Marvel Mystery Comics #5 - pt. 1

We're heading back to check on Timely Comics today, back in (cover date) March 1940. This month, the Human Torch leaves New York City for the Midwest. It's the old story of a remote Alaskan village that needs urgent medical supplies but is cut off by the weather, only transported to a fictional island in the middle of Lake Superior because...I guess Alaska was too far? This weird island is covered in a glacier...I suspect Carl Burgos never visited Lake Superior and maybe heard some tall tales from Minnesotans about how cold and snowy it is there.

So HT leaves for the Midwest, but using the Newark Airport, which is an interesting choice. That's a real airport in New Jersey, and one New Yorkers still use today. The LaGuardia Airport had just opened months before this comic book would have been written.

HT, or Jim as his friends know him, has a supporting cast member named Johnson, who Jim isn't apparently on a first name basis with, but is still willing to come along on this dangerous flight to Lake Superior.

HT badly fails a skill check to pilot during a storm (probably at a penalty) and crashes their plane. In a rare occurrence, a Hero is knocked unconscious in a crash. The wrinkle here is that two hoodlums just got free from jail on the island (not sure how this island is big enough to have a jail, but okay...), they discover the plane, rob the medical supplies, and then set the plane on fire to get rid of the pilots.

I've never been fond of the Human Torch and reading these old stories make me less fond. It really bothers me how unscientific his powers work, that fire somehow answers to him as if it were alive. Nowhere is it more evident than in this story, where the fire forms a protective circle around HT, even while he's unconscious. So either he can subconsciously control fire in his sleep, which I think is way overpowered, or fire has some sort of collective consciousness, which is really weird and wonky. Now, once he's conscious again, using his Control Fire power to make the fire part for him -- that makes sense to me.

More wonkiness comes a bit later when HT falls into water and, instead of his fire being extinguished, the narrator says he was "ordering his flame out." Now, maybe there is a sensible explanation for that too. Maybe he extinguishes his flame voluntarily before the water extinguishes it because, if he turns it off then he can turn it right back on, while if it's extinguished, then he can't use his powers for a random amount of time.

Still more wonkiness is when HT searches a wooden cabin, while still ablaze, and doesn't combust anything. That Control Fire power really gives you complete control. But what you can't explain away with that power is towards the end when he encircles a pack sled and its dogs completely with fire, and the dogs keep running. That all six of them make their morale saves, at their Hit Dice, is rather incredulous.

There's an interesting wrinkle where HT flames on (he doesn't call it that; that's a Johnny thing) and his heat helps keep Johnson from freezing. Now, an Editor could hand-wave that as a common sense side effect...but it could also be a new power, Resist Cold, that a superhero can confer on someone else. We also see HT do sky-writing with flame, which I think we've seen before and needs to become a power in the Heroes Handbook.

Lastly, the two hoodlums plummet into the icy lake waters and die after HT melts the ice under their feet with a circle of fire. Whether he intended for that to happen is unclear...but he shows no regret, and we already have seen he has total control of his fire, so...

Next up is The Angel. The Angel's strength level is really up in the air in these early stories. Except for one text story that had him at Superman levels, he usually was only a strong human in most of his stories. Here, he can tip over a car with extreme effort (or a little help), so he can maybe lift 1,000 lbs. In Hideouts & Hoodlums terms, this is the Raise Car power, as there is no Can't Raise, But Can Tip Cars power (H&H deals more with abstraction than specific measurements). This isn't just a prank; it's all part of a plan to foil bank robbers by tipping over their getaway vehicle and any other vehicle on the street they can use to escape.

Angel then uses a length of rope (he must carry rope sometimes) to get to the roof and watch for them to come out. Note that he does not simply leap to the roof, so he has great strength, but not great leaping powers, again confirming that H&H is on the right track by making players choose which powers they have for each scenario.

Speaking of Raise Car, later in the scenario he is on top of a speeding taxi and pulls the driver out through an open window (if the taxi had air conditioning, maybe the hoodlum who carjacked it wouldn't have carelessly left his window down). Now, this seems to defy science, because you would think that even with great strength, someone with no way to brace himself would just fall over the side before being able to pull a braced man out the car window. Superpowers, luckily, defy science by their very nature. I might also, on a generous day, allow a Mysteryman using a stunt to do that as well.

For some reason, The Angel isn't wearing pants today.

Soon, when The Angel is swinging on that rope, one of the robbers manages to shoot the rope, and it seems to be merely accidental. There is some precedent for this, with firing into melee giving a chance of hitting a random combatant. For this to apply here, we would have to consider the rope and The Angel in "melee," which is a bit of a stretch. For the Editor to just randomly through in this complication would seem unfair in game play. 

The Angel joins a long line of comic book Heroes willing to use mobsters as living shields, but this might be the first Superhero to do so.

In the end, Angel decides to pummel the last of the hoodlums unconscious and he rains "blow after blow" on him. Now, in most game systems, a superhero's strength remains constant and the damage he would have done after just one blow might have knocked out an ordinary hoodlum. But here, a superhero has to buff his strength first before doing additional damage, so if he wanted the satisfaction of punching out a bad guy slowly with normal blows, that's very easy to do.

Next up is The Sub-Mariner, called the "Ultra-Man of the Deep" on the first page of his feature here. Demonstrating the difference in pace of Golden Age stories, the Angel story took place all in 10 minutes, while Namor accompanies a cargo ship to protect it for 3 days before the scenario even gets started.

Remarkably, Namor is said to communicate telepathically with the crew of his flagship submarine in this story. If you've ever wondered how Namor talks underwater...this would be how.

(Read at readcomiconline.to)

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

And we're back to Centaur Comics! This is Fantom of the Fair, though you wouldn't know that from this page. I really liked the early Fantom stories where he's hidden in the shadows and it looks like he could be Superman, so it's particularly interesting how much he looks like Clark Kent while in disguise here.

It makes sense to go in disguise when checking out a situation out of costume, and pretending to be a doctor may get you into places you would not normally be permitted to enter. But the fake English accent seems a strange addition.

That it takes the Fantom two punches to take down a rather ordinary mobster suggests to me that I was on the right track to keep superhero damage low except when they are buffed with powers.

And here, the same superhero who needed two punches to take down one guy, "literally mashed to a pulp" two guys. "Crashing blows" sounds like a good name for a new power, but most likely he activated his Get Tough or Get Tougher power.

Ever felt bad for hand-waving encumbrance rules in a RPG? Here, encumbrance is so unimportant that no one notices this nondescript English doctor is carrying three men at once.

This is going on behind the scenes in Daredevil Barry Finn. Bear in mind that, at the end of 1939/beginning of 1940, many Americans still want to remain isolated from the war in Europe, so people who want to arm for war can still be bad guys and not patriots.

I had to look up lemon soda. I'm only familiar with lemon-lime soda, but apparently lemon soda is still a thing, just not mass marketed (specialty grocery stores tend to carry it).

I'm liking Frogga as a character. Maybe more mermen should be like him in my campaigns.

Frogga's difficulty in wrecking through the hatch, even with a crowbar, makes me think he's a fighter rather than a superhero.

Note how "daredevil" Barry Finn does nothing this whole adventure but talk to people and tell Frogga what to do; like if Matt Murdock made Foggy Nelson do all the work...

This is The Inner Circle. I wasn't sure what "Itoria" was until the "Mafio" reference and then it all fell into place; the Inner Circle is about to tangle with the Italian Mafia, and the first time the Mafia has been named (or nearly named) in a comic book.

I suspect the blue hand tattoos are made-up...

Now, bear in mind that Carlos isn't supporting cast; the Inner Circle is presented as a group of equal Heroes -- so the IC committed the "cardinal sin" of splitting up the party. Now, I am not the type of Editor who forces Heroes to stay together as a group all the time; and in fact I am comfortable with having entire sessions where Heroes can pursue side projects or mini-quests during group downtime. But sending one solo and deep into enemy territory for such a risky mission -- even I would likely step out of character and advise the players against this.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

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.)