Crackajack Funnies #20 - pt. 2

And we return with Freckles, which surprises me sometimes with its continued relevance to this blog. Here we see how easy it is to find treasure in the game -- particularly when the treasure is meant as a plot hook, and then you can literally snag it up anywhere.

An interesting code of colored lights for villains to use to communicate with each other.

I think I've mentioned elsewhere how natives need a better chance of hearing noise.

The cowboy genre has lots of reasons for bad guys to want to take someone's ranch by force, but this may be the first time the bad guys have wanted the ranch so they can turn around and sell it to the government. Won't the joke be on them if the government declares eminent domain on the ranch and builds the dam anyway!

Do natives also need a better chance of hiding in shadows, or should that apply to half-pints?

Sleight of hand is a skill you don't often see bad guys using, but this outlaw is an expert -- managing to move his hands over to an exposed axe right in front of Red and still goes unnoticed.

We haven't visited our old friend Myra North in awhile. Most male heroes solve problems with their fists; Myra solves this one with just her shoulder! I wrote recently about how a character should be able to sacrifice his chance at an attack to modify someone else's attack roll upwards, but here is an example of someone foregoing her attack to modify someone's attack roll downwards.

It's also interesting that this scene hinges on wind direction, an element often neglected in stories and RPG scenarios.

"Forcing away" needs to become a stunt in dog fights between aviators; basically a push attack, but without contact between the planes.

Power dive is already an aviation stunt, but I should probably write something about this tactic, of playing chicken with airplanes. It would apply equally to cars; the non-Hero/non-Heroes involved have to make morale saves or swerve out of the way. The Hero then has to make a save vs. science to pull out (or hit the brakes) in time to avoid the collision. Of course, the goal is to make your opponents swerve so hard that they crash, so they have to make saves vs. science if they fail their morale saves, crashing if they fail again (just not into you).

Blowguns are a surprisingly rare weapon in comic books.

According to Clyde Beatty, clowns have a soothing effect on crowds. Perhaps Heroes should bring clowns with them so their allies will all get a bonus to morale saves.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Terry and the Pirates (Large Feature Comics #2)

Like when I covered the first Large Features Comic, I did not have access to this particular issue. But I did have access to the daily strips it covered, from '35-'36, thanks to The Complete Terry and the Pirates vol. 1. Now I just have to think of some things to say about it.

Which was tricky. Although an action adventure strip -- if not considered the action adventure strip -- Pat and Terry spend a lot of there time in these early adventures getting captured, escaping as circumstances change around them, and then getting captured by the next villain.

One thing that strikes me as worth mentioning is that -- unless you want a higher mortality rate for Heroes than you see in the comic books -- villains are going to always choose to capture the Heroes when they can, even when it makes way more sense just to kill them out right. Even if the Heroes have already escaped from this villain before, he will nevertheless accept their surrender every future time it's offered. Maybe he wants to gloat. Maybe he is planning a fitting deathtrap for them. Maybe he just has to wait until after this important meeting he has to take (which Heroes then get to observe and glean plot information from!) before he can do justice to killing them.

Another thing is that Pat Ryan is the perfect example of a Hero who trades up on his supporting cast. Normandie is a cute, sweet romantic interest, but unarguably less than one hit dice. Pat can get more XP for forgetting her and moving on to a more dangerous femme fatale, like Burma, and then dump her for The Dragon Lady (obviously a higher-level Fighter) when she turns up. One thing about femme fatales I should clarify in the next edition rules -- even if they are in conflict with you, they still count as supporting cast.

I had been convinced by others that "hide in shadows" no longer belongs as a human trait, since the Mysteryman class essentially turns that into a class-based trait. Still, Pat, Terry, and Connie spent a lot of time hiding, and using darkness to their advantage. Now I'm not so sure again...

Detective Comics #23

Speed Saunders investigates a murder committed with a sharpened ski-stick that can be thrown like a javelin. Speed reveals that it has a range of 50', so a javelin would too.

Larry Steele, Private Detective, is hit with a blackjack and knocked out for 20 minutes, after which he wakes up.

The Crimson Avenger runs afoul of zombies in this issue; zombies made by science instead of magic. The science zombies are called "mechanical men" and "zombis", and are driven around by two hoodlums who work for a mad scientist. The scientist has a "giant" king cobra that the zombis are worship (though why they would worship the snake if they were mindless eludes me), but it's not really that giant -- large, maybe. It's also worth noting that they can be fooled by disguises, as The Crimson disguises himself as a zombie and successfully moves among them (definitely calls for a save vs. plot, that trick).

The Crimson also hides in shadows and the zombis are unable to spot him.

Bruce Nelson goes back to his alma mater of Princely University, clearly a stand-in for Princeton. He stops a murder from happening with a blowgun.

Speaking of stand-ins, Jerry Siegel likes to kill off stand-ins for famous people. In Spy, a senator is murdered (no indication as to which, but there's only 100 of them), and then a famous aviator who sure seems to be Charles Lindbergh is killed. The murderer is a mad scientist who has his hunchbacked assistant swap out buttons on the victims' clothes with buttons containing a radio receiver. The receiver buttons trigger heart attacks in the victims, apparently over long distances. the whole set-up is a pretty dangerous trophy item to put into the Heroes' hands.

The assistant, Rutsky, is quite capable. He climbs a tree with cat-like grace, sneaks up on a trained spy like Bart Regan, and almost throttles Bart to death with his bare hands. Maybe assistant should be a mobster type!

To find out where Dr. LaForge is, Bart just has to call the local newspaper office and talk to someone in the research department. The paper has on file what country Dr. LaForge is visiting from and where he's staying. Newspapers sure used to have generous budgets for research departments!

Cosmo, the Phantom of Disguise, has to shoot the head off a cobra to save someone. I'm as yet unsure if I need to distinguish between varieties of poisonous snakes, stat-wise, in 2nd edition, other than perhaps the large/huge/giant distinctions.

Slam Bradley and Shorty explore the distant future of 2 billion AD with the help of a scientist with a time machine (specifically a "time-flier" -- it looks like a plane, but it moves through time instead of space).  The time machine seems to work an awful lot like Wells' The Time Machine, down to history playing out at super-fast speed through a view screen.  Something else to point out is that time machines must be remarkably easy to make; in comic books, a single professor working alone is often responsible for creating them.

It's perhaps easier to send your time-traveling Heroes to the ridiculously distant future so it doesn't have to even resemble the present world anymore. But there's a danger of too powerful hi-tech trophies winding up in the Heroes' hands in any future scenario, as well as the temptation to find out knowledge of the future the Heroes can exploit to their advantage.

The future is sure different in some ways, with a metal sun in the sky shedding green light, and a mysterious body orbiting the artificial sun. Cities surrounded by a screen of death rays. There's still jungles in the future, and wild leopards in them, but if the time-flier hasn't moved through space, then the jungle is at the same latitude as New York City. Anticipating global warming...?

Shades of Gamma World, the future is ruled by humans, living with uplifted/mutant bird-men and uplifted/mutant plant-men!  They live on a monarchical society once again, answering to a prince. The weapons of the future consist of odder fare than Laser guns. They use pipes that can paralyze others with sound, or living missiles -- plants that can dodge in mid-air and spray poison gas.

(Issue read at Read Comics)