Popular Comics #49 - pt. 3

UGHH...the new Blogger is so terrible, I hate to even work with it. We'll see if I can plow through and at least finish this issue.

Captain Tornado finally earns some points -- despite how Jane is dressed, he keeps his eyes facing nice and high -- and then promptly tosses them away with senseless violence. "Giant eyes! I can't even see what it is, if it's dangerous or not, or what it's intentions are -- but I'm a'gonna shoot it anyway!"  

That's a pretty dynamic first panel for a strip this otherwise...well, I still don't know what to make of this strip. Let's try to work it out together, shall we? 

Pro: Moon Mountain Manor sounds like a great name for an adventure module.

Pro: Although the Village of Rose Hollow seems to be fictional, there is a Rose Hollow Valley in Baxter County, Arkansas that is near the Ozarks.

Con: A minor quibble, but newspapers don't print their headlines in color.

Pro? Con?: The story turns conventions on their head by having the unattractive scientist in the lonely laboratory overlooking the village be the hero instead of the villain.

Con: The laughably named Mancho Phyroe. Mancho makes me think our hero is Spanish, but what to make of Phyroe...?

Using field glasses to read cablegrams at a distance is a sound tactic.

"Yugrarvia" surely refers to the then-Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

This page brings up a good point about the importance of thinking about where your hideouts are getting their electricity. If from the local power grid, it is too easy for the Heroes to turn that power off, but if the hideout has its own dynamo, you must place it somewhere. 

I am wondering what is supposed to be so "horrifying" about that laboratory. It looks more "intriguing" than anything.

"Soft-shoe prowl" is a cool term.

This is a rare occurrence of a Hero using a chimney to navigate vertically through a hideout, but it is a good idea to be prepared for this in-game.

I'm amused by, not only how the death ray says "death ray" on it, but that he's advertising it took nine tries to perfect it. 

There are no unexplored frequency bands in the vicinity of the X-ray; those are ultraviolet rays and gamma rays.

1,000 miles is a crazy long range for trophy weapons, but not that unusual in the comics. Consider carefully its effect on game balance, since players can get their hands on these. 

Wing-walking was a stunt for Aviators in 1st edition Hideouts & Hoodlums.

Gas tanks exploding is a fairly critical complication for aerial combat.

Shark is smart to rescue his opponents, as it does give him people to question for information.

In 1940, the "medical magic of the hypodermic" likely refers to morphine.

Here is a rare occasion of Asians speaking an actual foreign language instead of broken English.

The Syndicate sounds like a criminal organization, but here seems to be refer to a national alliance (the Axis, perhaps?). It does not seem to be a coincidence that the bad guys here seem to be Japanese.

Being able to throw destroyers against the Heroes does make it a seriously high-level challenge.

 

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Amazing Man Comics #9 - pt. 4

Picking up where we left off with Mighty Man, here we see the asssistant (the dog man...though I'm inclined to pass on statting a dog man mobstertype) attacking MM with a garrotte of chain. This would be one of those examples we were just talking about of an improvised weapon that would do half-damage -- and maybe one-third damage, if we were honestly taking into account a 5 1/2' tall dog man dangling from the neck of a 12' tall man (conveniently drawn much closer to the same size on this page).

Though I'm mainly including this because a garrotte of chain was an important weapon in a fanfiction piece I just recently wrote, which I thought was a pretty cool coincidence.

Now for our last feature, the Shark.  First we get an interesting cutaway that shows how a schooner could serve as a concealed submarine dock. And then we see the Shark's "super television set" acting like a Crystal Ball. Better than a crystal ball, because normally you need to know what you're looking for to use a crystal ball. The Shark must have asked it to show him where the subs were docking and it did it, solving the mystery for him. I really don't recommend giving out trophy items like this.

The Shark is using a Raise  power here, but which one? A submarine in 1940 could have weighed over 1,000 tons, but that's out of water. Underwater, it would still weigh at least 600 tons. That would require a 6th level Raise power -- and those don't even exist in Hideouts & Hoodlums (yet). This also means the Shark would need to be a 12th level superhero. At this point in his published career, the Shark hasn't earned enough XP to even be 2nd level yet, so that means 11 brevet ranks!

An example of wrecking in the battleship category, and of using powers and wrecking to provoke morale saves, which end in complete surrender and the two signed confessions (it is interesting how the Shark gets two copies, and we'll see why shortly).

Push Ocean Liner is a 5th level power, but one intended to require the superhero to be constantly pushing the ocean liner, not giving it just one good shove. This would be something the as-yet unnamed 6th level Raise power (Raise Submarine?) would allow, so the duration must still be going on it since his previous use (which makes sense, as he's been in no combat, so he's in exploration turns).

An unusual strategy of locking the mobsters in, rather than going in and getting them. Plus we get some more examples of wrecking things. Since the wrecking he's doing is disabling, but not sinking the schooner, I would use the robots category.

And here's the big reveal -- that second confession is left behind at the schooner, so the coast guard will find it when they come to rescue the spies on board. When I do run high-level games of H&H (it doesn't happen often, but our current campaign has 6th level Heroes, so it's coming...), I hope the players will just have fun messing with much weaker bad guys, like this, rather than expecting to be challenged all the time.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)