Jungle Comics #3 - pt. 2

We're picking up where we left off with Tabu, Wizard of the Jungle. Stripped from his creator, Fletcher Hanks, and put in the hands of a more capable artist, will Tabu be less weird?

Polymorphing into a pigeon isn't too weird, and we already know from two previous adventures that Tabu has the brevet ranks to cast a 4th level spell.

Weirder is a 1930s villain comfortable with punching women, but maybe weirder still is that Velma is in the African jungle and still wearing a jacket. I feel for you, Velma; in my old age I have poor circulation now and get cold easily too.

That Tabu is felled by a bullet is weirdest of all, from a game mechanics perspective, because a magic-user of his level should have had enough hit points to take that shot and stay on his feet. Unless he was playing possum to lure out the villains?

I also want to call attention to that fifth panel, as there's a good amount of detail for outdoor ruins one can gather from that panel -- carved pillars, fallen trees, large skeletons, rocks, shrubs, and abandoned buildings.

 For whatever reason, Tabu allows himself to be tied up despite now being conscious (the bullet either stunned him or he was playing possum, as I suspect), and perhaps it's because Vilma was being threatened if he didn't comply. With these golden age stories being so short, sometimes you have to read the extra story between the panels. Anyway, that looks like a pretty nasty deathtrap, but since he's only tied to the elephants with rope, breaking loose requires just a simple wrecking things roll vs. the door category.

 So, deathtrap take two! This time, Blackwall gets the idea to sick a rhino on him. Because Tabu is still in a deathtrap, the rhino's charge can do lethal damage, whereas normally it would do no more than render him unconscious.

Who says things like, "It's tearing down at him with the impetus of a locomotive"? Probably someone who says things like, "Look at Charles tear into those scones with the impetus of a starving man!"

These clue coupons are clever, and could be a good source for random crime clues I can gather here. From this one, we add checking the flesh around a wound to see if it's swollen in such a way that suggests a poisoned weapon.

Although we already know Tabu can snap ropes, he decides to show off one of his most powerful spells by polymorphing into a rock. Polymorphing into a mineral is a much higher level spell than normal polymorphing, as the spells are written now.

Let's jump into the next story now, which is Camilla, Queen of the Lost Empire. We don't know the backstory of these characters, but Camilla is extremely trusting of an old man who tells her to set herself on fire to get her old kingdom back. I don't know about you, but I'd be concerned that the old geezer has a wicked sense of humor and is about to fatally prank me -- particularly when he starts prancing about and spouting "lo mozo co nomo" around the fire.

Camilla seems to be invoking Baal, the ancient earth and fertility god of Canaan and Phoenicia. You might know him from the bad press he got in the Old Testament.

Turns out the old guy was telling the truth after all! He seems to have cast a Wish spell for her that basically restores everything to the way it was earlier in the previous story.

Jon is either really trying hard to impress Ruth or he's pretty dumb, as it would have been a lot smarter to run from a big crowd of swordsmen than to stand and wait for them to reach him. From what we've been told, Jon and Ruth had no overwhelming need to explore the ruins other than curiosity, so if they had just left and never come back they would have been much safer. Or they could have ran, waited for nightfall, and then tried to sneak in.

The Blue Bath is a terrible name for a deathtrap, but the idea of a magic pool that can age you to death is a good deathtrap. Or at least it would be if Ruth actually looked older than 50 when she comes out. I wonder, if Camilla hates her so bad, why she doesn't leave her in longer. Maybe the pool doesn't age you more the longer you stay in, but a one-time aging in a random range of years -- say, 10-60. That said, I wonder if being dragged out of a pit by grappling hooks isn't itself a pretty tough punishment; I'd say that would do 2-8 points of damage, 1-4 for the hooks digging into her and 1-4 more if they drag her up the wall.  

The python pit, in comparison, is a pretty mundane deathtrap. There's 1-6 falling damage for going into the pit, and then he could get killed by the constrictor snake, but Camilla was nice enough to let him have a weapon in the pit with him. That Camilla can never get over Jon!

Geez, Jon, do you really have it in for snakes? All you had to do was kill the snake, not dice it!

Awfully convenient how Camilla's fountain of youth is left completely unguarded. Magic water is also, apparently, extremely volatile when exposed to fire...whereas ordinary water would simply extinguish the torch. Don't eat anything spicy for awhile, Ruth!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Jungle Comics #3 - pt. 1

After my longest lull ever, I'm back! And so is Fiction House and the unrelenting racism of the jungle genre. Gird your loins, because we're wading deep into the racism today!

We'll jump right into the lead feature, Kaanga, in progress. I don't know why so many golden age comic book artists had trouble with drawing cats, but this black panther with a distinctly seal-like head tempts me to go back to work on the Advanced Hideouts & Hoodlums Mobster Manual so I can stat it! I guess it would be just a black panther that likes to swim a lot more, though.

Tree-based fighting is interesting because there's a chance each turn of falling out of the tree. Here, Kaanga and the seal-panther both miss their saves vs. science at the same time.

It's interesting how brutally murderous Kaanga was against black panthers, but how gentle and caring he is over leopards. Or maybe his player was just looking for a good deed XP award. Killing a defenseless leopard would have netted him no XP award.

An assegai is a real thing, a slender, iron-tipped, hardwood spear used chiefly by southern African peoples.

That's a big python! But is it a "huge" python -- in terms of needing additional Hit Dice -- or just a normal-sized python? The average length of a python is, I believe, about 9 feet. This one looks to be twice that long, making it a large python (remember our large/huge/giant categories from D&D!).   Pythons can reach 26' in length, though, meaning that even in the real world there are such things as large and huge pythons.

I'm preeetty sure that constrictor snakes do not bite and hold fast like that. Had it looped around him and squeezed, I do think Kaanga would be a goner now.

There's another issue, though, of how to handle striking something against a stationary object after grappling it. I wouldn't introduce a new mechanic for this, but just reverse how hitting something with a rock works -- simple attack roll and damage if you hit.

Kaanga ducking is just flavor text; The King's attack roll missed and Kaanga ducking is simply how the miss is explained by the player and/or Editor.

I'm not sure where Cheba came from. Is Cheba the leopard from earlier, or a third cat? Did the Editor decide that Cheba just happened to be walking by and tossed her into the encounter, to make it easier for Kaanga's player?

It's unclear what happens after panel 5. It seems the gun was knocked out of The King's hand when Cheba leaps on him -- and disarming guns is supposed to be a common occurrence in Hideouts & Hoodlums, to reflect pages like this. But how does he choose to pick up a rock instead of the gun? Was the gun damaged? Because there is no chance of that happening in the disarming mechanic as written. Does he accidentally pick up the rock instead? There is no game mechanic for random picking up stuff either.

Incidentally, in case you need the top hat explained to you, The King is able to take over a tribe of naive, superstitious natives because he comes from New York. So, that makes him smarter than an African.

The Red Panther feature is not any better. Okay, the artwork is better, I meant racism-wise. Here, we're supposed to side with the "innocent" miner wanting to take the land and its resources away from the natives living there because, you know, he's white (though having a hot blonde daughter probably helps his case too).

I don't have much to say about this page, except -- dig that elephant portrait on the wall. What is the backstory between the miner and that elephant that would make him put a photograph of the elephant on his wall, as if it was a beloved pet?

Did I mention I like the art? Comics.org's contributors think this is Arthur Peddy's work, and I really dig the layout of that first panel.

No, there was no African deity named Zagu. Most tribes, from what I've read, didn't worship deities so much as ancestors. Of course, this could be a cult, and an exception to that rule. Of course, maybe they are worshipping Tabu, so that this segues into the next feature...

Lastly, we're going to take a quick peek at the next story of Tabu , Wizard of the Jungle. Gee, I wonder why it's black panthers that are always the cats getting picked on (though at least this one is drawn well)? I'm also sparing you from the previous page where a black man is being tortured to death, supposedly not far away. Tagu doesn't hear those screams at all, but conveniently hears a white woman's screams.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Jungle Comics #2 - pt. 2

Tabu, not you too! Once-staunch defender of the wilderness, Tabu now slaughters animals willy-nilly to defend any man he sees. This has got to me my absolute least favorite part of the golden age -- this cheerful acceptance of animal death.

On the surface, Tabu drawn by R. L. Golden certainly looks better than by his creator, Fletcher Hanks, but it also looks more normal and mundane -- even when Tabu turns into a tree!

The elephant's graveyard is certainly supposed to be more impressive than it is, as it appears to only be the graveyard of three elephants.

One thing I do really like about this story is how Tabu discourages the youth from seeking revenge, but encourages him to let cosmic justice take its course (which happens, of course, because this is a comic book).

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 Some game notes: Tabu uses ordinary grappling attacks on the lions, perhaps buffed by some powers, if Tabu is a magic-user/superhero, as I suspect. For the Advanced Hideouts & Hoodlums Heroes Handbook, I have been working on a mystic class that combines them both.

Evidence of gorillas being encountered in groups as large as five. It's odd that gorillas are actually social animals, but in comic books they are almost always encountered individually. This is also an example of pacing an encounter so the Heroes do not face all the mobsters at once.

There is, interestingly enough, a Tree spell in the original game that inspires H&H. I'll have to see if there's an open license version of that spell, or if I'll have to create something of my own.

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This is a really curious story because it is actually a retconned retelling of the story in the previous issue -- something that almost never happens in comic books (except maybe in flashback). The white man's name is altered and the ending is altered so that Camilla lives. Someone may have thought after last issue went to press "Oops -- if we're going to name our feature after Camilla, it might be a good idea if Camilla survives."

I can find no evidence that a city named Kaza ever existed in Africa, but interestingly there is a KAZA now -- the Kavango–Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area.

That is one curious little rocket ship. Or, at least, it would have seemed strange in 1940 -- today we would call that a drone.

...As you can see here.

There's a very curious thing about these "natives." They look an awful lot like robots, yet they're never referred to as robots (or automatons, or anything but natives), and the narrator even tells us John kills several of them. Now, it's possible that the narrator is speaking from John's perspective, and how he thinks he's killing real people.

It's interesting that flexodium is a ray -- so it's a type of energy -- but it discussed as if it was a metal. Very likely this stems from a lack of understanding about how radiation works, which may have been commonplace in 1940.

Other than wanting to destroy western civilization, Camila doesn't sound so bad. Robbing ivory caravans is something I would be quite comfortable with letting Heroes of any Alignment do in my campaigns, though that is from my modern perspective, of course.

By "torpedo" she must mean rocket, and if her rockets can really reach space, her's beat German's V-2 rockets there by four years.

Once again, the very robot-like people are called nothing but guards.

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Game notes: 4 to 1 odds is overwhelming for John -- but if the Editor took a mulligan on their first gaming session, should John get to keep the XP from it?

We've seen so many paralysis rays already in comic books by now, but this time it's called an electric radio beam (which sounds like it would help your radio get good reception rather than paralyze someone).

I'm not crazy about Congo Lancer stories -- but I'm crazy about that map! If I was super-ambitious (I mean, more than I am now), I would try drawing a Editor's map of my campaign area that shows pictures of all the animals in that region and where they can most often be encountered.

That is one weird middle panel, with the crocodile just laying there, minding his business, while the radio waves talk over him.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Jungle Comics #1 - pt. 2

We return to check on Tabu today. We see him perform some tree climbing so uncanny that I hesitate to say that could even be done in Hideouts & Hoodlums as an expert-level skill; that is more likely the power Wall-Crawling in action.

Jungle Torment might be a magic-user spell in the making here. For the duration, up to 7 targets cannot rest and must make morale saves each turn. Seems like a good 1st level spell to soften up opponents.

Still going easy on them at first, Tabu decides to use Gust of Wind on their torches. Then he starts to get serious and lets loose with Insect Plague, a 4th level spell. Insect Plague hasn't made its way into any H&H product yet, but you can bet it'll be in the AH&H Heroes Handbook whenever I'm done with that. It will do continuous damage to whoever is caught in the swarm, so either these explorers have really good hit points or they escape from the swarm pretty quickly.

Since that pool of slime looks like green slime, I'm very tempted to include green slime now in the AH&H Mobster Manual (now in progress!).

It's unclear if this tiger is huge, in the sense that it has extra Hit Dice, or it just looks huge to someone when it's advancing menacingly on you in the wild (I'd probably think it was huge too!). Apes and tigers have both already been statted for H&H.

It's harder to say what's going on here, since we can't see where these paralyzing thorns are coming from. Is there some monstrous form of plant life that should fire paralyzing thorns? Or should this be a new spell? Or are the thorns simply flavor text for a Mass Paralysis spell? I'm leaning towards the first option, simply because there is not a lot of plant life you can fight in H&H compared to animals and people.

I'm going to have to call shenanigans here. Yes, I'm all for making Gust of Wind a more useful spell (and feel I did more to increase its effectiveness in H&H already), making it strong enough to bend over trees so that they can knock over people seems like it would be way too powerful, almost on par with an Earthquake spell (which, frankly, is where I thought Fletcher was going with that at the bottom of the last page).

Oh, it's not green slime after all! They climb out unharmed.

I cheated and used that illustration of the giant snakes as a hydra in Supplement I: National, but I'm pretty sure that's meant to be two giant snakes.The next page reveals that they are constrictor snakes.

Here we see evidence that the Leap powers allow for safe downward movement, though a controlled leap is different from a fall and I'm not sure if I'd allow this to protect heroes from falling damage (I've gone both ways in game play).

Tabu, still just showing off, demonstrates Polymorph Self and Transmute Mud to Rock (the latter spell has not debuted in H&H yet.) The jungle tree-vine was statted in Supplement I: National (I believe), based on this very picture.

I'll have to review my stats and make sure I gave the tree-vine the ability to stretch out its vines before entangling.

Tabu levels up!

So many animals in old comics are killed in one shot that it's refreshing to see an elephant just take the hit and keep moving.

I don't think any game mechanics are behind this accidental entangling; more likely, this is set-up for the scenario instead of part of the scenario.

Here's more evidence that Jon Dale's player isn't in control of his actions yet -- just what is the rationale for climbing to the top of the plateau? In his shape, after being dragged, you would think he would choose the easier journey of going around it.

This is the second story in the same comic about a hidden land of secret white people in Africa. I'm guessing the authors were inspired by the Prester John legend, although it might be just good old-fashioned racism.

600 years would put these Norsemen as coming from the 15th century, which is really late for Thor-worshipping Norsemen. Of course, maybe this is not the first generation of them isolated in Africa, which may explain how they got their own religion wrong and think Thor takes human sacrifices.

Still no idea how a Norsewoman manages to go by the name of Camilla.

Potions of longevity belong in H&H. But if it's that volatile, how is it safe to drink...?

Daily sacrifices? These people make the Mayans seem mild-mannered.

The reference to electrodes tells us that these Norsemen have had enough contact with the outside world to at least catch them up to 19th century science. They probably also heard that modern society doesn't approve of human sacrifice, but just didn't care.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Jungle Comics #1 - pt. 1

At long last we begin January 1940! With this "brand new" title from Fiction House!

Kaanga is a Tarzan clone with a few wrinkles thrown in. Note that he's not adopted by apes (Tarzan), nor by natives (Sheena), but by something that doesn't quite look like either...

First edition Hideouts & Hoodlums had an explorer class for heroes like Kaanga, but there's really little reason not to use the fighter class for him, so far.

Also note that Kaanga only needs "a few weeks" to learn English, so picking up new languages is something heroes can do on their downtime.

Kaanga's strength and leaping abilities almost put him in superhero contention. And yet...both editions of H&H have had rules for non-supeheroes to wreck things, and greater than normal leaping could also be a mysteryman stunt.

Here we learn that it was ape people Kaanga was adopted by. Ape people are statted already in 2nd edition, and this shows that they occur in numbers of up to 13.

I am not sure what to make of this backstory. White Panther and his father are the last of their tribe in the jungle...but they are whiter than whitebread, and the father looks weirdly Odin-like.

I like the unusual Macguffin of magical healing stones.

If you thought those ape men were racist, wait until you see these cannibals.

White Panther is clearly a superhero (or maybe a speedster from 1st edition!). He activates Race the Train to outrun the natives, and it is interesting that he uses his power only as a distraction instead of trying to use it to fight anyone.

It's unclear from panel to panel if White Panther is a naked albino or wearing skintight white clothes from head to toe. He also seems to have a magnetic disc on his belt that holds his dagger in place, which is pretty cool.

Apparently it wasn't hard to find the healing stones at all; you just had to keep wandering the jungle and the cave/mine is like a random encounter. Although the mine must have already been played out, someone was careless and left some healing stones just lying around.

Here's a reason not to carry guns in cave complexes -- gunshots apparently have a chance to cause cave-ins! Cave-ins are pretty brutal, delivering fatal damage for those who miss their saves vs. science, and tearing the clothes of even those who make their saves.

We can tell White Panther is low-level because he avoids combat whenever he can. He also doesn't know much about the fauna of Africa, since he calls that crocodile an alligator.

There are three crocodiles on the next page, so we know crocodiles can be encountered in groups of up to 3.

If we weren't sure if Kaanga was a superhero or not, there's no confusion where Fletcher Hank's Tabu is concerned. Tabu's magical sixth sense is the source of his powers, which include Outrun Train, Wall-Climbing (a 2nd ed. power), and ...well, moving silently is usually a stunt.

Here we see Tabu has access to the powers Leap I, Fly I, and some kind of super-swimming power (though maybe Outrun Train can cover this territory). He also demonstrates tracking, which was the primary skill of the explorer class. Maybe Tabu is an explorer/superhero character.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)