Wonderworld Comics #11 - pt. 1

Ah, the early Fox Comics were gorgeous! This installment of The Flame was written by Eisner and drawn by Fine, which is about as good as it gets here in (cover date) March 1940.

It scarcely requires explaining that "Kalnar" is Germany and "Rodend" is Hitler, especially not when you see "Rodend" on the last page below.

"Dorna" is a little trickier. It seems most likely Poland, given this time in the War, but the capital of "Dorna" is not yet captured in this story, while Warsaw was taken four months earlier than this was published.


For those mathematically impaired, The Flame was born in 1915. Ichang, or Yichang, is a prefecture-level city located in western Hubei province, China. It is the second largest city in the province after the capital, Wuhan.



This is surprisingly credible; the Yangzte ("Yangtse" here) is responsible for 70-75% of China's floods, flooding nearly every monsoon season.

Just like Siegel and Superman, Eisner borrows from the story of Moses here.

This seems to be Tibet, though the geography is a bit off. The Yangtze River begins in Tibet, so the flood waters would have had to somehow sweep the basket upstream.

It's interesting to wonder if the "grand high lama" is the dalai lama, or a fictional lama that supersedes the dalai and panchen lamas.

It's also worth noting that this nested origin story is being told to us by a character in the main story, who may well be an unreliable narrator.

We're given no clue how messages are sent to the Flame. Radio? Telegram? Write a note and burn it with fire?

"Quick, let's ignore the anti-aircraft guns around us (I see three) and bring him down with our small fire guns! I'm feeling like a challenge today!"

I was really surprised by how much this page reminds me of Walt Simonson's art. The layout is great, if awfully background-less, but the perspective in that final panel makes up for any imagined deficiencies.

Continuity glitch: the Flame is clearly leaping from his plane in the third panel of the previous page, but is back in his plane in panel 2 of this page, and then back on the ground by panel 4. It seems that Lou Fine had intended the plane to be immune to the fire gun and demolish the gun, but Will Eisner wanted the Flame to be responsible for destroying it and gives him credit in the caption.

Despite having only destroyed one gun and beaten up about seven soldiers, the entire army surrenders at that point. Personally, I would have made separate morale saves for each squad, three saves per platoon. But I understand this was a scenario with a short time limit.

Let's also talk about the effectiveness of a giant flame gun. I get that, thematically, it fits the title, but there's no way it could shoot fire as far as it could shoot a shell. I fail to see how this

weapon would be very effective.

I don't have much to say about this page except -- see? Hitler. Great "punch to the face" panel there, well before the famous Captain America cover of punching Hitler.















For this installment of Yarko the Great, "Anthony Brooks", aka Will Eisner, starts us off in faraway India, but how accurate is that geography? The Kabul River does empty into the Indus River near the city of Attock, in what is now Pakistan, but would have then been India. Far from isolated frontier, Attock would have been, I think, a metropolis of about 400,000 people at this time. It's typical racism of the times, though, to make other cultures look more primitive than they were.

All I have to say about this page is that the men from India must be statted as mysterymen (burning stunts), superheroes (using the Wall Climbing power), or magic-users (using the Spider Climb spell) to be able to scale a sheer wall like that.

(Spoiler: they're mysterymen; on a page I won't be showing, they use a mysteryman's weapon, a garotte.)

And that this is an awful long build-up to Yarko showing up in the story...

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Planet Comics #3 - pt. 4

We're down to the last feature -- poor lonely Auro, Lord of Jupiter! - but we're not going to ignore it because I have some things to say about this one.

We start with Auro doing a lot of showing off. We don't need game mechanics to handle simple showing off; any Editor should let his players describe any showboating as flavor text without making them roll for it.

But what if we did need to roll? Like, if Auro was competing with someone else for showboating? If Auro was a mysteryman, competing with other mysterymen, they could try to outbid each other on how many stunts they will expend. Other heroes could rely on the skill system, treating acrobatics as a skill. If only one contestant makes his skill check, then we have an obvious winner. If more than one makes it, the one who makes it by the most wins.

But on a d6, there is not much room for nuance there. In which case, we might switch to the unofficial game mechanic of ability score checks; have everyone try to roll under DEX, with the roll closest to the score winning.

This is not just a dragon; a few pages later we learn it is a dragon man. That would be because it can polymorph between forms. It can also breathe fire through its nostrils, but we never see it breathe fire far enough to function as a weapon. It is massive in size and probably has quite a few Hit Dice. Maybe 12?

Morale saves are very easily triggered in Hideouts & Hoodlums; any time your players say "I do this, does it make them run?" you should probably check with a morale save.

I'm amused that Auro feels he's "armed to the teeth" with only two visible weapons. Did he crotch some grenades?

How is there a kingdom within a few miles of your palace, and you don't know about it?

The leopard -- wandering encounter or fixed encounter outside the kingdom? You decide!

I like how the dragon man, as powerful as it is, chooses to throw a rock at Auro. And it's actually the most effective attack it gets in the entire story!

Spoiler - after pages of set up, the dragon man gets killed with one sword thrust, like most golden age opponents. Bleah!

That "scientific explanation of the Earth's origin"...I wonder if there is any truth to that, or if someone just misremembered what they had once learned about the theory of the Moon's origin...?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Wonderworld Comics #10 - pt. 4

Hey, welcome back! There's just a few pages leftover in this issue I wanted to address, this first one being from the Spark Stevens story. Spark always has the weakest artwork in the early Wonderworld issues, but you can see how rushed this three-panel page was. Still, it is a good example of when you can bluff your way into a morale check for the bad guys.

This is a pretty important milestone issue, as it takes the War in Europe, that until now has been largely couched in terms of analogies and fictitious stand-ins, is finally being accurately represented as a German invasion of Poland -- which had happened just a few months earlier. Ripped from the headlines!  

This is the first time -- possibly the last time, as far as I know -- that Polish is ever spoken in an American comic book. "Dzien dobre" means "Good day."

Despite the fact that I generally favor realism in my Hideouts & Hoodlums campaigns, I still subscribe to the comic book convention of having everyone you encounter able to speak English. I do know of one H&H Editor (hi Darren!) who is more of a stickler, wants more realism, and tracks what languages the Heroes know, based on their backstories more than their Intelligence scores.

While everyone else had to rush their jobs for this issue, K-51 has more than one 12-panel page! Here we see one of the deadliest of complications during an aerial dogfight, the shooting of the gas tank, which makes the plane explode in ...well, I'm not sure how many turns to make it take. Maybe just require a save vs. science to get out of the plane before it goes kablooey.

(Although comics.org suggests that Bob Powell may have wrote this story, the timeliness and anti-Nazi stance seems very Will Eisner to me.)

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Mystery Men Comics #7 - pt. 1

And we return to Fox's second title and a feature that had started out as a small back-up strip and now is lead feature in Mystery Men Comics.

We start with a rare example of a bad guy (the Blue Beetle impersonator) using tear gas as a weapon.

Mike Mannigan is the perfect example of the copper -- a police officer so incompetent that he stumbles when there is nothing to trip on -- he's not even close to a crack in the sidewalk.

The Blue Beetle imposter could count as a doppelganger, as they are now defined in 2nd edition rules.

Although we've seen million-dollar crimes so far in the comics, $50,000 is still a large amount in 1940 and one mobsters are willing to kill over.

This is one of the earliest instances -- if not the earliest -- of cussing in a superhero story.

 I'm not sure if the Blue Beetle qualifies for the new Avenger class that is going in the AH&H Heroes Handbook, but I'm giving this ability to that class. The ability is to trigger morale saves without even being present, but via the presence of the avenger's "calling card."

Letting a bad guy get away so you can follow him back to his lair is already a cliche by this point.

I've never considered Blue Beetle to be much of a source for inspiration, but now I want a tall chest disguised as a bookcase just like that.

This may be the first and last time Blue Beetle ever carries "trick make-up" with him.

BB is teetering right on the edge of switching from the mysteryman class to the superhero class, but we're not quite there yet. BB can get two punch attacks if his opponents are unarmed, so he's not necessarily buffed with any superpowers here.

 An avenger can trigger so much fear as to cause damage.

Wing Turner takes on a "costumed" foe, though one just wearing short shorts and fake horns. The Devil goes for a bigger pay-off than BB's villains had. 

I've written plenty before about how vehicular combat needs to be based on complications rather than hit points. Hitting the fuel tank is a particularly good complication, one that cuts down how much longer the vehicle can move, while giving it a chance each turn of exploding.

Lava pit? How did he get a lava pit under his castle, when there's no sign of an active volcano anywhere in the vicinity of that castle? You just never know where lava will turn up in a comic book story.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Crackajack Funnies #19 - pt. 2

This is still Stratosphere Jim...

The trophy transportation section in the Hideouts & Hoodlums Basic book has a list of upgrades to vehicles that qualify them as trophy items, and one of them is being bulletproof.

Heroes at any level might think about setting up a hideout for themselves. Here's some sound advice on picking a location with a hard-to-reach entrance, concealing the entrance, and stocking the hideout.

At the rate I go through months' worth of comics now, it takes way too long for me to come back around to Wash Tubbs. Here, we learn that a swanky nightclub could clear $450 in profit in two nights.

You also have to get past the racist nickname of Lucifer for a black man.

And then there's the large-scale ride-on train -- my dad works on those! (true story)

Two things to point out here. Captain Easy could probably handle these racketeers a lot quicker than Wash is, but Wash chooses to do it on his own because combat is dangerous and innocent people could be hurt. That is a Lawful Hero.

Secondly, when Wash has an important decision to make, he gets five different opinions offered to him, four of them from clearly non-Hero characters under the Editor's control. The Editor has to be careful in situations like this not to appear to be guiding the player(s) by making one option sound much better than the other options on the table.

This is Clyde Beatty, who I've already learned was a real person who just happened to get his own comic strip. What I took away from this page is a) not even a cruise ship is too unlikely a location to run into a lion that needs taming, and b) if you spray big cats with water, they need to make morale saves.

Bolton's got a map! I wonder if they would consider opening the flood gates and broadening the Waterfall of Tahar, to wash away the climbing attacking forces...?  Let's see!

Woo, called that one!  But -- what? "My job is done"? You weren't even the one who opened the flood gates, Bolton, all you did was stand around and watch!

A new plane is a pretty sweet reward for him...but I guess it's like giving the player who's Hero was knocked down to 1 hp and couldn't do much all session a full share of treasure.

More evidence of how "bandit" almost always means Hispanic. Other than that, the scenario of rescuing a prisoner from the bandits is much more interesting to me than a "defeat the bandits" scenario.

That is one risky rescue plan; it apparently all came down to Jack beating the bandits at initiative. Otherwise, Whitey was going to have to survive a hail of bullets before that tear gas gun went off.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Fight Comics #1 - pt. 2

Last time, we were about to meet the newest hero of futuristic 1997. It's this guy, Saber -- which is, admittedly, a pretty cool name for a Hero -- and you can tell he's a Hero because these U.S. government guys say so (U.S. government guys are all good guys in comic books) and because, well, he's almost naked. In addition to being athletic (high Dexterity score) and has a great mind (high Intelligence score), he has telepathy, which sounds a lot like psionics -- remember the 1st edition psionics system from Supplement III?

I would hand-wave the leaping over the desk thing; if he has enough Movement to get around the table so he could reach melee normally, I'm willing to accept the leap as flavor text.

Saber is pretty vicious -- I noted that the officials have to pry him off the spy or Saber might have beat him to death. No one offers to get him a shirt or pants.

750 MPH was considered near-impossibly fast circa 1940; this speed was not reached until 1947, and not publicly known about until 1953.

"Teloradio" seems like a common cliche of science fiction, combining the television with a telephone, or webcamming, as we call it today.

It will be interesting if we see exactly what the "destroray" does exactly. It sounds like something that would have came out of G.I. Joe...

"Deland" is a strange spelling for Clinton, who was of course the U.S. President in 1997. The actual Secretary of State was Madeleine Albright, so Fight Comics got that even more wrong.

It's curious how the Alaskan uniform looks so Russian, if Alaska is under U.S. control in this future. Maybe control was only recently wrested away.

One-man submarines are as old as 1776. The submarine sled is different in that it seems to be a submersible motorboat, something we still don't have in 2018.

Still no one has suggested that Saber put on a shirt yet.

Saber's sub sled crosses the 827 miles between Washington, D.C. and Bermuda in three hours -- meaning the sled can go 275 MPH, a water speed record that was not broken until 1964, but even now never maintained over three hours.

Rewards can come in all forms for a successful adventure. Here, Saber not only gets to be head of the Super-Intelligence Department, but they give him a shirt! (The first one would come with an XP reward; the second one...not so likely.)

This is Kayo Kirby, which looks like it's going to give us a combination of the crime fighter and sports genres. Note that Kirby manages to force morale saves on the thugs only by injuring them, not by knocking at least one of them out first.

Now, this page gives me a thought...what if coach was a Supporting Cast Member type, who gave Heroes advice while fighting, and it gave them a +1 bonus to hit? That would be pretty cool (though dangerous for the coach, bringing him along into hideouts!).

In my current campaign, there's a jail overcrowding problem that my players have had to deal with in creative ways, including this one -- just letting crooks go with a warning. Not every encounter needs to end with mobsters going to jail.

And this page made me think of something I've never considered for a game mechanic. What if Heroes needed supporting cast to be present in order to fight at maximum effectiveness? Could players who insist on their Heroes being lone wolves suffer a -1 penalty to certain rolls, like attacks and saving throws? I'll have to give it more thought.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Adventure Comics #41 - pt. 2

Anchors Aweigh starts with a wandering encounter instead of a plot hook -- a known spy just happens to walk by! But it's to lure Lt. Com. Don Kerry and Red into a trap. It's a goofy sort of trap, though, as they run into a glass wall that somehow knocks them unconscious. How fast were they running?

Don and Red wake up in a deathtrap an hour later. Sin Yen, the spy, has them in an arena where they'll have to fight monstrous beasts until Don tells Sin what he wants to know. The first opponent is a large ape; at 7' tall, the ape should be 4 or 4+1 HD (being halfway in size between an ordinary ape and a prehistoric ape). Other opponents include a spider-snake (it's a huge spider with a snake tail, I guess, not sure what the advantage of that combination is!), and an octo-dile (a crocodile with eight tentacles -- new version of a carrion crawler, anyone?).  Further complicating the trap is more traps within the trap, including spiked pit traps, and a glass wall that slides down so one half of the arena can be flooded with water.

Skip Schuyler is given an interesting scenario to problem solve his way through: hi-tech cattle rustlers are using planes to make cattle stampede away from ranches, and then rounding the cattle into trucks, and guarding the trucks with machine guns. Interestingly, Skip doesn't even try to stop all the rustlers; he considers the pilot the weak link and goes after the rustler's plane. He engages the pilot repeatedly in a recklessly dangerous game of chicken with a plane of his own and causes enough failed morale saves that he forces the pilot to land. Then Skip hits the pilot with a rock and ignites the gas in the plane so the rustlers can't use it anymore. Skip is apparently fine with letting the local law handle the guys with machine guns...

In Rusty and His Pals, Rusty and his pals are lost at sea and spend three days drifting until a ship bound for Liverpool passes them and picks them up. Plot contrivance, or random encounter? Could the Editor have planned for several options, or even just rolled randomly between a choice of ports? Or was the next adventure pre-set for Liverpool?

I suspect the last option, as there's a bad guy waiting for them in Liverpool with a connection to their last adventure. Indeed, it's often a good idea to have at least one bad guy per scenario with a connection to the last adventure, as it helps keeps the adventures linked into an overarching campaign.

Cotton Carver meets a priestess who takes him through a secret door from the Shrine of Dagan to an underground river and a magic boat that travels on its own with just a command. They reach a magic gate that also opens when a command word is spoken (should I treat that as a trophy item too?). Elara the Priestess takes Cotton to a castle and a tomb where she gives him a magic sword called "Malar". Malar is the only weapon that can kill the Scarlet Seeress -- and that is the quest she gives him! She also gives him a "good luck" bracelet (a luckstone?).

Cotton journeys through an underground forest (how does that work? Is this a hollow world setting?). He is caught in a trap (a giant glass jar) and ...hypnotized? Charmed? ... by the Scarlet Seeress. The Seeress just leaves then to go lead her army towards world domination. Later, an old man uses a magic divining plate (like a crystal ball) to show Cotton where his sword went to while he was asleep, then offers to drive Cotton after the Seeress in his magic flying ...car?

I don't know what to make out of the "dark horde" the Seeress leads. Dark-skinned men? Demons? It's so hard working from summaries!

(Read as summaries at DC Wikia.)

Famous Funnies #58

Here's a good example of game play. There's three non-Heroes controlled by the Editor and one player-controlled Hero in the boat, with a gun under the seats. The Editor knows it's there, but has his characters stay quiet, so the player can solve the problem and remember about the gun.

Also worth discussing is the term "high-powered". In the basic rules, that could be code for a Gun +1. Or, if using the optional damage rules, it means the difference between 1-10 points of damage and 1-12 points of damage.

It's also worth pointing out that, unless that's one sickly shark, 12 points of damage is not going to kill it. More likely, the shark failed a morale save afer being injured.

Is it ever just an octopus? It's almost always a giant octopus, isn't it?

This is from the gag filler page Life's Like That. I think this one is pretty funny.

Oaky Doaks has nothing to contribute this month to Hideouts & Hoodlums, but I'm sure digging King Cedric's snappy patter.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)