Rocket Comics #2 - pt. 4

I probably shouldn't be as impressed as I am with the adventures of Buzzard Barnes, and maybe I'm reading too much into things here, but as Barnes and Andy argue over who has the most kills, it reminds me of Legolas and Gimli. In addition, we get to see some of the things you can do during aerial combat, including setting each other's planes on fire, and shooting copilots.

Now this also intrigues me, probably being the first instance of a record being played backwards in a comic book.

I could tell Jack Cole's The Defender is a blatant ripoff of the pulp novel hero, The Avenger, but an even more knowledgeable fan on Comic Book Plus tells us that this story specifically plagiarizes the third Avenger pulp novel, "The Sky Walker." 

Pittsburgh is an unusual setting for a comic book story and might actually be its first appearance in one. 

Drinking carbolic acid is more of a save or die situation rather than doing points of damage - though I could see it still doing damage even if the saving throw vs. poison is made.

The first invisible plane in comics? I'm not sure about that...might have to go back through the blog to check.

It seems like the Defender is kinda' reaching here...wouldn't it be more likely that Peerless Steel just makes inferior product, than the conspiracy theory that Supex Steel is using a stolen ray from an invisible plane to damage any steel that's not theirs? Well, this is comic books, so...

Here's another mad science invention for your Hideouts & Hoodlums campaigns: a sound detector that can follow specific vibrations over a distance of miles, hours later (as unlikely as that seems). 

You'd think inventing a bulletproof airplane might have been a better use of his time...

I get why it was done this way, for story, so it would look like the villains were getting away, but I hope not too many H&H players will plant time bombs in enemy planes, rather than capturing the villains and turning them over to the police with evidence. Although, on second thought, this strategy keeps me from having to give out trophy planes to my players...

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

 

 

Zip Comics #2 - pt. 4

We're still on the War Eagles feature of this issue. This is the first guy named Kermit to ever appear in comics and, curiously, we never see him again past panel 4.

Tom's big plan is to gamble on a good encounter reaction roll from General Worth. He gets a great roll too, since Worth gives them a promotion and carte blanche freedom to act without supervision. It's a sweet deal, but perhaps a necessary one -- I've never had players interested in a military-themed campaign where they have to take orders all the time.









The Supermarine Spitfire, or Vickers Spitfire, was a British single-seat fighter aircraft used by the Royal Air Force and other Allied countries before, during, and after WWII, and was produced in greater numbers than any other British aircraft. Beside them are the Hawker Hurricane, a British single-seat fighter aircraft of the 1930s–'40s. It was overshadowed in the public consciousness by the Supermarine Spitfire's role during the Battle of Britain in 1940, but the Hurricane inflicted 60% of the losses sustained by the Luftwaffe in the engagement, and fought in all the major theatres of the Second World War, all according to Wikipedia.

I love the composition and art on this page and wonder what Ed Smalle had for photo references.

There are two "stunts" in play on this page. One is luring a plane into an ambush. Normally, your allies have no chance to surprise an opponent if they've already seen one of you, but that's assuming normal on-the-ground conditions where someone can turn and look in any direction. Visibility in aerial combat is really restricted to your facing, so I would roll for surprise for each individual plane.

The other stunt is forcing one plane to crash into another. This could conceivably happen on the ground too, as ramming damage with a vehicle should automatically force a morale save. If you keep getting "run away" results, and box the person in so he has nowhere else to go, he's going to run into someone from his own side. Although, on the ground, you might get a surrender result too -- something someone in a plane can't easily do.

Panel 1 reminds us Editors of something important: if the bad guys see you use smart tactics, they will try to use those same tactics too.

"Prop shattered" is an aerial combat complication.

My final observation from this page is that Tom's chances don't look too good...

Mort Meskin's Captain Valor returns this month and, while Mort still isn't up to his full artistic powers, there is still a lot to like about this Terry and the Pirates clone. You just have to get past some really bright yellow skin to get to it.

Hop-Lung's party on top of the ledge looks even in number to Valor's down below, but still has three advantages: height advantage gives them a +1 bonus to hit, the rocks along the top of the ledge give them hard cover, -2 to be hit, and the loose boulders give them potent missile weapons. The advantage Valor's party has is they are armed with rifles, with a longer short range, while it looks like Hop-Lung's party is only armed with pistols.

Anyway, what I like about this is that Occupied China is a dangerous place for low-level Heroes, where any act of defiance (like stealing an officer's car) has dangerous consequences. It also inverts how Alignment works; under these circumstances, a Lawful Hero can work with a pirate, because the pirate is an outlaw for defending his homeland. The Lawful Hero can steal an officer's car, because is strikes a blow against the invaders. The Chaotic guys aren't the only ones who get to have fun and go crazy in this setting.

I also like how Valor gets a fresh plot hook immediately upon finishing his first one, in panel 5. That's efficient storytelling/game play!

Are the sentries good shots? Based on what, exactly? Two of them are shooting at the car at short range, before it's had a chance to accelerate very fast, and are still missing.

In a bit of meta-gaming, Valor's player has already won over Angie and Ronny as loyal supporting cast members thanks to good recruitment dice rolls, but in-game is still pretending Valor wants to drop them off at the consulate.

Wait..where was all that dynamite and hand grenades? Sitting in the trunk of the officer's car?? No wonder the sentries didn't want to hit the car while it was still too close!

Valor throws that smoke bomb awfully close to himself. Good thing he's really sure it's a smoke bomb and not an incendiary bomb (skill check to identify, or is it written on the bomb?)!

If you're confused by the sides in this conflict, the bandits are still bad guys because they're attacking white people. The pirates are considered neutral because they only attack other Chinese people. The Japanese are the main bad guys, and every Chinaman is either a bandit, pirate, or working for the Japanese.

It really looks like Ronny's not going to survive that second tier of panels, but it must be a longer fuse on it than it appeared.

It's pretty dramatic, having to surrender the outer walls and retreat into a wooden cabin. If reinforcements had not arrived, I don't think they would have held out long in there. Once the invading bandits get up to the windows, the people inside lose all their cover bonuses (unless there's enough furniture inside to hide behind too).

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

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.)

Smash Comics #8 - pt. 4

Today we're picking up where we left off with Invisible Hood, still fighting his way through a modern medieval castle (a villain's favorite real estate!).

Here we see that objects being carried by the Invisible Hood are not themselves invisible.

We also get the first occurrence of the phrase "friendly ghost" in all of comics-dom. Take note, future Harvey Comics employees!

"Why, Kent - what are you doing here? And why are you also soaking wet, like I am? Say...you're not really the Invisible Hood, are you?" - Tom would say if he weren't a comic book character.

Brace yourself, because we have some really racist pages of Paul Gustavson's Flash Fulton to get through now. All you need to know is that Flash has come to the Amazon to find a missing explorer. Lots of people have come down here to search for Roger Hart, but none have succeeded. So maybe Flash can be forgiven for being suspicious when this native turns up as such a convenient guide.

It's bizarre how often South American natives are drawn looking like African natives in some of these early comic book stories. This is an example of what indigenous Amazonians looked like circa 1940.

Now one detail he got right I thought was wrong -- voodoo really is practiced in Brazil. It would be an imported religion, though, not something the indigenous cultures would practice.

Being a comic book, it should be no surprise Flash can speak with the native. The surprise is that Flash knows the native's tongue and the native isn't just speaking in broken English.

Brazil has states,not districts, and there is no Kitawa state in Brazil. "Kitawa" doesn't even look like a South American word and, indeed, the only Kitawa I can find is in Papua New Guinea!

Again, Paul is right on some details; there are/were cannibals in the Amazon.

"Hey, our guide just jumped overboard!"

"You think we should just let him go since he helped us get this far?"

"No, there's a chance he'll betray us. Let's both shoot him in the back!"

Okay, enough of that! I think you can guess that they used sound effects to startle the superstitious natives, ho hum.

Turning now to my second favorite feature, John Law, Scientective! In many ways, John Law is like a second draft of Harry Campbell's earlier character, Dean Denton (featured heavily in my repackaging of Funny Picture Stories, on sale now!). Just like how Dean had to figure out who his nemesis, The Conqueror, was, John is narrowing down which of 13 suspects is The Avenger.

And, along the way, we get some science lessons, like how to leave threatening messages on other people's windows.

Sometimes the science is a little shaky for a science-based hero. I mean, compared to the average golden age comic book story, this still reads like an issue of Scientific American. But I can't figure out how the short wave heat inducing transmitter -- we call those electric heaters today -- managed to set the mattress on fire, but not the ceiling above it.

Now, John's scheme to unmask the Avenger is a little convoluted here and may require some explanation. It isn't obvious, but you have to assume that The Avenger is calling John in panel 8 to gloat. It certainly isn't a smart move on The Avenger's part, but John did bait him with the newspaper headline and villains have to save vs. plot to keep from gloating when given the chance.

It's worth pointing out that this is a time before there you could access multiple phone lines with the same phone. So if you wanted to have 13 phone lines, as John sets up here, you need 13 telephones to do it.

Also note the cartoon of Hitler with swakstikas for eyes on the front page of the newspaper.

Sometimes we have to look at Gill Fox's Wun Cloo, despite the painful racism of it, because there are interesting concepts hidden in here. Now, getting a robber to agree to pull into a gas station and park over the car lift is probably the hard part, but if he falls for it, you can lift it off the floor and threaten to set the floor on fire so he can't get out safely.

This is actually a bit of clever naming; the Tennessee Valley is large and the Tennessee Valley Authority built 50 of these dams since 1933. So when you call it the Tennessee Valley Dam, that can be a real dam, without knowing which one.

So Wings hunts down the "pirate dirigible" (even though it's pretty clear a foreign government is responsible for this attack, and for the life of me I can't figure out why he's shooting at the little gondola and not the giant bag of hydrogen directly above it. Does Wings just not like easy victories? "Getting the engine" is definitely a bad result on a random complications table for aerial combat.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Keen Detective Funnies #18 - pt. 4

Only because I'm a Harry Campbell fan, I'm going to devote one more blog post to this issue, devoted entirely to Dean Denton...despite Dean not being my favorite of Campbell's characters, and this installment in particular being terribly racist.

At least Campbell, as usual, had done his homework. "Bomba" is Boma, capital city of the Belgian Congo, and is still an important city in the Democratic Republic of the Congo today.

The text makes it sound like Katanga is a city, but it is a province in the southeast corner of the Congo. The narrator's assertion that Katanga is 700 miles away is pretty accurate.

"Compagnie Belgique" is not a real thing, but seems very plausible, even though  the correct way to say it would be "Compagnie de la Belgique," or Belgium Company.

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Here we see a rare example of kit-bashing hi-tech trophy items during an adventure instead of during downtime. This is how a scientist class would use powers, which would here include a new power, Detect Radiation.  It's a weird sort of power and not how, I think, Geiger counters actually work. It's functioning here more like a long-range Locate Object spell, or a Find the Path spell, rather than detecting something's presence in a certain radius.

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Oh look, Dean is sexist now too. Sigh...

You're going to have to choke down some really terrible dialogue on this page, but one interesting piece of dialogue is the unusual phrase from Dean, "you're like money from home!" While certainly rare today, I wonder if this was a more common saying circa 1940.

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And check out that sleight of hand! Has Absalom been carrying rabbits and canaries around in his pockets all this time, just hoping for an opportunity to do a magic act? Or is there more than even simple cantrips going on here? It almost seems more like an Animal Summoning spell!

This page is troubling to me, from a game mechanics perspective. We have an aerial dogfight and, the way I have the mechanics for this working out in my head, you make attack rolls each turn you are facing your opponent's plane and the more hits you get, the more a percentage chance of a random complication happens. I see this all the time in dogfight scenes -- but not this one, where the plane simply goes down without explanation, almost as if it had simply run out of hit points.

I guess I will need to watch for more examples.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Zip Comics #1 - pt. 3

This is still Kalthar, and we've rejoined him just in time to find out where he hides his magic potions. Is invisible panther hair whiskers? I wonder why the grains even need to be tied to his ears, as weaving them into his hair (if it was longer) would have been much more sensible.

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Being normal size means Kalthar isn't buffed by any powers. In such a state, five guards are easily enough to take him down.

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Unlike many other strips, it is clear that not everyone is speaking English; Kalthar just happens to know all their languages. I honestly don't see much difference between that and having them all speak the same language, although we'll talk about this more on the next page...

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It's interesting that throwing spears at a Hero when he can move around is combat, but if he's tied up, it becomes a deathtrap, with the separate rules that apply to deathtraps (zero hit points means death instead of unconsciousness).

It seems like Kalthar is using some kind of power to summon apes, but if the apes are considered his SCMs, and he's just shouting for them, and they're near enough to hear it, isn't there a good chance they would just come anyway...?

Here's where requiring Heroes to know different languages might actually be useful in the game -- because knowing the language can form a connection with someone, and give you a bonus (+1?) to your encounter reaction roll.

Kalthar can clearly speak with animals as well. I do not want to give this ability all Heroes, and in fact brought up on this blog a long time ago that the Explorer class should get the speak with animals ability. Maybe Kalthar is multi-classed?

And last on this page is a rare example of an elephant being able to wreck through a stone wall. Elephants sure are strong!

Here, for the first time, we learn that Kalthar grows 15' tall when he's activating his powers, which seems to include Nigh-Invulnerable Skin and Multi-Attack.

This feature is War Eagles. Six am seems awful early to start playing Dawn Patrol (TSR joke there).

One of the nice things about this strip is that it includes the name of each plane at the bottom. I don't have to compare the drawings to photos and guess anymore!

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If I ever manage to write my own aerial combat rules, trying to gain control of the facing of your opponents will be a critical function in combat.

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Always make sure there is some downtime in your campaign for role-playing. Friendly rivalries are a good role-playing opportunity. Romances are a little more challenging for most roleplayers.

It seems almost too good to be coincidence that the twins like a Helen Carter, like Captain America would later like a Sharon Carter.

Again, we get the name of a plane to help with research, though that is awfully hard to read...

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A lot of the H&H rules still can apply to aerial combat, including using skills to move silently and gaining surprise before combat -- just occurring at much faster movement rates.

...and yet there still seems to be a need for specific aerial stunts that work more like they used to for the 1st edition Aviator class. Here we see the stunt Power Dive in use.

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This is also a prime example of the amount of carnage that can go on in a war-themed campaign. The goal seems to be accruing the highest possible death toll -- which is perfect for racking up XP in a campaign where finding treasure and trophies is not the goal.

Here we have a villain turn up. You can identify villains by their ability to make return appearances; so, basically, anyone who survives going up against the Heroes could be a villain. The problem here is, the twins haven't actually met or interacted with Anton Schultz, so there's no fun in making him a villain.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Feature Comics #29 - pt. 2

I sure hope those cows are okay!

Rance Keane goes over the evidence and finds the hard-to-miss one -- the railroad spike has been removed -- and one that feels a bit like overreach -- because he only finds the print from a right shoe, he presumes that there was only a right shoe. Odd that he isn't suspicious about not seeing the marks from a cane or crutch at the scene. Did he think the saboteur just hopped around?

Rance not only thinks he has the right to go snooping under the beds of people he suspects, but if he finds two matching shoes he thinks he has irrefutable evidence. This reminds me of a school of thought when it comes to game refereeing which advocates having no planned solution to a problem, but just go along with whatever solution the players come up with.

A rare instance of a hatchet being used as a missile weapon, and of a male supporting cast member fainting (failed morale save, not a failed loyalty save).

This is Captain Fortune climbing around, finding that even on cliffs there can be encounter areas. The skeleton with the warning pinned to it is great hideout dressing.

Slim and Tubby encounter bad guys with an unusual strategy -- they lose on purpose, to make the good guys look bad. In certain circumstances (like this boxing ring) it could work.

And we'll wrap up with Spin Shaw, who's in an aerial dogfight with unidentified, but possibly Japanese, planes. The fighting maneuver most used in this fight appears to be a wingover, though it is never named by the narrator. I just found this Wikipedia entry, which I will definitely have to incorporate in the Heroes Handbook.

Forcing a pilot to crash is, interestingly, not listed among the basic fighting maneuvers I linked to above.

I'm not sure a parachute would just pop open and spread out like that...in fact, I'm inclined to doubt it (save vs. science to make it happen?). I'm also not sure how swinging overhead keeps Spin from getting shot at; more likely he just won initiative that turn.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)