Amazing Mystery Funnies #19 - pt. 1

Followers of Great Scott! Press are probably aware that I've been working with the Fantom of the Fair much more recently than the last time he came up on this blog. This is ahead of where I am in reprinting his stories and...whew, this one is probably going to need some serious reworking before I would use it. I was never a huge Paul Gustavson fan, but I like his stuff a lot more than whatever fill-in artist this is (I've seen on Comic Book Plus this might be Al Anders or Will Roland). 

I think it's interesting that the Fantom has left New York for Maine because, in my fiction pieces detailing some of his backstory, he came to New York (and the new world) through Newfoundland and spent some time there, and maybe this was him heading back that way. Also -- plug here for the next issue of Funny Picture Stories where that Newfoundland story will be published -- plug plug! 

This is convenient, but also really weird and creepy, that the Fantom was hanging out in this guy's house for no other reason than to eavesdrop on his conversation with himself. 

But how "near" does the Fantom need to be to hear that? There is no exact limit in the rules for distance, but a common sense ruling from any Editor should tell you he would need to be inside the house or just outside an open window from the house at the furthest. But is the Fantom using a spell, like Clairaudience? Or a magic crystal ball off-panel to scry? But that still brings us back to the question: why was the Fantom monitoring this man?

I like the carnival setting because it seems a natural progression from stories set at a fair. 

Just like it's hard to believe the Fantom just happened to hear that conversation, suspecting Professor Trepper was a near-impossible leap in logic without using some sort of magic spell. Divination? 
 

The narration of panel 5 is interesting. Is the narrator unsure if the Fantom was surprised or not, or is only talking from Agar's perspective? 

Trepper has called in some roustabouts to help him, but as soon as one of them goes down the rest all fail their morale save, which was probably a single roll for the whole group. 

We're going to jump off of that pedestrian story and gaze upon the works of Basil Wolverton. Ooooo.  Ahhhhh. Seriously, those panels 5 and 6 are gorgeous. I've got nothing game mechanic-y to say about this page, so just enjoy.

One of the standard tropes of bad science fiction is to take Earth resources, give them an extra adjective, and then try to pass them off as something exotic and alien. True, green diamonds would be something new on Earth and probably really valuable, but what practical value would they have worth interplanetary travel for...?

We now know Mercury stopped being volcanically active 3.5 billion years ago, but Wolverton was right about it having volcanoes!

We learn that atom-needle pistols are more powerful than flame guns.

Thermo armor -- trophy armor that makes the wearer immune to heat damage.

I wonder how much $1 billion will feel like in the future. Assuming inflation never ends, I'm guessing it's going to be worth more like millions today, and that makes interplanetary diamond mining even less plausible. 

But -- oooh! We get a new monster, the vulkite, which looks exactly like an alien wyvern.

Here we get an explanation for what atom-needle pistols can do -- the ammunition explodes (like little atomic bombs?) once they're inside you. That seems like it must do a lot of damage -- at least 4-24? 

We also learn that vulkites have really good Armor Class because of their "heat-hardened hide" -- so maybe 1 point better than a wyvern -- and they are probably immune to heat and fire too. 

It's weird how a wooden door is surviving just fine on Mercury...

Mercurians are sure cool-looking and quite villainous, but stat-wise I can't see any reason in the story to stat them as anything other than human. I mean, he might as well be human since he can't do anything special.

Now, Mercurian Mole-Men, on the other hand, are really sneaky and have "deft movements." I would probably give them a low AC, fast Movement rate, and a good chance to pick pockets or perform sleight of hand.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Popular Comics #49 - pt. 1

The radio drama allegedly always used true cold cases from the FBI files, and the Gang Busters comic strip at least started out the same, but how true is that by 1940? I can't find any evidence of an actual FBI agent John Winston, though Winston being the middle name of John Lennon is, admittedly, clogging my search results, and there's no reason why the name couldn't have been changed to protect a still-active agent's identity.

Richmond, Virginia is of course a real place. I can't find a Calvert Bank in Richmond, but there is a Calvert Drive in Richmond, and perhaps there was once a bank there? 

The Tri-State Gang was real. According to the Sword and Scale website, their crime spree ran "through Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia during the early to mid-1930’s."

By this page, the scene has shifted to Baltimore, Maryland. The names of the streets seem to have been changed to ...protect the innocent streets. Although there is a Harvey Street in Baltimore, it is commercial instead of residential, and doesn't intersect with an Elm Street. 

The map hardly seems necessary, since the maneuver of blocking the intersection with cars is really not elaborate. 

The story of the Tri-State Gang is actually pretty interesting, but you wouldn't know it by this rushed retelling. Indeed, the Gang Busters comic strip often has a bland sameness to its stories.

So we'll skip ahead into Martan the Marvel Man. I'm pleased with what this installment is trying to do, showing us Martan and Vana getting to know Earth, but I'm skeptical that they would immediately understand our comedy as quickly as they do here. Even more interesting is that this is an alien invasion story, but with the twist that Martan and Vana are on the ground with regular people and get to see how they react and deal with it.

The locations are worth mentioning here. It's unusual that the aliens land somewhere in New Jersey and San Francisco and not more obvious targets, like Chicago, New York City, or Washington, D.C. Likewise in Germany, the aliens skip Berlin and are landing in less important areas of northern Germany.  

On a page I'm not bothering to share we also learn that the invaders are Martians, but the story ends with us still not even having seen the invaders yet. Maybe next time!
 

I am leery of this page because of the gruesomeness of that final panel, but two points here: one -- and we've seen this elsewhere before (and done better) -- is the idea of mistaking dinosaurs for dragons, or having dinosaurs and dragons be one and the same thing. It's a fanciful idea today, but much less was known of dinosaurs in 1940, so it would be easier to equate them with fantasy creatures. 

Second, and going along with how less was known about dinosaurs, pterodactyls are here displayed acting like carrion-eating vultures, when they were actually fish eaters, more like seagulls and albatrosses.  

Again, pretty gruesome, but I appreciate that the author knew the poisonous fumes are at least as dangerous as coming into contact with the lava (oops, Jurassic World 2 seemed to have forgotten that!). I would say anyone within 10' would need to save vs. poison or take ...let's say 2-8 points of damage from it, per combat turn within that distance.

Rekra is a weird name, but it actually is a name! I'm not entirely sure from where, but Google searching seems to be pointing to it being Slovakian. So this Slovakian spy has a gas gun and gas mask. Well-outfitted! This is a variant gas gun too, one that sprays paralyzing gas instead of sleep gas (both are chemically fanciful so, why not?). 

Oil line to motor broken is a good random complication in aerial combat (though this time it's being faked by plane thieves!). 

Out of the Sun was an aviator stunt in 1st edition Hideouts & Hoodlums, and here is used to give the Masked Pilot a surprise bonus while tailing the hijackers. 

This could be the earliest mention of Nicaragua in comic books. It's interesting that Nicaragua, being a neutral county in this story, gets to keep its name, but the villainous country is called "Vulcania." It's pretty easy to figure out which country that is, as El Salvador is known as the Land of Volcanoes. Although ruled by a dictator, Nicaragua was at least officially on the side of the allies during WWII. Although Nicaragua's dictator, Somoza, was corrupt, he wasn't as bad as El Salvador's dictator at this time, Matanza, who had more than 30,000 of his people killed.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

 

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.)

All-American Comics #12 - pt. 2

In Popsicle Pete, the Typical American Boy, Pete and his pals go in search of a pot of gold and find, coincidentally, $10,000 in gold bullion hidden by mobsters in a hidden stewpot. That's good news for Pete, but an interesting challenge for Pete's Editor, who just gave away enough XP to level up four half-pint fighters between the ages of 3 and 10 (provided they are all classed, of course; Supporting Cast Members do not all have to have a class and are simply noncombatants if they don't).

In Gary Concord, the Ultra-Man, Gary and his sidekick Guppy are placed in a prison more villains should consider; a completely transparent one that his guards can constantly watch and hear him through. The weakness in this approach, of course, is the guards themselves, and Gary is able to convince one into switching sides with a lucky encounter reaction roll.

This feature has the unusual distinction of being the first time in comics history the term "bunghole" has been used in print. It's unclear if the term is being used in its original meaning, an aperture through which a cask can be filled or emptied, or its slang meaning. It does appears that Guppy is about to flip off his guards right afterwards, though.

A lot of downtime happens in the last few pages. During it, Tor's forces conquer one-quarter of the United States. Gary has been busy leading the effort to counterattack on two fronts: first, a wave of thousands of atomic-powered plastic stealth ships armed with anti-metal rays (they are not called plastic, but made of "synthetics") to take on Tor's air force directly, and then a series of intercontinental ballistic missiles filled with sleep-inducing foam to be aimed at Tor's home country. Next issue we'll find out if all that works. My question is, if they had the resources for all this, why was the initial defense of the country apparently limited to conventional anti-aircraft guns?

(Read at readcomiconline.to)