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 #18 - pt. 2

We're still looking at Jon Linton's adventures in the future; a future where men wear robes and women wear short skirts.

It seems like a huge design flaw that Satan Rex's atomic power plant is controlled by two exposed electrodes. I was going to say the place should also have some fail-safes in place, but I suppose the power shutdown is a fail-safe, preventing something worse like a meltdown.

I don't think any 1940 writers knew about meltdowns yet...and yet, Harry Campbell did seem to have more knowledge of science than your average comic book writer of the time, so...?

I just complimented Campbell for his smarts, but there seems to be a glaring mistake here; two pages back, Jon learned the systems would need 30 minutes to reboot, and here the "wall of force" is rebooting well before then. Of course, maybe Satan was smart enough to have a back-up system kick in for the force wall.

It's interesting that Campbell calls it a wall of force and not the more common term, force field (in use in science fiction going back to 1920!). Wall of Force is, of course, a magic-user spell as well.

The second to last panel spells out that the Scientist class normally takes a week of downtime to invent something, but has a chance to kit-bash something in just a day.

The Mount Wilson Observatory telescope would be the largest in the world until 1949. I'm not sure where the "6,000 billion million miles" came from, but researchers could see nebulae over 5 trillion miles away.

The "reveal houses on the moon, if there are any" is as optimistic as telepathic television-phones.

Bill and Davey is an odd duck, a comic strip coming from a minor league syndicate that was picked up by both Dell and Centaur (though neither for long). It's hard to see what they saw in it -- unless they just picked it up cheap.

There were headhunters, and cannibals as well, on the Solomon Islands, so while the depiction of Ajax might seem racist, the description isn't. 

This is Tippy Taylor on Fantasy Isle, a non-subtle rip-off of Swift's Lilliput. This scenario should be a cakewalk for even a class-less half-pint; since I'm still working on the assumption that 1 hit point represents roughly 30 lbs. of mass, and a 6" tall person would weigh less than an ounce, then Lilliputians...or Fantasy Islanders don't even come close to having a full hit point, or being able to do any damage themselves.

The tank poses more of a threat, even scaled to tiny size. Since it's the size of a gun, I would allow it to do a full 1-6 points of damage if it shot Tippy in the leg.

That must be a 3' high jump by Tippy. Impressive! 

This is John Degen, Private Detective, from a one-shot called "The Fiend of Halwith Hall." Shadowing someone, by car, on a country road, should be a basic skill check.

John is smart to head straight to the cellar, as most of the good stuff in a hideout is underground.

John has a skeleton key, a minor trophy item that gives him a bonus to skill checks when opening locked doors.

Here we have a mad scientist with the emphasis on mad. Like many mad scientists, he wants to do a brain transplant. Now, he might be just a raving loon, or maybe he has the science to do it; we never do find out.

Two wolves are unusual pets for a mad scientist.

The pit trap in the driveway is very unusual. It also doesn't make a lot of sense, since the car was parked when John goes inside, and is in the pit trap after he gets out. Maybe it took a long time for the weight of the car to activate the trap?

That's a lot of blood loss, to make the gunpowder too wet to burn. The Hideouts & Hoodlums rules don't account for blood loss and there's no way to make yourself bleed faster to foil traps.

Wow, that is one dark ending. It's rare for Heroes in comics to fail, but John not only failed to save this poor guy, but we find out just what horrible fate befell him.

Lastly, we're going to look at a verbose page of Larry Kane, investigating "The Ghost of Kirkwood." There's a pretty good set-up for a haunted house scenario here, with lots of rumors being supplied on this page.

My curiosity has been aroused too, but it's late and I'll read the rest next time!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Amazing Mystery Funnies v. 3 #1 - pt. 2

And we're back to The Inner Circle, where we see the players have figured out that, if they pool all their supporting cast members together, they can form a military force of 30 men -- or more (depending on how high their Charisma scores are)!

But then this page shows us the disadvantage of having too large a fighting force on your side, as they easily take the "Mafio" island without any challenge or suspense. The Editor could always up the challenge level they encounter to match -- maybe give the Mafio some heavy artillery of their own -- while other Editors might feel that is cheating and run their scenarios as-is.

This is the first I've ever seen of Tippy Taylor, which is odd because it seems so tailor-made for Hideouts & Hoodlums conversion.

First we get a lot of establishing of a real world setting, with references to place (Metropolis, California, Mt. Arrowhead) and time (topical reference to Amelia Earhart's disappearance).  This is the first mention of a city named Metropolis in comic books and, while Mt. Arrowhead is fictional, there is a Lake Arrowhead in California.

The scenario really starts when Tippy and Hunk wash up on the island -- everything before it could be backstory read to the player at the start of the game. The dinosaur gains surprise on them, but has a neutral encounter reaction to them and does not attack.

Here we see more sauropods, apparently of different species, all socializing together. The dinosaur chasing Tippy seems to be more curious about him than hostile -- which is very good since Tippy is probably no more than a 1st-level fighter!  We also see that dinosaurs -- or at least sauropods -- do not run faster than humans (but not slower either).

This is interesting because we don't often see Heroes failing skill checks. It's so necessary for the plot that he fall in that pit, though, that it makes me wonder if the Editor did not fudge the results against him -- bad form, I say, favoring story over the dice. Or perhaps there are multiple ways to reach the underground lair, and Tippy just fell into the first one.

Wax statues of guardians seems like a good trick to put in your hideouts.

Well, it turns out they aren't just wax dummies after all, but androids waiting to be turned on!

The old man's recipe for activating androids is a quest worthy of an entire mini-campaign.

Tippy gets a free ride to the next destination on his quest on the back of a gryphon! I'll have to include a note that there's a chance they can talk.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)