Smash Comics #8 - pt. 4

Today we're picking up where we left off with Invisible Hood, still fighting his way through a modern medieval castle (a villain's favorite real estate!).

Here we see that objects being carried by the Invisible Hood are not themselves invisible.

We also get the first occurrence of the phrase "friendly ghost" in all of comics-dom. Take note, future Harvey Comics employees!

"Why, Kent - what are you doing here? And why are you also soaking wet, like I am? Say...you're not really the Invisible Hood, are you?" - Tom would say if he weren't a comic book character.

Brace yourself, because we have some really racist pages of Paul Gustavson's Flash Fulton to get through now. All you need to know is that Flash has come to the Amazon to find a missing explorer. Lots of people have come down here to search for Roger Hart, but none have succeeded. So maybe Flash can be forgiven for being suspicious when this native turns up as such a convenient guide.

It's bizarre how often South American natives are drawn looking like African natives in some of these early comic book stories. This is an example of what indigenous Amazonians looked like circa 1940.

Now one detail he got right I thought was wrong -- voodoo really is practiced in Brazil. It would be an imported religion, though, not something the indigenous cultures would practice.

Being a comic book, it should be no surprise Flash can speak with the native. The surprise is that Flash knows the native's tongue and the native isn't just speaking in broken English.

Brazil has states,not districts, and there is no Kitawa state in Brazil. "Kitawa" doesn't even look like a South American word and, indeed, the only Kitawa I can find is in Papua New Guinea!

Again, Paul is right on some details; there are/were cannibals in the Amazon.

"Hey, our guide just jumped overboard!"

"You think we should just let him go since he helped us get this far?"

"No, there's a chance he'll betray us. Let's both shoot him in the back!"

Okay, enough of that! I think you can guess that they used sound effects to startle the superstitious natives, ho hum.

Turning now to my second favorite feature, John Law, Scientective! In many ways, John Law is like a second draft of Harry Campbell's earlier character, Dean Denton (featured heavily in my repackaging of Funny Picture Stories, on sale now!). Just like how Dean had to figure out who his nemesis, The Conqueror, was, John is narrowing down which of 13 suspects is The Avenger.

And, along the way, we get some science lessons, like how to leave threatening messages on other people's windows.

Sometimes the science is a little shaky for a science-based hero. I mean, compared to the average golden age comic book story, this still reads like an issue of Scientific American. But I can't figure out how the short wave heat inducing transmitter -- we call those electric heaters today -- managed to set the mattress on fire, but not the ceiling above it.

Now, John's scheme to unmask the Avenger is a little convoluted here and may require some explanation. It isn't obvious, but you have to assume that The Avenger is calling John in panel 8 to gloat. It certainly isn't a smart move on The Avenger's part, but John did bait him with the newspaper headline and villains have to save vs. plot to keep from gloating when given the chance.

It's worth pointing out that this is a time before there you could access multiple phone lines with the same phone. So if you wanted to have 13 phone lines, as John sets up here, you need 13 telephones to do it.

Also note the cartoon of Hitler with swakstikas for eyes on the front page of the newspaper.

Sometimes we have to look at Gill Fox's Wun Cloo, despite the painful racism of it, because there are interesting concepts hidden in here. Now, getting a robber to agree to pull into a gas station and park over the car lift is probably the hard part, but if he falls for it, you can lift it off the floor and threaten to set the floor on fire so he can't get out safely.

This is actually a bit of clever naming; the Tennessee Valley is large and the Tennessee Valley Authority built 50 of these dams since 1933. So when you call it the Tennessee Valley Dam, that can be a real dam, without knowing which one.

So Wings hunts down the "pirate dirigible" (even though it's pretty clear a foreign government is responsible for this attack, and for the life of me I can't figure out why he's shooting at the little gondola and not the giant bag of hydrogen directly above it. Does Wings just not like easy victories? "Getting the engine" is definitely a bad result on a random complications table for aerial combat.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Amazing Man Comics #8 - pt. 1

We come back around to Bill Everett's second best creation of the Golden Age, Amazing Man. John Aman is seen here, making the same decision one of my earlier H&H groups did -- wouldn't it be fun to go take on the Nazis?

We also see that he's not exactly a green mist when he's "The Green Mist"; he's actually invisible.

We also learn that John smokes (boo!), but looks really slick in a suit. I sure like this look more than the nearly naked look they'd give him in the comics later.

While my players took a steamer across the Atlantic, John steals onto an Army Air Corps base (if this is New York, it could be Mitchel Field, but we have no idea where John is now), steals his personal plane (looks like a flivver to me), but also two machine guns ad lots of ammo. It's a chancy, but effective method of upgrading a hero's weaponry without waiting to take mobsters' weapons as trophies.

In 1927, Charles Lindbergh showed the world that a solo pilot could reach France from New York in 33 1/2 hours.

Let's assume that John either stole synchronization gear for his front-mounted machine gun (which the narrator neglected to mention) or, being really smart, he was able to improvise one (which makes me wonder -- could inventing things become a skill check?).

This is something I've gone back and forth on about vehicular combat. How would the Editor know when to have bullets make a plane burst into flame?  It seems that there has to be a chance of a random complication per hit.

Parachuting is a potentially dangerous business. Should it grant a saving throw to avoid falling damage, rather than automatically spare the hero from falling damage?

It's unusual to see characters actually speaking in German, instead of German accents.

Speaking of unusual, this is an unusual variation of the "take me to your leader" tactic.

It's hard to believe John somehow forgot to prepare his most potent power before landing himself in Germany, but players do this sort of thing all the time when they're playing games where they have to prepare their characters' powers, spells, or what have you.

Here we see John demonstrating wrecking things and the Leap I power. He describes his powers as "the strength of a hundred men," (that means he can lift 5-10 tons, or the equivalent of the Raise Trolley Car power), "the brains of a hundred scientists" (I have no idea how to quantify that one in game terms), and "the physical alertness of a hundred antelope" -- and I'm not even sure what that last one means! Should being immune to surprise be a power?

The coloring is off, of course, but that is what armored cars looked like, circa 1939.

It's interesting that both the German and the French forces are wearing gas masks. Apparently they are both expecting chemical attacks from each other? John grabs a rifle, but doesn't bother with a gas mask. He is apparently very confident about his saving throws vs. poison, which makes it odd that he even feels he needs the gun. Perhaps the rifle, like the uniform, are just for identification.

This looks a lot like the 4th level superhero power Turn Gun on Bad Guy, which I'm thinking of giving the even more generic name of Missile Deflection.

The ability to wreck tanks means that John is at least 4th level. If he has access to 4th level powers, though, then we know he's at least 6th level.

Howitzers are artillery weapon/trophies in both editions of Hideouts & Hoodlums.

Normally, attacking while invisible dispels that invisibility. One could make a case that wrecking things is not, technically, an attack.

As a reminder of how ruthless Amazing Man can be, he killed the pilot before commandeering the bomber. Granted, it was a Nazi pilot.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Smash Comics #5 - pt. 3

Whew! I've been getting so much Hideouts & Hoodlums stuff done, I haven't had time for this blog!

When I last left off, I was looking at the Invisible Justice story from this issue. I've already talked plenty about how easy disguise and hypnotism skills are in comics, so this whole first row should come as no surprise. No, what I'm interested in here is that Invisible Hood has to still sneak silently into the room -- invisibility does not itself guarantee surprise conditions -- and the fact that Invisible Hood was willing to shoot Hyde in the back as he was running away.

When I talk to people about H&H and golden age comic books, more than once I've been asked about how the game handles the perceived notion that all the Heroes of the Golden Age were goody two-shoes. Invisible Hood just tried to shoot the bad guy in the back.

This is from Abdul the Arab, and game mechanics-wise this is more complicated than it may at first appear. Abdul encounters a lone man wandering the desert and rides out of his way to aid him; the man turns out to be an ex-member of the mobsters Abdul didn't even know he was after. So what did Abdul just encounter -- a random good deed that rewarded him with a plot hook character, or a random plot hook character Abdul mistook for a random good deed? Only the Editor knows what he rolled for...

Sand pits are a good desert trap -- but not when they conveniently lead to the exact room in the mobsters' hideout you need to reach.

The bad guy is consistently referred to as a brigand here, a mobster type present since the beginning in H&H.  There is no game mechanic reason for the brigand's horse to stumble; it seems like a creative explanation of a missed attack roll.

This is Captain Cook of Scotland Yard, and one clue that this is meant to be a short, one-night scenario is that it starts at the entrance to the hideout (a freighter in this case) and he's already been given his mission.

The fact that this is a low-level scenario is evident by the single guard, armed only with a throwing knife. The guard misses, despite having bonuses for attacking from behind and above.

Linen is a good random thing to find in a hideout.

What the heck kind of map of England is that?

A clipped newspaper article is a cliched clue; making the clue an obituary of the guy who's office you're in gives the clue a creepy twist.

I can easily accept that Cook found the warehouse's address while in the company's main office. He could have even looked up the address in a phone book. But the warehouse address is on the company stationery's letterhead?  Instead of the corporate office address?

Though I've been riding this story pretty hard, this last wrinkle -- about the secret gas solidified into powder and sprayed onto the linens that have been out in plain sight all this time -- is a pretty good wrinkle. It could also make a pretty good trap. "This room's full of nothing but worthless linen; I'm burning it." BOOM!

Hugh Hazzard and His Iron Man would have me believe that large robots are worth $5 million. Nooo, I'm not putting something that valuable in my hideouts!

It's odd that Bozo is immune to the death ray, since it very easily wrecks the plane it strikes first. Bozo is clearly no ordinary robot, but one statted with levels in the superhero class. But no power of a superhero buffs you to be immune to rayguns (yet). Could this be as simple as a successful saving throw?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Smash Comics #5 - pt. 2

Wow, it's been so long, I finished and published the HIDEOUTS & HOODLUMS Basic Book 2nd Edition between posts!

I love how the Scientective uses science for problem-solving. Here, he realizes that something in the room with him can dissolve the material binding his wrists. Of course, a smart Editor anticipates things like this and stocks his hideouts accordingly.

"Rheostat" is a word that's fallen out of common usage. It means an adjustable resistor so constructed that its resistance may be changed without opening the circuit in which it is connected, thereby controlling the current in the circuit.  Of course, John could have just said "This switch ought to shut off the power," but that wouldn't sound very Science-y!

With little time to spare, John Law has to start playing hunches. His first hunch is that the brand new power plant right by the tracks can't be a coincidence, just like every reader was probably thinking on the first page.

John is able to smash the generator easily despite not being a superhero (and wouldn't he be in trouble if his hunch had been wrong!). I did include a note in the scientist entry in the mobsters section of the H&H 2nd ed. basic rulebook that scientists can all wreck labs -- but John is a Hero, not a mobster. For now, this will just have to fall outside the game mechanics...until the scientist class comes back in the Advanced Hideouts & Hoodlums Heroes Handbook someday...

There's a very curious editor's note about a giant induction field displayed at the New York World's Fair. I have not been able to find evidence of this, unless the editor is referring to the automated highway system demonstrated in the Futurama exhibit. I can find no evidence that Russian scientists were ever working on a "floating railroad." Could the author have read something about the electrification of the Russian railway system and misunderstood...?

This is from Wings Wendall and what makes me stop and pause is...what did that officer look up commercial airplane listings in?  Trade journals? Records of the Civil Aeronautics Authority? If Wings is flying with the U.S. Army Air Corps, how do they have these civilian records close at hand?

I like to think these hoodlums are just sitting there in warehouse drinking and planning because they're drunken hoodlums.

I've waffled for a long time now on how vehicular combat should go in Hideouts & Hoodlums. Do weapons trigger a chance of complications, like crashing? Or should it, like man-to-man combat, be a incremental process of hit point loss? The wording of "guns take their toll" suggests to me the latter, as the abstract, cumulative damage -- not any one hit on any one part -- is what causes the crash. But I've so far seen evidence in the comics that support both ways.

The idea that the Boss left such a simple note for Agent M-29 on a scrap of paper, rather than expecting him to commit a single sentence to memory, is an obviously planted clue. But planted for a trap, or by an Editor who really wants his player to get to that warehouse?

It's also worth noting that Wings doesn't head straight to the warehouse, but reports his intention to his superior officer first. That's a very Lawful way to play.

Why is one window locked and another window left open? It could be saves vs. plot, or it could be a simple 1-3 yes/4-6 no roll. The first option makes Heroes luckier as they advance in level, while the second option keeps circumstances at an even random chance.

We also see Wings being surprised. Fresh arrivals to an ongoing combat still get a chance at surprise.

Wings is attacked here by gangsters, a new mobster type with a special ability of getting victims into cars.

Although players should have some control over their supporting cast, they cannot just arbitrarily declare that their SCMs show up when the Hero is in trouble. The players can suggest that SCMs show up, and the Editor can decide if he should say yes or no, or give them a save vs. plot to see if it happens.

This sequence reminded me, while preparing the chase rules for 2nd edition, that I needed to include a missile combat phase during the chase turn!

I think I missed this, though -- when I compiled a list of abstract complications that could happen during a chase, I may have missed the slowing complication, like a flat tire. I'll have to double check...

Wings recovers quickly because of the new rule in 2nd ed. that allows unconscious Heroes a save vs. plot to recover in 1-6 turns. Because he's still in danger, turns are still being counted in half minutes.

The "boss" is either a master criminal or, if the spy class was in use, a higher level spy.

This is Invisible Justice. Thurston is driven off the road during a car chase (the complication is crash, but because there's water nearby to crash into, Thurston only loses the car and takes no damage).

Here's a precedent for invisibility, at least granted by trophy items, not turning items touched invisible.

Old mansions, on the only estates for miles around, make great hideouts (plus, its fairly easy to find a map of a generic mansion you can use for your game on short notice).

Large patio doors without closed drapes make a great way to spy on the hideouts' occupants before going in.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)