results table, especially if you can get in extra kick attacks while leglocked.

Flasks in mad science labs make great grenade-like missiles!

Whoa, whoa, whoa -- yes, both the Germans and the Japanese made overtures to the Tibetans from 1938-'39, but that doesn't mean the Tibetans actually planned to help them. This feature is unusual because, while Mongolians were usually treated as savages and the Chinese as fools, Tibetans were always treated like wise mystics in the comics. These warlike Tibetans are still racist, but at least it goes against the cliches.

Just when I think I'm sure aerial combat should be determined by complications, here is more evidence it needs to be settled by hit points. Having your wing riddled shouldn't force a landing, unless hits are just abstractions and hp loss is the real indicator of when you need to land.

"Their hospitality enhanced by rifles" is a good, sarcastic turn of phrase.

We also see a rare instance of a Hero hung by his thumbs. I wonder how many points of damage that would do over time...?

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Fight Comics #2 - pt. 3

If you've been worried about poor Kinks Mason and how he's going to get out of this pickle since my last post, you can see that he still has his hands full. The seaweed men turn out to be quite the challenge, with fist attacks seemingly having little effect on them. Now, it's also possible that Kink's punch just "missed" and did no damage, but to make the seaweed men more challenging, I'd like to make blunt attacks do half-damage to them.

The Navy would be shocked to learn that submarines can be run with one-man crews. Who knew? Now, I'm not sure what the minimum number of crew members required to pilot a submarine actually is, but I'm pretty sure it's higher. High enough that even an expert skill check shouldn't make this possible...

Also, we see Kinks loading a vacuum cleaner into a firing tube. Oops -- I guess that's actually supposed to be a torpedo?

Only here at the very end do we get the cool name of binding weed for this environmental threat.

Chlorophyll is super-effective on binding weed and seaweed men; more of it makes the former grow super-fast and lack of it kills the latter almost instantly.

This is Fletcher Hanks' Big Red McLane, King of the Northwoods. I include it because fighting fires sometimes comes up in scenarios and it's good to know how wide you need to dig your trenches to keep a forest fire from spreading.

Red is quite the high-kicker! I'm not sure, though, if using his feet should really give him any advantage at disarming opponents.

Heavyweights might qualify for a mobster entry, but I already have one for boxers in the Mobster Manual (it's coming -- someday!). Perhaps a note about heavyweights in their entry would suffice, rather than their own entry. Heavyweights might have +1 hit point and do +1 damage punching.

The term "palooka" predates the character Joe Palooka by at least a decade.

This is Oran of the Jungle. Oran is still a bizarre character, combining the urban prize fighter with the jungle hero. What concerns me here is whether Oran should be able to drag two people at once. I've previously talked about how a drag attack would work, mechanically, like a push attack, but in reverse. It's also in the rules that, if your opponents are also unarmed, you can make two unarmed attacks per turn. So yes, it is feasible to drag two opponents at once...

However, given the distance involved here, and that Oran needs to drag them over obstacles (the ropes), I might rule that Oran has to also succeed at grappling checks first, to make sure he can hold them long enough to drag them that far.

This is Terry O'Brien, Gang Smasher, though you wouldn't know he was a gang smasher since he seems to be a fairly ordinary boxer here.

There's something interesting in here, about how the Killer gains the upper hand by "craftily clinching" with Terry. For the Hideouts & Hoodlums rules to reflect this, there would need to be a space rule, where weapons need a minimum amount of space to be effective, allowing opponents to close into that space. It does require more preciseness to combat than H&H normally requires (even facing is rarely considered, except for back attacks). If you close so tight that your opponent can't get in a cross, can you only jab (a punch with a shorter space, but does lower damage?).

If we did institute this rule, we'd have to consider how to counter it. Does your opponent have to use the rest of his turn taking a 5' step back? 

This is "Strut" Warren of the U.S. Marines. Klaus Nordling is the artist and I enjoy his cartoony style here.

Here he battles a sumo wrestler, who I may need to stat as a mobster type. It hurts to punch a sumo wrestler (1 point of damage to self?), but other forms of unarmed combat, like kicking, work fine. In fact, sumos might be extra vulnerable to kicking (+1 damage?).

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)