Feature Comics #30 - pt. 1

It's been a long time since we last checked in with Quality Comics' flagship title. Here, the Clock (sans mask) investigates how a car was tricked into careening off the road, and anticipates the movie Goldfinger by 24 years.

That the Clock wakes up after 30 minutes suggests that he was simply stunned and recovers 1-6 turns later, but the Editor has decided to make those 10-minute exploration turns (which the Editor can do, at his discretion).

Monogrammed cigarettes must have been a novelty item of decades past.

That's also quiet an expose in the newspaper, that the dead man was a FBI man with secret industrial mobilization plans on him. I bet the FBI was wanting to keep that a secret. Industrial mobilization was, of course, a real thing, and had been ongoing since Sept. 1939 in the U.S.

I've seen this in games before, paying kids to run messages for you. In a pre-modern age it can be more reliable than technology for communication, though it could put the kids in danger.

Panel 3 is a good example of how easy it is for Heroes to scale walls, even in dress shoes and tuxedos, while carrying canes in one hand.

This is Lena Pry and we haven't looked in on this comic strip in a dog's age. I include this bit because of the discussion of relief checks, which was another real thing. The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was a United States federal law of the New Deal era designed to boost agricultural prices by reducing surpluses. The government bought livestock for slaughter and paid farmers subsidies not to plant on part of their land.

The Great Bear Lake is a real lake. It is the largest lake entirely in Canada, the fourth-largest in North America, and the eighth-largest in the world. Moose Creek is also real, running through Ontario.

There really is a Nugget City in the Yukon, but it's a RV park and, I suspect, doesn't date back as far as 1940. It's possible that "Nugget City" is a euphemism for the Town of Dawson, which was at the center of the Klondike Gold Rush.

This is Spin Shaw and Spin is in an unusual gaming situation that I've only seen once before in a Star Wars session; Spin is "grounded" by a captain who doesn't want him involved in the scenario, so part of the scenario becomes finding a way to get into the rest of the scenario. Here, Spin's player wisely finds a use for his plane that nothing else can do, forcing the captain's hand to let him take off. No dice rolls should be needed to judge a situation like this, and the player should certainly be rewarded for ingenuity.

Unlike Reynolds of the Mounted, which was surprisingly easy to place in the real world, San Luray seems to be entirely fictional. There actually is an archipelago called the Barren Islands -- but it's in Alaska, and it's very unlikely that this adventure takes place there. "Barren Islands" was surely meant to sound evocative, but also generic enough that they could be anywhere.

The cliche of the hollow statue that can be made to appear to be talking to its worshipers is as old as racism in adventure fiction. I include this example, though, because of the added details, like the density of the foliage concealing the entrance (find as secret door?), the fact that the entrance is a "queer opening" because it's much smaller than a normal door, and the shots of the interior show that the body has just one hollow column leading up to a small floored room in the head.

Eisner makes a point of showing us that Dollman is a good fighter at full-size to explain how he is still so capable at tiny size. Why I share this particular page, though, is for the use of "tomahawk" to describe a sap/blackjack. This may be purely a joke, as I can find no evidence that tomahawk was ever a slang term for a sap or blackjack.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Wonderworld Comics #11 - pt. 4

This will be our last visit with this particular issue, and we'll kick it off with about page of "Spark" Stevens.

Although this looks like a tough fight, the gobs should be approaching 4th level by now, these spies are likely 1 or 2 HD, and the guy with the gun has as good a chance of hitting his allies as the gobs by firing into a melee.

And what does "gob" mean here? According to the Old Farmer's Almanac, "There are two theories on this one. This term first showed up in regard to sailors around 1909 and may have come from the word gobble. Reportedly, some people thought that sailors gobbled their food. The term also may come from the word gob, which means to spit, something sailors also reportedly do often."

As for "photostat files," The Photostat machine, or Photostat, was an early projection photocopier invented in 1907.

I was really expecting a better trap when that spy reaches out for the secret pedal than -- a bed coming down and smacking them in the head. Now, while I can't imagine this doing more than 1-6 points of damage (in fact, I would probably treat it as an improvised weapon that does 1-3 damage), it's possible that our gobs were just so low on hp after that fistfight that this was enough to knock them both out. Or, as a surprise attack, maybe this is considered a head blow, which comes with a chance of knockout in 2nd edition Hideouts & Hoodlums.

This is the first death-by-normal-sized-spiders deathtrap I've ever seen in a comic book -- and I have to say, it looks plenty unsettling and would surely spook a lot of players! Of course, one ordinary spider isn't going to have enough venom to cause much harm to anyone, but this is a thousand of them, so I would treat a spider swarm as a mobster with a collective Hit Die total and a save or die situation if the swarm starts all biting you at once.

Fire is probably the surest way to get rid of them; I also would have allowed the players to throw rocks at them or even pee on them to drive them off.

As the Editor, never forget about how fire causes smoke, and be liberal with assigning smoke inhalation damage if an encounter seems to be going too easy.

You're in for an unusually educational installment of K-51: Spies at War. It is, in fact, a little prescient -- the Nazis didn't manage to sink their third ship with U-boats until May 28, 1940. The world was shocked that Germany had managed to make new U-boats in secret after WWI, but they didn't have very many, not until capturing the French and Norwegian naval fleets. Now, what else this news ticker fails to get right is the number killed. 22 is purely wishful thinking; the actual death toll from the first two sank ships was over 1,200 deaths (they didn't bother going after small boats!).

Q-boats were real. Q-ships, also known as Q-boats, decoy vessels, special service ships, or mystery ships, were heavily armed merchant ships with concealed weaponry, designed to lure submarines into making surface attacks. The British and the Germans used them in WWI, and then the U.S. started using them too in WWII.

Panic parties were a real thing, just as described here. I'm guessing depth bombs, or depth charges, really work like that too, though I've never actually seen a picture of one being launched before.

This is yet another example of a random complication from vehicular damage, this time the electrical systems shorting out.

The weirdest thing about this story is that K-51 does nothing at all the entire story, except swim away at the end so the captain doesn't get in serious trouble. Nice of him, yes, but he gets zero experience points for this "session."

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

All-American Comics #1-2

This is out of order, but I finally have access to the early issues of All-American Comics and I thought I'd play catch-up!

The first issue opens with Red, White, and Blue, my personal favorite feature from All-American Comics until the introduction of Red Tornado in Scribbly.

Some unusual 1940 lingo from this story:  a found purse is called, instead of a purse or even a handbag, a "pocketbook."  The owner's ID card inside is not called an ID card, but a "name card."  An agent of G-2, the U.S. Secret Service (as it was also known at that time) presents her credentials and they look like a pamphlet.

Reg'lar Fellers features a simple trap -- or is it simply a trick? -- where an intruder trips a tripwire that rings a gong and announces his presence. There's also a good chance of the tripwire simply knocking the intruder prone (save vs. science?).

The very first Hop Harrigan adventure begins with his origin story -- how, as a young boy, he flees by plane after getting in a fight with his evil uncle. Hop and the uncle have a short, but dramatic struggle over a weapon -- a hatchet -- that the uncle planned to use on the plane. Rather than a disarming attack, it seems Hop initiated a grappling contest instead.

Hop makes reference to his aviation heroes Lindbergh and Corrigan. Everyone has heard of Charles Lindbergh, but Corrigan was Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Corrigan.

Hop's first plane is a "Jenny" biplane, which is very appropriate because that's the plane I assigned to 1st level aviators.We also learn that a Jenny was worth $500, used! 

The Mystery Men of Mars is a great name for a feature, but it starts with some shaky science; three men are going to fly to Mars in an anti-gravity ship. "I don't work with power! I work with the laws of gravity! I found a vay to reverse them und ve can reach Mars by simply falling upwards!"  For one thing, there's nothing simple about that. Two, even if you could repel yourself from a center of gravity, how would you gain speed? The further away you "fell," the weaker the repelling force. The trip is going to take a month, which may seem like a long trip to a young reader in 1940, but means that the ship is "falling" at roughly 50,000 MPH.  Despite this, the ship does not disintegrate on contact with Mars' atmosphere, and lands so safely that it occurs off-panel.  Oh, and Mars has breathable atmosphere and even a pleasant clime. Who knew!

In Ben Webster, we learn that the most expensive fur-lined winter coat in a men's clothing store was $200.

Moving on to issue #2...

Red, White, and Blue find they have to catch a train for a secret mission, so quickly that they don't have time to get their baggage from the hotel. Red isn't worried, because he can wire the hotel from the next town and have them send the baggage to them. Which I point out because it seems an outdated service and one we wouldn't think of hotels doing today.

Red's friend, Christophe Amore, who conveniently shows up has psionic powers (see 1st edition Supplement III). Psionics is, of course, my go-to whenever some form of magic in the comics breaks the rules of magic. Here, Christophe has the ability of Detect Thoughts -- like any magic-user of level 3 or higher -- but with the extra ability of being able to transfer that ability to others for 24 hours. What's more, the range on this power is measured in miles, making it fantastically powerful (and well beyond the 3rd level spell!).  I'm beginning to think that psionics needs to be kept out of the players' hands and used by the Editor whenever he needs a magical effect like this that breaks the rules of magic.

The science about helium is actually good in this story, including about how it is extracted from natural gas, but the stuff about it only being produced in the U.S. and the U.S. having a monopoly on helium is pure bunk.

In Mutt & Jeff, we learn that a pedigree dog goes for $60.

That Hop Harrigan's mentor's plane has a ceiling height of 22,000 feet just shows what humble beginnings Hop has; planes were breaking that ceiling height record as early as 1916.

Hop's first SCM, "Ikky", faints in a tense moment. I actually added "fainting" to the morale save results table for just such an occurence.

In Mystery Men of Mars, Ted, Alan, and the Professor encounter Martians riding around in somewhat resemble the dreadnought crabs we saw in Amazing Man Comics a while back.  These crabs can go 600 MPH despite walking on stilt-like legs. The Martians inside are called bugs, and look like pillbug men. They have telescoping third arms that come out of the center of their chests. They are encountered in groups as high as 13. The Martian bug men have advanced transportation, but primitive weaponry; they are armed only with spears. They use simple traps like portcullis traps.


(All-American Comics read at ReadComicOnline.)