Action Comics #22 - pt. 2

Clip Carson is on a steamship heading from Algiers to South America (two issues earlier, Clip was a guard on an ivory caravan in Africa, so this makes sense). When he sees a man clubbed and shoved overboard, Clip selflessly dives into the water instead of waiting for the ship's crew to point some searchlights into the water first. Searching in the dark would have been at a large penalty, perhaps dropping Clip's chance of finding the sinking man to 1 in 8.

The man, Clip later finds out, was marked for death by having bought an ivory statue crudely depicting an elephant. A cult allegedly worships this as an idol and anyone who touches it is marked for death. Clip is told this marks him too, even though he only reaches for the idol, he never actually touches it. The idol story would make more sense if it was bought in India instead of Africa, then this would be a statuette of Ganesha. A cultist makes an attempt on Clip's life, throwing a dagger through a porthole. Not only would this be a tricky shot, but Clip remarkably makes no effort to go after the dagger-thrower, despite the fact the would-be assassin must have been dangling precariously over the side of the ship.

The first suspect is an anthropologist onboard. The anthropologist correctly points out to Clip that the owner's story doesn't hold up; that there is no elephant god in Africa, but Clip doesn't believe him because the man gets so huffy with him. Remember, when running Hideouts & Hoodlums, to be in-character when giving out information; players need to know that info is coming from a character who may or may not be correct, or honest, and not straight from the Editor.

Clip goes to the radio room and asks the attendant to "burn up the ether with this message." It's a curious phrase and one I was surprised to see still gets used today! The earliest use of it I can find is a 1927 book called The Story of Radio. Apparently, there was once a serious concern that the atmosphere might be able to hold only so many radio waves at a time, and the proliferation of radio was actually a danger -- that it would literally set the ether on fire. Even though Einstein's theory of special relativity made the theory of ether obsolete in 1905, the idea stuck around, particularly in its association with radio waves.

The person Clip sent the radio message to is one of his supporting cast we've never met before, a newspaper editor.

"Tex" Thomson's adventure starts with a lengthy prologue in the Indian Ocean. An explorer is warned not to go to an unnamed island because of the demons there. On the island, he meets an old man who claims to have stolen his soul and begins to slowly transform into the explorer, Cary James. The demon's transformation takes two days to accomplish, at the end of which time Cary will be dead. During that time, Cary remembers he had been given a locket to protect him from the demons. Incredibly, for no reason other than to further the plot, Cary puts the locket in a bottle with a note for a friend instead of using the locket.

Later, in NYC, we learn that Cary's friend is also friends with Tex. The demon, impersonating Cary, is there in NYC too. The demon is looking for the locket, because the locket and the letter both made it to Dr. Drummond in NYC, who just happens to be the friend Tex is staying with. The letter explains that touching the locket to the demon's forehead will destroy it. Tex isn't even the one who does it; it's Dr. Drummond, the true hero of this story.

Although called a demon in this story, this monster sounds more like a doppelganger. Perhaps this is a more powerful version that we can call a demon doppelganger. The touch of the locket makes it revert momentarily to its previous form before turning to ash.

Zatara is at the "El Storko Club," dining alone. This is clearly a stand-in for the Stork Club, the famous Manhattan nightclub, one of the most prestigious in the world at that time. Zatara spies The Tigress before she spies him, (he has surprise) so he turns himself invisible to watch her. The Tigress slips something into a banker's drink. Interestingly, Zatara doesn't cast something like Purify Food & Drink or Neutralize Poison, but a spell that "glues" the man's glass to the table. I have no spell like that in H&H. It seems to be a spell of such limited utility that I hesitate to make one, unless it can make objects much larger than a glass immobile. In that case, Immobilize Object might be a 1st or even 2nd level spell, depending on the weight limit affected and its duration.

As the banker and Zatara leave together, Zatara spots a safe about to land on the man beside him. Zatara makes the safe blow away -- probably with Telekinesis rather than Gust of Wind. Safes are heavy though, but Zatara has a lot of brevet ranks, so maybe he's high enough in level to move 800 lbs.? That would make him...oh. 40th level. There either needs to be a Greater Telekinesis power, or Telekinesis -- already a 5th level power -- needs a lot of tweaking.

Zatara has no spell for analyzing poison; he takes the drink from the Stork Club to a chemist for analysis (luckily it's not contact poison because it's surely been sloshing around and spilling on his hand by now). Zatara casts a spell that is very much like Word of Recall, but it doesn't have to be Zatara's home, it can take him to anyone else's home who travels with him. Zatara casts a Wall of Glass spell around the man's home. I'll make that a 4th-level spell; it's still pretty effective, since the glass is about 5' thick. Then he casts Passwall to go through the Wall without just flying over it. After all these powerful spells, it's remarkable to see Zatara cast a 1st-level Disguise spell to make himself look like the banker. Then he casts the 8th-level Polymorph Any Object spell to turn an ordinary paper check into a living snake.

Zatara turns down a $100,000 reward for saving the banker. With as many brevet ranks as he has, Zatara's player has apparently given up on ever leveling his was past them.

The man who hired the Tigress to kill the banker is a bad guy called the Mask. Like the Tigress, he has no powers; he just pays a plastic surgeon to make him look like people. Zatara must be famous enough that the surgeon knows exactly what he looks like (or the Mask had a lot of photos taken between panels). Having failed to kill the banker, the Mask impersonates Zatara and asks for that reward money -- which is a pretty good Plan B, I have to say.

If using Telekinesis on a safe was too much, Zatara next uses it on a car that must weigh a ton. Telekinesis definitely needs improving in the rules. Zatara uses Polymorph Other on the Mask to make his face ugly (even taking away one of his eyes to be extra mean). Zatara even goes after the plastic surgeon, putting a curse on him so he can never perform surgery again. Again he lets the Tigress go free, since he has the hots for her.

So, to summarize, we know Zatara has somewhere between 18 and 100 levels in Magic-User.

(Read at readcomiconline.to)

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.)

Jungle Comics #3 - pt. 2

We're picking up where we left off with Tabu, Wizard of the Jungle. Stripped from his creator, Fletcher Hanks, and put in the hands of a more capable artist, will Tabu be less weird?

Polymorphing into a pigeon isn't too weird, and we already know from two previous adventures that Tabu has the brevet ranks to cast a 4th level spell.

Weirder is a 1930s villain comfortable with punching women, but maybe weirder still is that Velma is in the African jungle and still wearing a jacket. I feel for you, Velma; in my old age I have poor circulation now and get cold easily too.

That Tabu is felled by a bullet is weirdest of all, from a game mechanics perspective, because a magic-user of his level should have had enough hit points to take that shot and stay on his feet. Unless he was playing possum to lure out the villains?

I also want to call attention to that fifth panel, as there's a good amount of detail for outdoor ruins one can gather from that panel -- carved pillars, fallen trees, large skeletons, rocks, shrubs, and abandoned buildings.

 For whatever reason, Tabu allows himself to be tied up despite now being conscious (the bullet either stunned him or he was playing possum, as I suspect), and perhaps it's because Vilma was being threatened if he didn't comply. With these golden age stories being so short, sometimes you have to read the extra story between the panels. Anyway, that looks like a pretty nasty deathtrap, but since he's only tied to the elephants with rope, breaking loose requires just a simple wrecking things roll vs. the door category.

 So, deathtrap take two! This time, Blackwall gets the idea to sick a rhino on him. Because Tabu is still in a deathtrap, the rhino's charge can do lethal damage, whereas normally it would do no more than render him unconscious.

Who says things like, "It's tearing down at him with the impetus of a locomotive"? Probably someone who says things like, "Look at Charles tear into those scones with the impetus of a starving man!"

These clue coupons are clever, and could be a good source for random crime clues I can gather here. From this one, we add checking the flesh around a wound to see if it's swollen in such a way that suggests a poisoned weapon.

Although we already know Tabu can snap ropes, he decides to show off one of his most powerful spells by polymorphing into a rock. Polymorphing into a mineral is a much higher level spell than normal polymorphing, as the spells are written now.

Let's jump into the next story now, which is Camilla, Queen of the Lost Empire. We don't know the backstory of these characters, but Camilla is extremely trusting of an old man who tells her to set herself on fire to get her old kingdom back. I don't know about you, but I'd be concerned that the old geezer has a wicked sense of humor and is about to fatally prank me -- particularly when he starts prancing about and spouting "lo mozo co nomo" around the fire.

Camilla seems to be invoking Baal, the ancient earth and fertility god of Canaan and Phoenicia. You might know him from the bad press he got in the Old Testament.

Turns out the old guy was telling the truth after all! He seems to have cast a Wish spell for her that basically restores everything to the way it was earlier in the previous story.

Jon is either really trying hard to impress Ruth or he's pretty dumb, as it would have been a lot smarter to run from a big crowd of swordsmen than to stand and wait for them to reach him. From what we've been told, Jon and Ruth had no overwhelming need to explore the ruins other than curiosity, so if they had just left and never come back they would have been much safer. Or they could have ran, waited for nightfall, and then tried to sneak in.

The Blue Bath is a terrible name for a deathtrap, but the idea of a magic pool that can age you to death is a good deathtrap. Or at least it would be if Ruth actually looked older than 50 when she comes out. I wonder, if Camilla hates her so bad, why she doesn't leave her in longer. Maybe the pool doesn't age you more the longer you stay in, but a one-time aging in a random range of years -- say, 10-60. That said, I wonder if being dragged out of a pit by grappling hooks isn't itself a pretty tough punishment; I'd say that would do 2-8 points of damage, 1-4 for the hooks digging into her and 1-4 more if they drag her up the wall.  

The python pit, in comparison, is a pretty mundane deathtrap. There's 1-6 falling damage for going into the pit, and then he could get killed by the constrictor snake, but Camilla was nice enough to let him have a weapon in the pit with him. That Camilla can never get over Jon!

Geez, Jon, do you really have it in for snakes? All you had to do was kill the snake, not dice it!

Awfully convenient how Camilla's fountain of youth is left completely unguarded. Magic water is also, apparently, extremely volatile when exposed to fire...whereas ordinary water would simply extinguish the torch. Don't eat anything spicy for awhile, Ruth!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Jungle Comics #3 - pt. 1

After my longest lull ever, I'm back! And so is Fiction House and the unrelenting racism of the jungle genre. Gird your loins, because we're wading deep into the racism today!

We'll jump right into the lead feature, Kaanga, in progress. I don't know why so many golden age comic book artists had trouble with drawing cats, but this black panther with a distinctly seal-like head tempts me to go back to work on the Advanced Hideouts & Hoodlums Mobster Manual so I can stat it! I guess it would be just a black panther that likes to swim a lot more, though.

Tree-based fighting is interesting because there's a chance each turn of falling out of the tree. Here, Kaanga and the seal-panther both miss their saves vs. science at the same time.

It's interesting how brutally murderous Kaanga was against black panthers, but how gentle and caring he is over leopards. Or maybe his player was just looking for a good deed XP award. Killing a defenseless leopard would have netted him no XP award.

An assegai is a real thing, a slender, iron-tipped, hardwood spear used chiefly by southern African peoples.

That's a big python! But is it a "huge" python -- in terms of needing additional Hit Dice -- or just a normal-sized python? The average length of a python is, I believe, about 9 feet. This one looks to be twice that long, making it a large python (remember our large/huge/giant categories from D&D!).   Pythons can reach 26' in length, though, meaning that even in the real world there are such things as large and huge pythons.

I'm preeetty sure that constrictor snakes do not bite and hold fast like that. Had it looped around him and squeezed, I do think Kaanga would be a goner now.

There's another issue, though, of how to handle striking something against a stationary object after grappling it. I wouldn't introduce a new mechanic for this, but just reverse how hitting something with a rock works -- simple attack roll and damage if you hit.

Kaanga ducking is just flavor text; The King's attack roll missed and Kaanga ducking is simply how the miss is explained by the player and/or Editor.

I'm not sure where Cheba came from. Is Cheba the leopard from earlier, or a third cat? Did the Editor decide that Cheba just happened to be walking by and tossed her into the encounter, to make it easier for Kaanga's player?

It's unclear what happens after panel 5. It seems the gun was knocked out of The King's hand when Cheba leaps on him -- and disarming guns is supposed to be a common occurrence in Hideouts & Hoodlums, to reflect pages like this. But how does he choose to pick up a rock instead of the gun? Was the gun damaged? Because there is no chance of that happening in the disarming mechanic as written. Does he accidentally pick up the rock instead? There is no game mechanic for random picking up stuff either.

Incidentally, in case you need the top hat explained to you, The King is able to take over a tribe of naive, superstitious natives because he comes from New York. So, that makes him smarter than an African.

The Red Panther feature is not any better. Okay, the artwork is better, I meant racism-wise. Here, we're supposed to side with the "innocent" miner wanting to take the land and its resources away from the natives living there because, you know, he's white (though having a hot blonde daughter probably helps his case too).

I don't have much to say about this page, except -- dig that elephant portrait on the wall. What is the backstory between the miner and that elephant that would make him put a photograph of the elephant on his wall, as if it was a beloved pet?

Did I mention I like the art? Comics.org's contributors think this is Arthur Peddy's work, and I really dig the layout of that first panel.

No, there was no African deity named Zagu. Most tribes, from what I've read, didn't worship deities so much as ancestors. Of course, this could be a cult, and an exception to that rule. Of course, maybe they are worshipping Tabu, so that this segues into the next feature...

Lastly, we're going to take a quick peek at the next story of Tabu , Wizard of the Jungle. Gee, I wonder why it's black panthers that are always the cats getting picked on (though at least this one is drawn well)? I'm also sparing you from the previous page where a black man is being tortured to death, supposedly not far away. Tagu doesn't hear those screams at all, but conveniently hears a white woman's screams.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)