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.)

Shadow Comics #1 - pt. 1

I have access to an incomplete copy of this issue, so I'll review what I can.

The first Shadow story takes place somewhere near the U.S.'s largest munitions works, which is interesting, because that would not likely be by New York City. I haven't been able to find out exactly what was the U.S.'s largest munitions works in 1940, but I know the Navy's biggest munitions works was out on Nebraska because, you know, putting that much explosives next to a major metropolis probably isn't a great idea...

Is the Shadow a fighter or mysteryman? Other than walking the ledge of a building, he does little that would count as stunts. He's also really ruthless, slaughtering all the enemy agents, including a woman.

The next story is Iron Munro, another future hero, this one set in 2093. It starts with Iron, being one of the last five survivors of a Ganymede colony, finally escaping Jupiter's gravity to get help from Earth. The science is okay...Ganymede is said to be −120 °F when it's really more like -343 °F. The escape velocity from Jupiter would have to be 2.4 times faster than Earth, but it's weird that anyone would set up a Ganymede colony while being unprepared for that. The author also thought Ganymede would have an atmosphere, when it doesn't. The 1,000 MPH winds would be closer to realistic for Jupiter, but tend to top off below 400 MPH.

Why are there no colonies between Earth and Ganymede?

Iron doesn't know that Earth's President died five years earlier, despite radio waves only taking 35 minutes to each Jupiter from Earth.

Iron is a superhero on Earth, using the Multi-Attack power to beat up the soldiers he first encounters on Earth. It also appears he can safely jump 50' down without injury, using the Leap I power.

Gold is still valuable in the future.

The current President becomes Iron's Supporting Cast Member, and follows him off-planet on adventure!

Iron's new spaceship is solar-powered. It can travel at almost one-fifth the speed of light. News to science: when an object strikes another object at that speed, they get shunted into another dimension. In this new dimension, the sun is blue. No idea how that makes sense...

Next up is that other stalwart of pulp fiction, Doc Savage! Doc Savage is in the delicate situation of having to put down an uprising of natives in an African colony...allegedly to keep the natives from being slaughtered, but it also looks like Doc is okay with maintaining the status quo of colonialism.

True to a Doc Savage story there are elements of mystery here; who put the handwritten note on the dead man's body? But because this story is much shorter than a Doc Savage novella, the answers come in one page (spoiler: it was the villain, Von Guyter, to lay a trap for Savage).

Doc escapes from being tied up thanks to a mini-flamethrower in his belt buckle -- which is a cool trophy item for Heroes, but one Doc has never needed in his stories, since he's easily escaped being tied up before. Doc also carries a vial of liquid explosive, good for pouring into rifles to wreck them, and if he pours it into fire it -- no, it doesn't explode (for some reason), it makes a smokescreen.

Carrie Cashin is a female detective with her own feature...but she's not a very good detective. She picks up a suspect's dropped gun with her own hand, obscuring any useful fingerprints. "Don't you know it's a penal offense to send threatening notes?" she asks, as if unaware that any law violation, even a misdemeanor, is a penal offense.

Pulp hero Nick Carter gets his own adventure, but the only thing remarkable about it is that the "hatchet men" Nick fights are refreshingly un-stereotyped, wearing ordinary suits and using knives as weapons.

The next feature is the unfortunately named Diamond Dick, and you would never in your life guess that Diamond Dick is a frontier scout character. The story takes place at Fort Advance, currently under the command of General Custer. Interestingly, I couldn't find evidence that Fort Advance was real, but a Fort Advance does figure into the dime novels of Buffalo Bill. Diamond uses a two-gun fighting style, highly unusual in 19th century stories. He makes a disarming shot with one gun, but only shoots the hat off the man's head with the other, seemingly verifying that holding two weapons doesn't give you a meaningful second attack in comic books (and in Hideouts & Hoodlums).

Dick escapes from Indians and finds the fort's horses the Indians are keeping; the story doesn't say how he finds them. It would make sense if he used his tracking skill, but it seems more likely that he just luckily stumbled across them while running away. The horses only have a single guard on them, a mistake bad guys often make in fiction.

---

Jake Bigley, the evil trapper who sold the stolen horses to the Indians, leaps down on Dick from a tree to give himself both a height advantage bonus (+1) and a from behind bonus (+2) to his surprise attack. In the ensuing conflict, it appears that Dick is grappling to keep Jake's knife away, which is technically true because if Dick initiates a grappling attack, Jake can only grapple back. If Jake won initiative and attacked with his knife first, then Dick's grappling attempt might just be flavor text.

(Read at readcomiconline.to)

Amazing Mystery Funnies #18 - pt. 2

We're still looking at Jon Linton's adventures in the future; a future where men wear robes and women wear short skirts.

It seems like a huge design flaw that Satan Rex's atomic power plant is controlled by two exposed electrodes. I was going to say the place should also have some fail-safes in place, but I suppose the power shutdown is a fail-safe, preventing something worse like a meltdown.

I don't think any 1940 writers knew about meltdowns yet...and yet, Harry Campbell did seem to have more knowledge of science than your average comic book writer of the time, so...?

I just complimented Campbell for his smarts, but there seems to be a glaring mistake here; two pages back, Jon learned the systems would need 30 minutes to reboot, and here the "wall of force" is rebooting well before then. Of course, maybe Satan was smart enough to have a back-up system kick in for the force wall.

It's interesting that Campbell calls it a wall of force and not the more common term, force field (in use in science fiction going back to 1920!). Wall of Force is, of course, a magic-user spell as well.

The second to last panel spells out that the Scientist class normally takes a week of downtime to invent something, but has a chance to kit-bash something in just a day.

The Mount Wilson Observatory telescope would be the largest in the world until 1949. I'm not sure where the "6,000 billion million miles" came from, but researchers could see nebulae over 5 trillion miles away.

The "reveal houses on the moon, if there are any" is as optimistic as telepathic television-phones.

Bill and Davey is an odd duck, a comic strip coming from a minor league syndicate that was picked up by both Dell and Centaur (though neither for long). It's hard to see what they saw in it -- unless they just picked it up cheap.

There were headhunters, and cannibals as well, on the Solomon Islands, so while the depiction of Ajax might seem racist, the description isn't. 

This is Tippy Taylor on Fantasy Isle, a non-subtle rip-off of Swift's Lilliput. This scenario should be a cakewalk for even a class-less half-pint; since I'm still working on the assumption that 1 hit point represents roughly 30 lbs. of mass, and a 6" tall person would weigh less than an ounce, then Lilliputians...or Fantasy Islanders don't even come close to having a full hit point, or being able to do any damage themselves.

The tank poses more of a threat, even scaled to tiny size. Since it's the size of a gun, I would allow it to do a full 1-6 points of damage if it shot Tippy in the leg.

That must be a 3' high jump by Tippy. Impressive! 

This is John Degen, Private Detective, from a one-shot called "The Fiend of Halwith Hall." Shadowing someone, by car, on a country road, should be a basic skill check.

John is smart to head straight to the cellar, as most of the good stuff in a hideout is underground.

John has a skeleton key, a minor trophy item that gives him a bonus to skill checks when opening locked doors.

Here we have a mad scientist with the emphasis on mad. Like many mad scientists, he wants to do a brain transplant. Now, he might be just a raving loon, or maybe he has the science to do it; we never do find out.

Two wolves are unusual pets for a mad scientist.

The pit trap in the driveway is very unusual. It also doesn't make a lot of sense, since the car was parked when John goes inside, and is in the pit trap after he gets out. Maybe it took a long time for the weight of the car to activate the trap?

That's a lot of blood loss, to make the gunpowder too wet to burn. The Hideouts & Hoodlums rules don't account for blood loss and there's no way to make yourself bleed faster to foil traps.

Wow, that is one dark ending. It's rare for Heroes in comics to fail, but John not only failed to save this poor guy, but we find out just what horrible fate befell him.

Lastly, we're going to look at a verbose page of Larry Kane, investigating "The Ghost of Kirkwood." There's a pretty good set-up for a haunted house scenario here, with lots of rumors being supplied on this page.

My curiosity has been aroused too, but it's late and I'll read the rest next time!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Keen Detective Funnies #18 - pt. 2

This is still Spark O'Leary, that famous Irish newshawk who doesn't look remotely Irish. In fact, doesn't he look Asian to you? I wonder if he was drawn with the intention of him being Asian, and the publisher decided to paste an Irish name onto him instead, thinking no one would notice or care.

Spark has such an easy time following these clues that it's amazing the feds asked him to pursue this instead of just figuring it out themselves. In fact, there was so much evidence immediately pointing to Kurt that I immediately suspected a red herring; maybe the FBI did too!

---

It's rare to see ordinary mobsters with a really cool trophy weapon, but this unnamed spy has a tear gas gun! I would imagine it has the range and area of effect of a sleep gas gun, but is less effective (temporarily stunning anyone who fails their save vs. poison?).

It's remarkable that as dramatic an escape to a deathtrap as we get on this page is all recapped in panel 4 alone. I'm not sure how you could dodge out of the way fast enough to make someone pushing you fall out of a plane...but it does create a precedent for fumbles being allowed on push attacks!

But panel 5, with him knocking himself out, Scotty in Star Trek V style?

There's no way to emulate that in game rules; I'm not going to make people roll for movement, with a chance of fumbles and hurting themselves. The only way that makes sense is if there was a lot of turbulence on the plane and the Editor required saves vs. science to keep from falling sideways.

Seditious pamphlets is minor loot you can find with certain types of mobsters.

Setting fire to the ship you're standing on is a ballsy move!

Speaking of ballsy playing, I think we all know the real reason Spark wants to find the hideout -- he burnt up all the trophy items on the ship and he needs more loot to level up!

Rigging an entire hideout to blow up is not a recommended tactic, unless you didn't have time to design anything before the next session and you really don't want the players going in there.

---

I'm never sure how much faith to have in these "fact" filler pages, but there's some interesting stuff here, including number of teens arrested in a year (I suppose I could verify that in the FBI's Crime in the U.S. serial, but I'd have to find a depository library to get paper copy of the 1940 issue; I can't find it that early online), where the term "gumshoe" comes from, and which states had no capital punishment circa 1940.

---

C-Man shows the value of questioning, not just one witness at the scene of a crime (and expect the Editor to feed all the information you need through one character -- that's lazy game-mastering!), but up to seven witnesses. Actually, if the Editor assigned a 1 in 6 chance for each witness to have valuable clues, there would be a good statistical chance of getting the information in just 6 witnesses.

---

Cigars with distinctive wrappers, fresh car tracks, footprints, broken twigs, and heel marks are all good examples of clues to use when Heroes are tracking.

Going to jump ahead now to Dudley Dance, a feature about "the greatest crime chaser of all time" and not, as one would expect, a dancer. Here, Dudley tackles -- or rather is tackled by -- one of the earliest werewolves in comics. Or is it another case of a fake werewolf?

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"Leather hardness of Dance's cheek"? What does the man do to develop such thick cheek calluses that they count as armor? Seems like an Editor that had trouble coming up with believable flavor text on the spot.

Hmm...six shots in rapid succession is possible in Hideouts & Hoodlums, but not for low-level Heroes. I hate giving firearms any advantage, actually, as my personal preference is for two-fisted fighter types, but there is plenty of gun-toting Heroes in these early comic books the H&H game has to emulate.

The story ends with a lot of attempting to explain away the werewolf as something non-supernatural, but it just sounds like he's just describing a tribe of werewolves that live in India to me...and that sounds like a pretty good adventure location for high-level Heroes!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Keen Detective Funnies #18 - pt. 1

Ah, Masked Marvel, such an odd duck. This post might be more therapy rant than useful game content...

This installment starts with the beginning of what should be an epic quest to discover the lost city of gold. While everyone on Earth knows that El Dorado is the name for the mythical lost city of gold, this story insists on calling it Ora. I did a quick Internet search to see if there was any precedent for calling it Ora, but all my search results were for the upcoming movie Dora and the Lost City of Gold. Coincidence...?

Naturally, any human beings living along the Amazon River will be wild savages? What is your doctorate in, Lincoln, racism?

The trope of a highly civilized forgotten race is as old as pulp fiction. It's also a trifle racist.

Bear in mind, this is a Masked Marvel story.

I was expecting the Internet to be able to tell me what was 10 days upriver on the Amazon, but travel by water isn't so (ahem) cut and dried as that. Let's assume you made very good time over those 10 days and made it as far as the Colombian border. That would put you at or near the town of Leticia. I haven't found much information on Leticia in 1940, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't full of wild savages.

In fact, I found this video as the only evidence of what daily life looked like along the Amazon in the 1940s. Some workers did go around in nothing but shorts, but it is extremely unlikely that you would find a chieftain in a loincloth at this time.

Now, this is after the rubber boom, when native workers were first exploited and civilization was first brought to this region as resources were funneled away from them. Before 1920, yes, it might have been more likely to find natives in loincloths back then.

Remember how this was as Masked Marvel story?







Oh come on! The "natives can be bribed with booze" trope? I'm not putting that in my description of the mobstertype. I will have a note about sometimes using poisoned weapons, though.

Oh yeah -- the Masked Marvel! This is nine pages into the story and MM hasn't even got there yet. So here he is, speeding recklessly to make up for lost time. You'd think this was a timed tournament round by how quickly he's trying to get to the scenario.














At last, the City of Gold! Time for a climactic fight to the finish between the Masked Marvel and the diabolical -

Oh what the heck!? He snipered the villain from a distance? Who is the hero in this piece again? I'm betting it's the natives who were smart enough to leave the old abandoned city alone.

Okay, phew...got that out of my system. We've just enough space left to look at this month's Spark O'Leary, Radio Newshawk feature. Now, this scenario intrigues me, not so much for the spy tapping code over the radio, but the angle of it possibly being a traitor in Spark's supporting cast! This is a good story to throw at players who have amassed large supporting casts in long-term Hideouts & Hoodlums campaigns. Look at that -- brought it back to gaming right at the end!

"Of course I can!"

"Then why haven't you already done it?"

"I was waiting for a player-character to tell me to do it!"

It's a truism that's difficult to avoid...you want your game to be realistic, but you also want your players' characters to be the heroes and the planners, forcing non-Heroes to stand around and wait to be told what to do all too often. The reverse problem is when your Editor-controlled non-Heroes are too proactive and the players feel they have to go along with something the Editor is "telling" them to do. 

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Action Comics #21 - pt. 1

Superman is nearly a two-year old concept by this point. He still works for the Daily Star, so this is still taking place in Cleveland. Or is it? This is the first story in which the city is called Metropolis. Ultra-Humanite is still his main villain (now villainness). Clark Kent writes an article for the Daily Star about Terry Curtis and his atomic disintegrator, an article that Ultra reads, making Clark responsible for the danger Terry soon finds himself in. 

Although Clark gets a serious clue as to who Terry's new girlfriend is (she looks like the very actress Ultra's brain now inhabits? Hmm...), it takes him a surprising amount of time -- a week, in fact -- to guess at the truth (clearly he has not read much fiction and doesn't know how villains return from seemingly dying). Superman's player has to take the full blame for this, as there is no game mechanic for solving clues. It seems like the player was just tired of going after Ultra, feeling the Editor was forcing the same villain on him too often. Instead of being flexible, the Editor simply ups the ante, as Ultra is soon extorting $2 million from Metropolis over the threat of the disintegrator, forcing Superman to finally deal with this.

Ultra forces Terry's obedience with a "torture ray" that projects a blinding light into his eyes. It only takes several hours (1 rest turn) for the ray to break him. The new version of the disintegrator Terry makes is a raygun that can be mounted on the front of a plane. The narrator calls the plane a "fantastic air-vessel," but it clearly resembles a 1937 Boeing Flying Fortress. 

Ultra demonstrates the disintegrator on the Wentworth Tower. I can't find any evidence of anything like a Wentworth Tower in Cleveland, so that seems to be more evidence that we're in a fictional new city now.

Superman finally uses a power, Raise Building, to hold up the tower until all the bystanders are clear. It is very unclear if Superman is flying or leaping in this story. He manages to dodge the raygun in mid-air, but then has to descend to the ground. This is why I put into the power Leap III that the leaper can make a 45-degree turn in mid-air. 

That Superman is able to trigger an eruption in the volcano Ultra is using as his new hideout makes me suspect the location is Ecuadaor, since the last time a volcano erupted in the Americas was the Sangay Volcano there in 1934. Superman hitches a ride on an airplane -- on top of the airplane -- to get to Ecuador, so the only power we need concern ourselves with here is perhaps the use of Hold Breath when the plane rose too high in the atmosphere, or perhaps a Resist Cold/Endure Elements power to cope with the temperature at that altitude.

Ultra's hideout is a glass-sheathed "city" inside the volcano. It is the first, but not the last, time that Jerry Siegel would toy with the notion of hiding lost ruins of forgotten civilizations in Superman's world. 

Ultra sics "huge" robots on Superman, making it his first battle ever with robots. They appear to be man-sized, though.

Superman is stopped by a trap -- if he crosses a photoelectric beam in the room, a disintegrator raygun aimed at Metropolis will be turned on remotely. It's a diabolical trap, but it's got some issues. Could Ultra have really created an intercontinental remote control, or is he bluffing? And what if Superman just left the room, came around it, and broke through the opposite wall? Instead, Superman allows himself to be suckered into a false offer to trade Curtis' life for some "crown jewels" being stored in Metropolis. Perhaps Superman is just curious to see what Ultra's game is...

There is no explanation for why the crown jewels are in Metropolis, or what country they are from. It was long rumored, while war was raging in Europe, the UK shipped its crown jewels to the U.S. for safekeeping (and now it is rumored that they never left Windsor Castle). 

Superman returns to the U.S. by running up through the Americas. It is suggested by the narrator that he is only at outrunning train speeds, which means he might have taken days to get back. Race the Plane would have got him back home in 7 hours. 

Regardless, it is enough time for the National Guard and the city's police force to assemble to stop Superman (when Ultra phones ahead to tip them off).  They certainly don't come prepared; their one cannon is pre-WWI vintage. 

Superman makes a subtle use of wrecking things to wreck open a fire hydrant. A long time ago on this blog I talked about using the water pressure from a fire hose as a ranged push attack, but maybe it should be strong enough to do damage too?

Instead of just wrecking his way inside, Superman uses the power Wall-Climbing...I'm guessing because he expects to see the crown jewels through a window.

The National Guard get inventive with trying to stop Superman. They chop off the flagpoles so Superman can't use them to help climb (but he's using the power, so he doesn't need them). When that fails, they try to drop a safe on him from at least two stories higher up. The safe maybe weighs around 600 lbs (3 men can move it). So what damage would a 600 lb. safe cause falling two stories onto someone's head?  Someone weighing an average of 180 lbs. does 1-6 damage with a weapon. If we double that for each d6 of progression, we get 3-18 damage for the safe (rounded up). If the damage progresses at +1d6 per 180 lbs., we're still at 3-18 damage -- at this weight -- but that makes dinosaurs SUPER dangerous. It the safe falls 10' it takes/does 1-6 damage, +1d6 for each additional 10'. So we're up to a whopping 5-30 damage for the falling safe -- good call, National Guardsmen, this safe is about as dangerous as a cannon! Unfortunately, Superman comes up with an unusual use of the Raise Car power, negating damage when something is dropped on him (because he can lift it away). Indeed, Superman then buffs himself again with Extend Missile Range so he can toss the safe back up onto the roof (a harmless move, but one that might trigger morale saves at the Editor's discretion).

Superman takes the uncharacteristic action of holding the National Guard Commander over the side of the roof, to force the surrender of his men. It's unclear how he recognizes the man as the commander, since he's not wearing any special uniform. Presumedly, Superman was bluffing and did not really intend to drop the man to his death, but this early in his career no one knew that about him.

Superman is able to rip open a vault door as "tho' it were a toy," which is why all types of doors all wreck at the same category.

Superman is able to disregard tear gas because of the Different Physical Structure power and machine gun fire because of the Imperviousness power. 

The situation escalates when three Army fighter planes show up and bombard the floor Superman is on with gunfire -- presumedly killing all the National Guardsmen inside. Superman "outmaneuvers them" in a panel where he appears to be running on clouds. I'm not quite ready to introduce a Cloud Walking power yet, as I believe that was not the artist's intentions. Indeed, I believe Shuster intended that to be smoke from the gunfire around Superman, not clouds, but was changed by Siegel's narrative caption.

Superman returns to the volcano in Ecuador "shortly later," meaning that he definitely used a higher level Race the- power this time. Ultra immediately "double-crosses" Superman by trying to kill him in a death trap; it's unclear if Superman really planned to trade the crown jewels for Curtis until the double cross. The death trap is four panels that raise out of the floor around a 5' square and close in on a single target, each with two diamond-tipped drills set on the inside of the panel. One could presume this trap would do up to 8-48 damage, provided all eight drills hit. I would probably roll to hit for all eight (as 4 HD mobsters), accounting for the victim's ability to squirm in the available space and avoid them. Superman simply wrecks his way out of the trap. Not only does he wreck the drills, but he is shown to break the diamond bits in half with the force of his punch. It's difficult to assign a category to that, but I would go with battleships or dams. 

The atomic disintegrator also comes in rifle size, but this weapon is not a raygun; it shoots a thin beam (that looks like fire) that the attacker needs to roll to attack to use (spoiler: he misses Superman, so we don't find out if Superman is immune or not). 

Superman lets Ultra jump out of the room, assuming the volcano would kill him, feeling that wrecking the larger raygun is more important. Causing a volcano to erupt by wrecking things would be in the dam category.

Pep Morgan's feature follows; it's a standard vs. gamblers plot, but is marked by the meta-humor of Pep reading a copy of Action Comics.

(Superman story read in Action Comics Archives vol. 2, the rest read at fullcomic.pro)

 

  

Smash Comics #7 - pt. 1

It's a pleasure revisiting the early Smash Comics for Will Eisner's Espionage, second only to The Spirit in the Eisner ouevre, in my opinion.

Black X has his original name back now and is no longer being called Black Ace. This page is interesting because it seems believable enough that it could be real history, only it's not. As far as I can tell, this "Caldwell Line" is a clever fabrication.

We've seen Batu's illusions before, but this is the first time it's been explained to us that his illusions last after he stops concentrating on them for a short while. None of the phantasmal spells, up to 3rd level anyway, explain this benefit.

This page explains that Black X can be overpowered by five-to-one odds (even though it looked like he was only fighting two guys on the previous page).

We get another example of a fighter (or a spy, if using that 1st edition class) wrecking bonds.

Black X looks like the tension is really getting to him, but the guys in the planes are doing most of the work here. Is Black X still guiding the adventure at this point? It's his positive encounter reaction check that gets the coast guard to believe him (unless he gave them some secret password we missed). One could also argue that it's Black X's expert navigational skills that save the day, meaning he must have succeeded at a skill check here. With the skill check, the pilots were only looking for  concealed torpedoes instead of secret torpedoes.

Morale dilemmas are so rare in these stories, but is Black X making this decision of his own volition? Could a femme fatale compel a Hero who fails a saving throw to act against his interests, like a Charm Person spell?

This is a huge detour from real world history that is ignored by next issue.

It will be interesting to see if the next installment really follows this and takes place in Chicago.

This is Abdul the Arab. This is a kind of clever way to tell when someone shows up for your super-secret meeting in disguise. Turned out to be important!

This story would be mundane if not for two details: 1) the villain is using ventriloquism and 2) in addition to money, the villain wants a specific gem. Why that gem? There's a story.

(The real story disappoints, though; the ventriloquism is unnecessarily explained away, and the reason for the gem is stolen right out of The Moonstone.)

"He's inside the house" is a horror movie cliche, but who knew it started with this story?

First villain lair in a swimming pool. There are not a lot of other situations where books on sea diving turn out to be valuable clues.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)