Speed Comics #7 - pt. 3

 We're back with Ted Parrish, the Man of 1000 Faces as he crosses over into a wizard duel in a Ditko-esque magical landscape...oh, what's that? Scarlo is jumping and not flying in panel 3? Panel 6 is just horribly drawn, with a big, long perspective line inked as it vanishes into a solid chimney and the rest of the roof behind him just vanishes because the artist got lazy? Well, that's disappointing.

Speaking of disappointing...as the Editor in a Hideouts & Hoodlums scenario, it behooves you to ensure that the players feel like their presence in the scenario made a positive impact; that they wouldn't have been better off just standing back and letting the police do their job. You know, like how Ted totally bungles capturing Scarlo alive here, when the two officers might have stopped him had Ted not got in the way. 

But there will be times when the dice rolls go so badly for the players that terrible results will happen, and then you need to have in-game consequences. You know, like how Ted must surely be wanted for manslaughter now.

Now we're going to jump all the way to the last page of Biff Bannon. Dick Briefer is going full-on Mad Magazine (only 11 years earlier) here with the frantic pace, zany humor, and exaggerated violence. That got me thinking about the H&H rules for modifying campaign mood to fit the style of comic book story you want to tell. If you wanted to run combat in zany mode, maybe every attack should push at double distance in addition to damage (instead of replacing damage), and you could hit as many targets as you want with the same attack so long as the method or results would be funny and inventive. 

I don't think this would work for campaign play, as there would soon be no suspense about whether the good guys win (it wouldn't be funny if the bad guys could hit as many people as they wanted), but it would be fun to try in a one-shot scenario.

And now I'm jumping full steam ahead into Lt. Jim Cannon and the mystery of the needlessly elaborate plot device. I mean, you can sink a ship with icebergs, or you can sink a ship with mines, but does putting the mines on the icebergs really do any extra good? If anything, it makes the mines easier to spot, which is what happens here.

Maybe I'm just so incredulous because Devilfish is such a non-threatening name for a villain. Anything-fish doesn't sound villainous. "You may call me...the Goldfish!"

That does look like a really long submarine. The longest submarine in WWII was Japan's I-400-class sub; at 400' long it held the record for two decades.

This is from Landor Maker of Monsters, and this installment is a weird, soap opera-y one that our Hero (and his girlfriend) doesn't barge into until the second to last page. What's interesting here is that Creeta is clearly an android, with steel wires controlling her body inside, and her weakness is the screw in her neck that ...well, I'm not sure how it kills her exactly, but turning it seems to do a lot of damage to her.

Bob Powell seems to be really rushing the art here too. He could do much better.

This is from Munson Paddock's Mars Mason. Mars is an interplanetary mailman because, you know, we're never going to have some kind of electronic delivery system in the future. Comic book science is as goofy as ever here, with that heat radiation wave that is somehow different than radio waves, but that's nothing compared to a ship from Jupiter leaving after a ship from Earth and moves fast enough to intercept it before it reaches Mars. I think we're going to have to accept that the Jupiter Men have extremely long range teleport technology. 

What really works here is the creative alien design work and, even more interestingly, the villain name Killraye. That is great and suddenly I want to use it (though I'd probably drop the e).   

This, this is one of the reasons why the AH&H Mobster Manual is still not done after all these years. I'll be reading "new" comics and it's the same old human bad guys, blah blah blah, and I'll be thinking I've seen everything new I'm going to see -- and then Mars Mason fights Jupiter Men. Now the Mobster Manual has to include these! This is marvelously inventive, with the spiky heads and strange growths in their faces (are those fangs? Short tentacles? Something else? Who knows!). Their bodies seem to be separated into two halves sort of shaped like wings, which would seem to make sense for a lifeform evolving on a gas giant (if the gravity wasn't so crushing), each side ending in five appendages like giant fingers. Each appendage ends in a tool, either a club or a hook, that I'm guessing are not natural (but you never know in comic book space).  

This first panel makes it look like their heads can detach. Maybe the heads are the only real part and the rest of the body is just something they wear? Crazy.

Almost as exciting is the multi-ray torture machine. Which ray will it be? Sounds like this item needs a random table, although apparently the differences are just flavor text and all of them eat out your vital organs. 

If you're feeling cheated because Mars has to get rescued, keep in mind he's only a mailman. 

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Marvel Comics #1

And now we finally reach this milestone. Until now, half the Hideouts & Hoodlums Hero races didn't make sense!

The Human Torch story that starts this issue is the inspiration for the android race. The special abilities of the android race emulate the ability to burst into flame, shoot flame, and take off into the air on a fiery jet -- though all these can be disguised through flavor text (like turning "Fiery Jet" into spring-loaded feet). Androids are H&H's verion of dwarves.

That The Human Torch is of the superhero class is evident by how much wrecking he does in this story (as if wrecking trucks, if not tanks). He's encased in a 10' cube of cement and busts out, he melts bars (as if wrecking doors).  He sets a warehouse and a regular house on fire (automatic, if around combustibles). He melts three doors, a truck, and the roof of a building (treat as a car). The amount of wrecking suggests to me that The Torch has three brevet ranks right here, despite being first level.

Other than wrecking, The Torch seems to demonstrate Fly I and possibly Nigh-Invulnerable Skin. At one point he badly scalds the mobsters who fled from him into a swimming pool by boiling the water -- I don't have a power yet for that one. Heat Water?

Sardo (that's an Italian name, apparently, though it always seemed science fiction-y to me), the villain in this piece, has a wealth of trophy items at his disposal -- he has a diving suit, a glass tube large enough to contain full-grown man, a gas mask, a gas bomb, a tank of liquid nitrogen, a tube of nitro gas, and a tank of sulfuric acid.

Likewise, The Sub-Mariner is the first merman hero in comics, and the inspiration for the merman race. Being able to breathe underwater was a given. We may or may not see faster swimming in this story. Later stories establish that mermen are weaker out of water, hence the wrecking things penalty out of water. And as for the magic resistance...it doesn't really emulate Namor at all, but mermen are H&H's version of elves, and I figured it helped round out the race and maybe would make it a more appealing choice to play.

Speaking of swimming faster, at one point Namor and Dorma travel from Antarctica to New York City in two days. That means they were traveling at, at least, 190 MPH -- way faster than I let mermen swim. That means they were either boosting their speed with a power, like Outrun Train, or -- even more likely, were using some sort of underwater vehicle we didn't see.

Wrecking wise, Namor crushes a diving helmet (wrecks as machine?), and he jams a rudder on a huge ship (maybe treat as a generator?). Curiously, Namor uses an axe to break glass at another time -- perhaps the only so far we've seen any kind of a limitation to how often a superhero can wreck.

Power-wise, he uses a leap power (probably Leap II) to catch a plane and Extend Missile Range (at least I, possibly II) to throw a man out to sea. Not a lot, so even though Namor surprises wrecks very little, he probably also has three brevet ranks even at first level.

Lastly, it is worth noting that Namor is actually only a half-merman. H&H works under the assumption that all half-mermen have the abilities of full-blooded mermen, though in actual comic books a half-merman is apparently more powerful than a full-blooded merman (this discrepancy could just be from Namor being higher in level too).

Both The Torch and The Sub-Mariner are also killers, or at least we know for sure that Namor is and The Torch very probably killed some people. They are Chaotic in Alignment.

The Angel also debuts in this issue. In many ways The Angel is typical of the Mysteryman tropes, particularly with how criminals fear him by reputation. For the most part, The Angel could even just be a Fighter, as he solves almost every problem with fists. But there is one instance where he leaps from the roof of a courthouse and lands safely. We never actually see the courthouse; we're just told this. So, maybe this courthouse has a really low roof, keeping The Angel from taking falling damage. Or maybe The Angel has unusually high hit points for a low-level Hero (high Constitution score?) and just absorbed the damage. Or maybe The Angel has a leap power and is actually a superhero? I'll watch for more evidence in future installments.

In the one-shot "Jungle Terror", the story's macguffin is a lost diamond in the Amazon and the apparently false rumor that the diamond can "enslave people". Rumors are good -- they get Heroes to go do things, and you only have to pay out on the rumors half the time! The twist in this story is that, instead of one diamond with special powers, our heroes find lots of ordinary diamonds. However, the Editor wisely doesn't give them time to collect them all, throwing endless waves of natives at them so they'll just snatch a few and run.

Lastly, I reviewed this issue on one of my Scottenkainenland blog.

(Issue read in Marvel Masterworks: Marvel Comics v. 1.)