Mystic Comics #1 - pt. 2

When we last left Zephyr Jones and Corky on the surface of the sun Cygni 61 the Mad Astronomer had a machine that sprays his secret formula on Zephyr and Corky. He tells them that this will protect them from the heat on the surface of the star, and apparently the blinding light and the crushing gravitational pull as well). Our boys are so gullible, or so smitten with his daughter, that they immediately go outside to see if it worked. Instead of walking on super-heated plasma, this seems to be a rocky place, inhabited by dwarfs that live in caves.

They find that at least nine star-dwarfs had captured the astronomer and his daughter from their ship. Most of them chase after Zephyr and Corky. The dwarves have super-tough skin (like the power, because the heat of the sun has hardened them), but are vulnerable to fire extinguishers because...ah, let's stop pretending any of this makes sense! These aliens remind me of the game Awful Green Things from Outer Space, where you're supposed to try everything on your ship on the aliens, because only one random item will kill them.

To top it off, Zephyr and Corky go back below ground to save the prisoners from eight more dwarfs. They defeat the dwarfs by throwing rope around a group of them and then pulling the rope off the cliff the dwarfs are on. Not sure why none of the dwarfs think to grab onto the rope and pull Zephyr and Corky down first, or with them. If the star-dwarfs are just too dumb, then a fair Editor would make some kind of intelligence check for them (trying to roll under a low INT score) before letting them fight too cleverly. They are very primitive, fighting only with clubs and darts from blowguns.

We've seen Heroes start avalanches to bury or block adversaries before, but Zephyr takes the cake by knowing just where to throw a rock to start an avalanche. That would take some kind of expert skill level in geology, I would think, followed by a successful attack roll vs. a low Armor Class.

The next feature is the 3Xs. The three "Xs" are private detectives, all working anonymously (although they wear no masks to conceal their identities, so it should take too long for people to figure them out), but go by 1X, 2X, and 3X. Each has an area of specialization; 1X does the detective work (high Wisdom score), 2X is a "walking encyclopedia" (high Intelligence score), and 3X is the strong-arm (high Strength score). A later caption explains that 1X is in charge and the other two are his aides (Supporting Cast Members). The 3Xs are good scrapers, but not great, as 13 hoodlums break into 1X's home to retrieve the glove and the hoodlums only fail a morale save and leave after beating all three of our good guys almost to unconscious. None of them use weapons other than blackjack/saps, during this battle. Later, 2X has a disintegrating pistol, a trophy weapon that does extra damage.

A taxi driver tells the 3Xs that his taxi cannot go over 70 MPH.

The Green Terror is a mob responsible for a rash of brazenly public kidnappings, covering their escapes with a smokescreen of green smoke. A clue left behind at the scene of their latest kidnapping yields a clue that requires an expert skill check in botany to identify -- a lost glove on the scene was permeated with the pollen of a rare orchid. Because the orchid is imported, they use freight records to figure out that when the mob came into the country, and when it plans on leaving. Of course, there are some holes in that theory -- what if only one member of the mob worked with orchids? What if the mobsters were on the ship coming, but not on the next boat going? What if an unregistered grower has the same orchids in their greenhouse and they weren't imported at all?

Their leader is also known as The Green Terror. One of the earliest supervillains in comics, The Green Terror is a green-skinned African with the vampiric power to live forever so long as he keeps drinking human blood. However, he's a real pushover in a fight and folds after getting punched by 3X once.

Next up is "Deep Sea Demon," but if you want my impressions on that story you can read here, because this is a barely modified reprint of Fred Guardineer's "Devil of the Deep" from Funny Pages v. 2 #1.

Dakor the Magician is the next feature, and like some other magicians we've seen he's light on actual magic and more of a detective. We also see, like in the 3Xs story, that travel out of the country seems to be public information, as Dakor's assistant Williams is quickly able to learn that their prime suspect in a murder is leaving the country for France.

(Read at readcomiconline.to)

Mystic Comics #1 - pt. 1

We're back to Timely Comics and their newest title in 1940. But don't expect any Bill Everett, Jack Kirby, or Joe Simon goodness in this one; this is pure 2nd rate-Chesler shop filler, cranked out because Martin Goodman wanted another Timely title on the shelves to capitalize on this new superhero craze.

So what does it give us first? Flexo the Rubber Man. Yes, Will Harr and Jack Binder took one look around the burgeoning crowd of superheroes in the field and said...Bozo the Iron Man looks like a winner; let's take that concept and make it even sillier. In a decision that would make for a hundred off-color jokes if this wasn't a family blog, the narrator tells us that Flexo is made of "living rubber" and filled with "secret gas." This rubber/gas combo somehow allows Flexo to outrun bullets (in Hideouts & Hoodlums, the Race the Bullet power), gives it the strength of an ox (wrecking things and Raise Car power?), and the ability to zoom through the air like a bird (Fly II power?). But narrators often exaggerate for new superheroes, so let's see if the story follows up on any of that.

Oh, and to make matters worse, the scientists who invented Flexo had to steal the supplies from the cancer hospital they work in. Nice job, leaving those cancer patients without the treatment equipment they need, jerks. It's almost a pleasure to see these two tied up by a mobster and his vamp/moll, who then steal radium from the two men. The mobster works for a mad scientist who need the radium for his death ray, of course. In one informative panel, the mobster explains that he would bump them off with a gun, but "the professor likes to wipe out his victims in fancy, scientific style," which basically explains every supervillain's deathtrap ever.

After activating Flexo to rescue them, we are told Flexo is running at the speed of a bullet, but that's our suspicious narrator again without any real proof. Flexo does leap -- very clearly leaping instead of flying -- and given the height of his leaps I would call this a very clear example of the Leap I power. When shot at, his rubbery hide provides the Nigh-Invulnerable Skin power. Then he uses Multi-Attack to grapple three mobsters at once. It takes a little bit more of a (ahem) stretch to see how stretching himself between the car and a telephone pole counts as a power, but since the purpose is to stop the car from moving, that seems to be the same as using the Raise Car power.

To find their missing radium, the unnamed scientists borrow a radium detector, or what we might call a Geiger counter, from the hospital. This Geiger counter has a really good range on it, though, because it can sense radiation from an airplane.

At the hideout, Flexo has to fight two electrically-charged robots. Flexo does really well at his wrecking things rolls vs. the robots, and demonstrates Electrical Resistance, his first level 3 power. In fact, since he hasn't even demonstrated a level 2 power yet, I'm wondering if he isn't demonstrating a power at all, but simply had enough hit points to take the hits from their electrical fields.

The hideout has a simple portcullis trap, but Flexo's solution to it, squeezing through the bars, might be our first instance of him breaking the H&H rules. Normally, I would call this flavor text for wrecking things, except that the bars are still intact and trapping the scientists even after Flexo squeezes through. For this, then, we would need a new power, perhaps some weaker version of Passwall, like a 2nd-level power called Pass through Small Openings.

Flexo defeats the mad scientist and his three hoodlums by spurting gas at them, which either does damage or puts them to sleep -- the story isn't clear. However, giving this robot a "breath weapon" is just like how I handled robots in 1st edition H&H, suggesting to me that maybe Flexo should be statted as a mobster, and a Supporting Cast Member, to the scientists, instead of a Hero with a race and class. This would eliminate any difficulties in statting him as an android superhero. But if Flexo is an android superhero, what level? One of his 1st level powers demonstrated could be his android ability, meaning he's demonstrated two 1st level powers and 1 2nd level power -- Flexo must have two brevet ranks, allowing him to start as a level 3 superhero, an extraordinary man.

Next up is Blue Blaze. This story starts in 1852 at Midwest College. It was difficult to pin down a specific college with so generic a name, but then my first assumption would be that Midwest College would be in the Midwest. What gets the story moving, though, is the tornado that sweeps through the campus and kills 85% of the people there. Finding out when major tornado touchdowns happened is easily done on the Internet these days and, possibly not by coincidence, a deadly tornado had ripped through downtown Arlington, Massachusetts only the previous year. I have commented before (see Whiz Comics #3) about comic book writers taking inspiration from headlines in the recent news.

While believed dead after the tornado and buried, Spencer is struck with "substrata dermatic rays" during his 88 years of hibernation, which is a term that doesn't really mean anything, but suggests that the rays are striking him under his skin. Is this how the author says radiation? If the narrator is to be believed, his strength increases 1,000-fold, which would make him able to lift/press about 50 tons -- or access to 5th-level Raise powers in H&H terms.  More incredulously, Spencer was supposedly buried in a skin-tight costume with attached cowl and a riveted girdle. and these were the clothes he died in.

Upon digging himself out of his grave, BB immediately encounters two superstitious hoodlums. They both fail their morale saves after he activates his Super-Tough Skin power. One of them "has a heart attack," but you know how those pesky narrators keep exaggerating, and there is a result of "faints" on the morale failure table. The other one simply surrenders.

The hoodlums were digging up bodies for a professor with a super-cool hideout, accessible by a secret elevator in an inn on the edge of town, miles below ground. The elevator lets out in a foyer which accesses a huge entry hall through a Dr. Suess-shaped archway. The hall looks posh at this end with checkerboard tile flooring and thick columns. Either at the far end, or perhaps in a side hall, the columns are thinner and decorated with skull motifs.

There are also traps. Red gems spaced around the hideout activate "tension beams," like a Hold Person spell. Then the rays whisk their prisoners on a high-speed tour of some nearby laboratories (the professor is quite the show-off) to Professor Maluski's audience hall (a "receiving" gem ends the tour here). Near the audience hall is a dungeon where 50 zombies are kept. The zombies are not supernatural, but controlled by ray receptors sewn into their shrouds. Maluski is armed with a "new type automatic," which seems to be a way of saying a Gun +1 to me. The zombies turn on Maluski with the control tube is smashed, which is conveniently keeps in the dungeon with the zombies. There is also an access to an subterranean stream in the dungeon.

The next feature is Zephyr Jones; despite this being a first issue, Zephyr has crossed over from Daring Mystery Comics #2. Zephyr and Corky are now making routine trips to Mars in the near future, when they are hijacked by a mad scientist and his daughter at gunpoint. "The Mad Astronomer" wants them to take him to Cygni, by which we can assume he means Cygni 61, a star 11.4 light years away. This is going to be an extremely long story if not for faster-than-light travel. And when they call him mad, they aren't kidding. He thinks there is stardust on stars that can cure any illness. No explanation for why they have to go to a star so far away to get that instead of our own star.

The science is wonkier than that; apparently the author thinks there are "lesser stars" between Earth and Mars, by which he seems to mean comets. These stars are covered with gasses and Zephyr figures out that if he can combust the atmosphere of a comet, it will propel the ship away at faster-than-light speed. This actually works, devastating the number of known comets in near space and somehow fails to destroy their spaceship every time they try it. En route they almost hit a moon, but are traveling so fast that they pass right through it. This reminds me of the Silver Age Flash vibrating through solid matter at super-fast speeds, but it does beg the question how they are interacting with comets to gain speed from them if they are effectively immaterial.

(Read at readcomicsonline.to)

Daring Mystery Comics #2 - pt. 1

It's been some time since we last checked in on the fledgling company of Timely Comics.

It starts with Zephyr Jones and His Rocket Ship, firmly in the science fiction genre. Zephyr and his friend Corky are heading to Mars in a privately built rocket ship. Zephyr is right about how far it is to Mars, but either his calculations for travel time are off or mine are, because at the 300,000 MPH speed he claims he's going I think it would take five days to reach Mars instead of one. That speed is, incidentally, eight times faster than the fastest spacecraft ever launched from Earth up to the present day.

When the ship veers off course, it lands on a "lost planet" -- as if there could be an unnoticed planet between Earth and Mars. Actually, since the theory is floated later that this "planet" broke off of Earth ages ago, it's more factually a moon -- just one much smaller and in a far wider orbit. The moon is called Sunev (yes, Venus backwards, har har), and it not only has normal gravity and a breathable atmosphere, but it is inhabited by human-like aliens with feathery wings who call themselves the Birdmen and speak English. The birdmen live in a 19th century-like monarchy, but gunpowder was never discovered and the only science they are advanced in is chemistry. They have discovered an elixir that expands lifespan, so that the birdmen can live 300-400 years (there is no explanation given for how they have solved the overpopulation problem that would cause). There is a separate race/culture on the Sunev called (I'm not kidding either) the Parrotmen.  The Parrotmen are more muscular and brutish-looking, preferring to go shirtless in combat and fight with maces.

Zephyr and Corky, perhaps having not expected a safe journey into space, came armed with two automatic pistols and a Tommy gun, make short work of the parrotmen with their maces. After stopping the Parrotman uprising, Zephyr and Corky return to Earth before heading to Mars, which makes sense -- they would need all new calculations to change their trajectory from Senuv, and likely the Birdmen are not advanced enough mathematically to help them.

The Phantom Bullet, Scourge of the Underworld, is next.  Nearly washed-up and cynical newspaper reporter Allen Lewis works for the Daily Bulletin, a name just too generic to be able to trace to a particular real city.

Despite the fact that at least five people have examined a crime scene before him, Allen is the first person to find a bird feather clutched in the dead man's hand -- proof that it always pays to examine the scene of the crime for clues, no matter how much later. A police officer at the scene also gives him a freebie, telling him what might have been a randomly rolled rumor, that hand prints have been found at the scene of three crimes that seemed to belong to a seven-fingered person. 

Players often pay little or no attention to the private lives of their characters when not adventuring; seldom is that more on display than when Allen's player calls his boss an idiot and tells him to write the story himself, before running off to do hero work.

The first indication that Allen may be a mysteryman comes pages later, when Allen makes a spectacular -- though still far from superhuman -- leap between rooftops. But Allen is still 1st level -- indeed, still in his origin story -- and is handily beaten in his first turn of combat when ambushed by "birdmen" (see a theme developing between stories...?).

Amazingly, Allen still has his job the next day and gets assigned to talk to an inventor, who just randomly decides to hand off his "invention" to Allen -- a gun that shoots ice bullets. This is what Allen needs to complete his origin story; armed with the gun, wearing make-up on his face instead of a mask, and wearing a bright-colored shirt and red cape -- because, you know, he'll need to sneak around and stuff -- he sets out to stop more murders. Off-panel, the Phantom Bullet uses his skills to move silently and climb walls to get around the police cordoning off a threatened man's home.

This time Allen shoots and kills one of the bad guys when they show up again, but there is no sign that the man has feathers; he just seems to be an ordinary black man. We also learn the plot finally -- the bad guys are killing rich men who refuse to hand over $500,000 to help fund a new government. The other two make off with the money and Allen has to move on to the next would-be victim.

This time, the man doesn't refuse and the money is picked up by a bum Allen recognizes. Cornering the bum, Allen recovers the undelivered money and finds out where it was supposed to go, the address being a local cemetery. Now, it would be great if this was the bad guys' hideout -- a nice, atmospheric location. But the cemetery is empty. Allen goes back to the bum and re-examines the envelope with the address on it; the correct address is in invisible ink and the first address was a phony clue.

The real hideout is an African explorer's house, or more precisely the caverns under the house (the Phantom Bullet finds the caverns off-panel). *sigh* ... in a decidedly racist twist, the "bird men" turn out to be half-black men/half-ape mutants wearing feathered headdresses as if they were American Indians. This resembles the beast men race we talked about adding to Hideouts & Hoodlums a long time ago, but I think I would just stat them as ape men. There are not two more of them, but five more of them, and they're dumb enough that PB can trick them into following him back upstairs to a window and then all jumping out after him like lemmings. PB had swung himself up to the top of the window ledge, and then comes down to shoot the evil explorer, ending the story (and saving a kidnapped young woman who just happened to be in the caverns).
 
Next up is Trojak the Tiger Man, a Tarzan clone. Normally, Tarzan clones have to be raised by animals to speak to animals, but Trojak was raised by an African tribe of humans and just happens to know how to talk to animals anyway. He also gets a tiger for a starting companion. His tiger, Balu (showing this feature steals from The Jungle Book as well as Tarzan), is shot, but is only lightly injured by it.

Trojak himself is shown to be able to bend a gun barrel, which is either a really lucky roll for a non-superhero at wrecking things, or maybe Trojak is a multi-class fighter/superhero. Further, subtle evidence of Trojak being a superhero might be the strange case of the unnamed woman in the white hunting party Trojak encounters and follows. At first, the woman is fine with her companions and their quest for gold, but over the course of days of observing Trojak following them, she starts to show disgust with her fellow travelers and an admiration for Trojak that can only be explained as sexual attraction -- or maybe use of the power, Turn Good.

(read at fullcomic.pro)