Wonderworld Comics #11 - pt. 2

We're still looking at this month's Yarko the Great feature and those wacky Indian Mysterymen are up to their hijinks again. That panel 3 is really weird - if you plan on killing him in his sleep, why would you straddle him on his bed first?

The art in panel 4 reminds me so much of Vince Colletta.

It's not clear from this story if Yarko is just passing through, staying at this hotel temporarily, or if he normally lives in this hotel, which used to be more of a thing. Given the size of that balcony, it's a very nice suite he's staying in.

Initially I found panel 1 confusing. Is Yarko jumping into the pot? No, that's the mysteryman cultist he kicked off of him on the last page. Yarko has already teleported off the bed, as revealed in panel 2. I would be tempted to say he was using the simpler spell, Poof!, but there's no cloud of smoke accompanying the spell.

Panel 3 is either showing Telekinesis or Protection from Missiles.

The caption in panel 5 refers to the cultist as a Hindu, the man's words in panel 4 make him sound like a Muslim. More importantly, the earlier pages that show them having secret meetings on a mountaintop reveal him to be a cultist (a statted mobstertype in 2nd edition Hideouts & Hoodlums). Perhaps the nature of this cult is that they mix Hindu and Islamic beliefs.

The final spell cast is revealed by Yarko's words "That will hold you" -- it's a Hold Person spell!

A cursed jewel that makes anyone looking at it save or die is pretty serious stuff. Since Yarko openly wears his twin jewel all the time means they do not share this ability.

Kohat is a real city in modern-day Pakistan.The "Order of Aribah" is completely fictional.

The significance of being the seventh son of a seventh son stretches into antiquity, across multiple cultures.

Yarko is using the spell Project Image, which apparently has a super long range.

As goofy as it always looks, Iger's Shorty Shortcake is at heart a solid adventure story, and perhaps the first one ever set in Guatemala. I don't think there's any particular reason why this story would need to take place in Guatemala, though I suspect Iger simply thought it sounds funny.

Here we have a mad scientist who doesn't look that much more comical than some other mad scientists, and his water magnet is not that much goofier than a lot of comic book science.

Birds are a tricky thing to stat accurately because, even if you make them bigger, a hollow-boned animal still doesn't have much mass to assign hit dice to. However, if you go up to 40 x normal size, you can get a carrier pigeon that weighs (unless my math is way off) 1,300 lbs. That bird is 7+2 Hit Dice, and has a wingspan of 80'!

If the world's heaviest worm, the Megascolides australis, was subjected to 40 x growth, it would weigh 700 lbs. and have 4 Hit Dice. However, at some point we need to max out the Hit Die gain from enlargement, or a 100 lb. Shorty would grow to 80 tons and have 266 20-sided Hit Dice!

It seems odd that Shorty assumes the water shrunk him, not that the lightning changed him (as often happens in comics!), or that the duration just coincidentally ended.

A glider seems like a nice trophy reward. Good for getting Heroes from plot location to plot location, but can't do much else to spoil scenarios (unless outdoors, and Shorty simply rains dropped items down on mobsters).  

Loraine spies have to be from the Alsace-Lorraine territory that, at this time in 1940, was still part of France! The politics of these revolutionaries isn't clear, but it seems they would be a political group wanting either independence or want to be annexed by Germany, which would be a very bad call, but -- hindsight is 20/20, right?

Cab drivers are a good source for plot hooks. Even international ones, apparently!

"Pan-chromatic film" sounds fancy, but "a panchromatic emulsion produces a realistic reproduction of a scene as it appears to the human eye, although with no colors." Almost all modern photographic film (since 1906) is panchromatic. All this is from Wikipedia, of course.

It's a discouraging start to your scenario when your best fighter gets beat up and dropped down a well in your very first encounter.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Wonderworld Comics #11 - pt. 1

Ah, the early Fox Comics were gorgeous! This installment of The Flame was written by Eisner and drawn by Fine, which is about as good as it gets here in (cover date) March 1940.

It scarcely requires explaining that "Kalnar" is Germany and "Rodend" is Hitler, especially not when you see "Rodend" on the last page below.

"Dorna" is a little trickier. It seems most likely Poland, given this time in the War, but the capital of "Dorna" is not yet captured in this story, while Warsaw was taken four months earlier than this was published.


For those mathematically impaired, The Flame was born in 1915. Ichang, or Yichang, is a prefecture-level city located in western Hubei province, China. It is the second largest city in the province after the capital, Wuhan.



This is surprisingly credible; the Yangzte ("Yangtse" here) is responsible for 70-75% of China's floods, flooding nearly every monsoon season.

Just like Siegel and Superman, Eisner borrows from the story of Moses here.

This seems to be Tibet, though the geography is a bit off. The Yangtze River begins in Tibet, so the flood waters would have had to somehow sweep the basket upstream.

It's interesting to wonder if the "grand high lama" is the dalai lama, or a fictional lama that supersedes the dalai and panchen lamas.

It's also worth noting that this nested origin story is being told to us by a character in the main story, who may well be an unreliable narrator.

We're given no clue how messages are sent to the Flame. Radio? Telegram? Write a note and burn it with fire?

"Quick, let's ignore the anti-aircraft guns around us (I see three) and bring him down with our small fire guns! I'm feeling like a challenge today!"

I was really surprised by how much this page reminds me of Walt Simonson's art. The layout is great, if awfully background-less, but the perspective in that final panel makes up for any imagined deficiencies.

Continuity glitch: the Flame is clearly leaping from his plane in the third panel of the previous page, but is back in his plane in panel 2 of this page, and then back on the ground by panel 4. It seems that Lou Fine had intended the plane to be immune to the fire gun and demolish the gun, but Will Eisner wanted the Flame to be responsible for destroying it and gives him credit in the caption.

Despite having only destroyed one gun and beaten up about seven soldiers, the entire army surrenders at that point. Personally, I would have made separate morale saves for each squad, three saves per platoon. But I understand this was a scenario with a short time limit.

Let's also talk about the effectiveness of a giant flame gun. I get that, thematically, it fits the title, but there's no way it could shoot fire as far as it could shoot a shell. I fail to see how this

weapon would be very effective.

I don't have much to say about this page except -- see? Hitler. Great "punch to the face" panel there, well before the famous Captain America cover of punching Hitler.















For this installment of Yarko the Great, "Anthony Brooks", aka Will Eisner, starts us off in faraway India, but how accurate is that geography? The Kabul River does empty into the Indus River near the city of Attock, in what is now Pakistan, but would have then been India. Far from isolated frontier, Attock would have been, I think, a metropolis of about 400,000 people at this time. It's typical racism of the times, though, to make other cultures look more primitive than they were.

All I have to say about this page is that the men from India must be statted as mysterymen (burning stunts), superheroes (using the Wall Climbing power), or magic-users (using the Spider Climb spell) to be able to scale a sheer wall like that.

(Spoiler: they're mysterymen; on a page I won't be showing, they use a mysteryman's weapon, a garotte.)

And that this is an awful long build-up to Yarko showing up in the story...

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Wonderworld Comics #10 - pt. 2

This is only Yarko the Great's eighth story, but already his second trip to the land of the dead -- and surprisingly his way there is entirely different this time. Instead of transitioning through a Dante-lite version of the afterlife, Yarko is able to transport himself (Plane Shift spell?) directly to the Valley of Shadows, or an area of it that is more desolate and uninhabited than when we last saw it. Interestingly, Yarko needs an item belonging to the Baron in order to track him across the planes; one could interpret from this that Yarko would wind up in some random space on the same plane without the sword to attract him to the Baron.

Shining Knight, no! (Just kidding; the old knight just has the same coloration as the Shining Knight will have a year or two from now).

Here we see Yarko fighting with a sword, and fighting well, invalidating the "magic-users can only fight with daggers" conceit.

We also get a good example of why we want to put powerful Heroes in environments where they can't use their full range of spells or powers. We know Yarko can still cast spells in the Afterlife, but there must be anti-magic zones throughout and Yarko had temporarily stepped into one.

Yarko's spell -- conjuring the ghosts of his past victims to attack him -- reminds me of the Phantasmal Killer spell.

This is Shorty Shortcake, and those are some really big germs flying out of that watch case! Rigging something to release tear gas -- or "crying germs", as it's called here -- is not a bad trap.

Hideouts & Hoodlums has rules for pushing opponents, but pulling them? That's trickier, I think. It would probably be a grappling attack and then, if successful, I would allow the grappler to make half-moves and pull the victim along, so long as the grappler had the higher Strength score.

While grappling your opponent, if you have a strong enough hold on them (that means at the Editor's discretion), you could roll to make another attack and put a hat on your opponent's head, if that was really something you wanted to do. I'm definitely not opposed to giving free attacks if they're used to do something in-character, but not actually harm anyone.

I'm glad I've never statted giant bats as having very many hit points, as these giant vampire bats (simply called vampire bats here, but the scale is always way off in a Shorty Shortcake adventure -- oh, I wonder if that is a feature I should talk about?) fall easily after just being hit with a rubber-band ball (an improvised weapon, doing no more than 1-3 points of damage, if ever there was one).

I'm kind of surprised that I've never seen a Hero track a bad guy by his cigar ash until this point.

This is also the first time I can recall seeing one trophy item specifically able to counteract another trophy item.

This is Patty O'Day, so naturally I'm going to focus on her partner Ham being awesome instead. Here it takes not one, but two head blows to knock him out, demonstrating that head blows are not automatic knockouts.

We also get a glimpse of a secret door concealed as a wall panel.

How long, in game time, should it take for eyes to become accustomed to the dimness? It probably doesn't matter for this scene, but if combat was about to begin it could be relevant. Or maybe not; I'd probably ignore the issue, unless Patty lost initiative, and then I could use the "eyes adjusting" thing as an excuse to explain why.

It's a smart tactic to keep the rope you were tied up in. Awesome Ham has figured out a use for it already!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Wonderworld Comics #10 - pt. 1

I certainly like it when Hideouts & Hoodlums perfectly emulates the look and feel of comic books from the golden age...but there are certain stories that make me go, hmm, maybe strict emulation could be taken too far. Case in point: should tanks be allowed to burrow through the center of the Earth, as a "shortcut" from Mongolia to Florida? Not only is that completely impossible, but it's so impossible that air dropping tanks from above would be relatively easy in comparison.

That said, I like that we get our invasion started in Florida for a change. The story imagines a Fort Blane in southern Florida, near the Everglades, but southern Florida only has Navy and Coast Guard bases in it for real.

A superhero using his wrecking things ability would not be unbelievable, except that we just saw (on a page I skipped over) the tanks shrugging off bombs dropped from airplanes like they were nothing. Is there some special vulnerability to fire to these tanks, and if so, how did they ever make it through the heat as they drew closer to the Earth's core?

And yet, there must be a known vulnerability to fire in the design, or there would be no reason for the men to have asbestos suits with them (unless they were anticipating the Flame showing up?).

10-to-1 odds seems too much for the Flame, though he uses Get Tough on at least four of them before taking off.

Oh, come on, Flame! What did that poor huge (5 HD?) alligator ever do to you? It looks like it was only trying to give you a hug to me, you murdering bum! And why do you only afterwards get the idea to use your flame to drive off the others? (Common sense morale check, at the Editor's discretion.)

More evidence of how easy disguise is in comic books: despite the fact these are see-thru helmets, no one questions the fact that one of the men is wearing the Flame's mask under his helmet.

The Flame can now wreck dams, which means he is at least 6th level -- not a surprise, since we've already seen him use the high-level Teleport through Focus power. He's only been published in enough pages to warrant being 3rd level by now, so there are plenty of brevet ranks in play here (if not for the teleport power, it would be possible that his flame-gun is a trophy item that wrecks at a higher level, and that the gun is not itself just flavor text describing how he uses his powers).

As loony as this story has been...that is one gorgeous page of art.

Here's that Teleport through Focus power we were just talking about! It would appear that we are talking about a range that can take him halfway around the world...but we also don't have to assume that the Flame made this trip in just one jump. Perhaps it took him days to teleport from open flame to open flame until he got to Mongolia.

Genghis Khan villains are apparently high kickers. I'm not sure how that makes a game mechanics difference, but it sure looks impressive!

 A very rare example of a sword being used as a missile weapon.

Despite being a relatively inexperienced superhero, the Flame already commands the respect of the U.S. Army.

It should not surprise you to learn that Evergreen Chasm is not a real place. Florida is relatively free of chasms. Sinkholes, on the other hand...

Not the first time we've seen plot hook characters literally crash into the Heroes.

Nor is the first time we've seen Heroes feel they have to escape bad weather by heading indoors, no matter how spooky the building looks (save vs. plot required).

That still looks like Eisner to me, but comics.org tells me this is Bob Powell doing a good Eisner impersonation.  I'm impressed by the sense of space in the castle interior. The door knocker, the height of the door and ceilings, the rafters, and the blazing chandelier are all dressing details for a good hideout.

Yarko, despite having gone spell-to-spell with the Devil already, can't overcome this one guard. Granted, the grappling rules are not kind towards magic-users (with their low attack bonuses), and perhaps we've finally discovered Yarko's weakness here, that he needs his hands free to cast spells.

Poof! is a 1st-level spell in 2nd ed. H&H. It only works on one person, so this is perhaps a higher-level version (Poof II?) that allows multiple people to disappear. It's also possible that more pf them than just the baron is casting versions of this spell.

 (Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Wonderworld Comics #9 - pt. 2

We rejoin Yarko the Great still messing with con men. He clearly casts Telekinesis, and maybe a Ventriloquism spell? Unless he's still just using ordinary ventriloquism skill there.

Now he casts Teleport and Speak with Dead.

I am going to spare you the first part of the Shorty Shortcake story, a racist tale about how Mexicans are lazy and sleep all the time, only waking up to watch cock fights. Here we see that thrown stones -- well, gold nuggets -- do damage. I would treat them as improvised weapons and do 1-3 points of damage.

I would be extremely cautious about allowing people to be tied up like pretzels in Hideouts & Hoodlums, as it might be too unrealistic for H&H combat. However...if you did enough grappling damage to break lots of bones, maybe it is possible...

So where is the fighting zone where Patty O'Day is? It's got to be Finland, unless this is an earlier story, and then maybe Poland. The officer arresting them speaks French; France has not yet been attacked, but French soldiers may have reached their allies in Finland or Poland. Plus, forces were already massing on both sides of the France-Germany border, so while no fighting had taken place yet, it was definitely a zone.

It's peculiar that this is "against regulations," as war correspondents were common in WWII and female ones were not rare. She must have just failed to gain permission.

I think Patty would be dead three times over by now if it wasn't for Ham. Here he displays successful skill checks at raft-building, sailing/navigation, fire-building, and hunting/tracking. I'm sure it's a product of the times that Patty can't be shown as being good at anything, but it leaves me puzzled why this feature isn't just called Ham.

Ham appears to get in two punches -- including a "two-in-one" punch -- before anyone can attack him back, but unless Ham is a buffed superhero, that seems unlikely. More likely, Ham has attacked over two turns (the "two-in-one" being flavor text for two hits in the same turn) without anyone being able to land a hit on him until the end of the second turn.

That Patty and Ham are locked in their cell with their camera stretches my suspension of disbelief. They must have made a save vs. plot to not have it confiscated, with something like a -3 or -4 penalty.

That is one stupid guard. She either scored a max roll on her encounter reaction check or he badly failed a save vs. plot to resist falling for that (an Editor could use either mechanic in that instance). The guard entry in the Mobster Manual is going to include a penalty on saves to resist whatever ploys the Heroes come up with to fool them and a chance for guards to stupidly turn their backs on Heroes.

The Moth seems like one of the earliest costumed supervillains in comics, or would be if he really wasn't just a bodyguard to the main villain. The Moth's costume is bulletproof, which only means it is at least as hard to hit as AC 7.

The gas gun looks to have a range of at least 15'.

The scientist/madman responsible for the Moths thinks they fly because they are "sensitized to a powerful energy wave," but it seems obvious to me the one in that first panel is wearing a jetpack.

This is one of the first evil scientists to use shrinking technology, and definitely the first for such a novel purpose.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Wonderworld Comics #9 - pt. 1

Our return to Fox begins with The Flame and something that I would never let players do at the beginning of a scenario -- locking themselves in a laboratory and trying to invent the most powerful explosive ever. Come on, this is game night! Try the scenario and leave this for downtime. You've got cool superpowers at your disposal (I even let you have all those brevet ranks; see previous posts about the Flame); try using those.

Not a map, per se, but an interesting cut-away of the interior of a submarine. Submarine design is very linear, making for a pretty boring hideout to explore.

Teleport through Focus is a great, high-level power for getting the Hero straight to the trouble, without having to do any slow investigation first. Maybe I'm not an expert on torpedo strikes, but I don't think they set fires in most cases -- seeing as how they punch holes into ships that quickly fill up with water. I wonder if there should be something like a 1 in 6 chance of vehicles sustaining damage catching on fire.

Now this is interesting...apparently the Flame isn't just immune to fire, but can interact with fire like it was a solid object. This is flavor text for the spell Water Walking.

Sometimes I wonder if I should just put all powers and spells in the same pool and let players pick from both...but then, some powers are very un-spell-like (the Get Tough, Raise, and "Race the" powers, for examples). Maybe there needs to be a rule for researching ways to transfer a spell into a power, and vice versa.

This can happen in Hideouts & Hoodlums. Superheroes are deliberately not good at fighting without buffing themselves with offensive and/or defensive powers, so if you want your power slots for other things, nine low-level fighters could conceivably take out a mid-level superhero just by doing enough damage.

Interestingly, steam is harmful to the Flame, even though fire and, presumedly, heat is not as well.

The Flame uses his explosive to blow up the hideout, which is also odd because usually hideouts blow up on their own just as the Hero is escaping.

Our villain, Doyoff (not a real name), reminds us that it pays to have more than one escape route.

And we're on to Yarko the Great, here reading a lot like that early Superman story of the con man posing as Superman. Like that story, these con men have no special abilities and are so generic as to be practically mobstertype-less. We do learn, however, that $300 watches were a thing in 1940.

This is a really curious Yarko story. After fighting vampires, the Devil, and Death itself, Yarko seems content to use his ventriloquism spells to play pranks on the con men -- even though they may have shot and killed a woman (though that scene seems out of place and really out of character for them). So far, Yarko hasn't cast a single spell.

Now we get into the spell-casting! First there's Hold Person, and then Yarko...well, he casts some kind of spell that summons stolen items and makes them float in the air in front of him. Maybe something called Thief's Bane? But it would have to be a 5th or 6th level spell, being a combination of Locate Object (for multiple objects) and Telekinesis.

Also note that, because fire extinguishers were not common yet, the theater has a fire bucket on the wall by Yarko.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)