Detective Comics #34

And we're back to The Batman! I've read elsewhere some people guessing that is the Crimson Avenger featured more prominently on the cover, but it doesn't really look like something he'd wear and I think that's meant to be just a random mysteryman.

This issue is a flashback to when The Batman was still in Paris (from 2-3 issues ago). Bruce runs into a faceless man and, because he didn't read Dick Tracy when he fought The Blank, is really shocked. I wonder if I should stat a mobster type called Faceless Men who have a Scare Good Guy power...?

To a modern reader, "Duc D'Orterre, Master of the Apaches" might need translation. The first half is French for "Duke of Orterre," while the second half is (obviously) English, and is referring to (according to Wikipedia) "a Parisian Belle Époque violent criminal underworld subculture of early 20th-century hooligans, night muggers, street gangs and other criminals," and not American Indians. Orterre is a fictional duchy in France and is closest to Orléans of real French duchy names.

Throwing a missile weapon, like a throwing dagger, through the open window of a taxi car can't be easy, so it's no wonder the Apache tossing at Karel misses. Karel would normally just have soft cover from the car door, but given the odd angle the dagger seems to have come from into the vehicle (almost from in front of the taxi!), I might give a steeper bonus of 2 or 3 points. Sometimes, facing really does matter in combat, but it has to be the Editor's call when circumstances would call for this.

Le Duc D'Orterre has a face-burning ray that can erase the features of your face, while still allowing you to see, breathe, and talk.  It doesn't make much sense -- unless the ray only affects the ability of others to perceive your face.

Bruce Wayne steps out of a room and then The Batman steps back in to talk to Charles and Karel Maire. Because this is a comic book, there's still a chance that Charles and Karel don't immediately make the connection that Bruce Wayne is The Batman, but I would give them a save vs. plot at a +2 bonus to figure it out.

The Batman's plan for finding the Duke is to wander the Parisian sewers until he runs into a wandering encounter of two Apaches -- who I guess I would stat as bloodthirsty hoodlums, since I don't have stats for hooligans or muggers yet, and my version of the gangster is decidedly different from these knife-wielding cutthroats. Before the battle is over, a second wandering encounter check brings back up -- a third hoodlum and the Duke himself.

The Duke is armed with a light-emitting cane which somehow stuns The Batman.

The Duke's death trap for The Batman is a mechanical wheel that spins anyone strapped to its outer edge, with a chance each minute of slamming him into the stone wall of the cell for...let's say 1-8 damage? Enough slams and it could definitely kill someone.

The Batman simply snaps his bonds, as if he was a superhero, in this story. This happens often enough in stories that I allow heroes to escape bonds as a skill check, but I would only give them one check, without changing the circumstances somehow.

A trap door in the ceiling of the wheel-trap room leads to what appears to be a garden where flowers grow with human faces. The Batman sees them and uncharacteristically sits down with his face buried in his hands. It's a disturbing scene -- possibly the result of some hallucinogenic gas in the room that effectively stuns The Batman. If taken literally, though, then the Duke has somehow grafted human heads to flowers in a way that keeps them alive, and seeing them is a trap that causes temporary insanity.

Despite having entered the garden room from underneath it, The Batman is lead by a talking flower to a "glass door" (which doesn't look like glass at all) that leads back into the room he'd just left. The garden room must be a split-level room.

Charles, captured separately, tells The Batman that the Duke has fled to Champagne. Champagne is a province, the west side of which might have overlapped the historic duchy of Orleans, so that bit works out -- though with such a large geography to search, it's rather remarkable how quickly The Batman spots the Duke's fleeing automobile.

Gardner Fox's word of the day is tonneau. A tonneau is the cover used to protect the passenger seats in a convertible.

The next story is Spy. Bart Regan's stories always seem to presuppose that there was some intelligence agency in the US besides the FBI -- which made sense in that Steve Carson worked for the FBI, and Steve and Bart never crossed paths. In this story, we see Bart heading into to work and it clearly looks like the entrance to the Capital Building, not the Department of Justice building the FBI worked out of in Washington, DC.

Bart is walking up the front steps with another man when they are shot at in a drive-by shooting. Bart immediately assumes the other man was the target even though Bart surely has a great many enemies by now. It seems an odd sort of hunch, and I suspect it would either be a wild guess on the player's part, or the Editor was feeding extra information to the player to lead to that assumption.

The ambassador is from "Bolaria," which sounds like it should be Bolivia, but it's not; Bolaria and Luxor are two warring European nations. Luxor is Germany, so Bolaria is...France?

Bart takes the ambassador's place, thanks to an on-staff make-up artist (a SCM who would be even better than the heroes at disguises, so maybe a save vs. plot to see through it at a penalty?). He heads to Europe via a trans-Atlantic clipper plane. The plane is shot down by two fighter planes from Luxor, but are either disguised to look like pirate planes or Luxor's flag looks exactly like a pirate flag.

(Batman story read in Batman Archives vol. 1, Spy story read at readcomiconline.to.)

Feature Comics #27

This issue is the debut of Dollman and, while I prefer The Flame from Lou Fine's ouevre, Dollman seems to be the one who lasted the longest.

Aqua regia is a mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid.

Dollman's ability to throw a syringe really far, relative to his size, is not so surprising if shrinking is only flavor text. Then Dollman's throwing range doesn't change at all.

It does seem like he's about to lose two supporting cast members here, though...

Wait, where did this idea that Dollman has the strength of 20 men come from?  Did they do some testing on him between the 2nd and 3rd panels?

Still...if he does have the strength of 20 men, then it sounds like he has access to the Get Tougher power already!

This is Reynolds of the Mounted and...man, that is one weird pillow! I don't think I will ever again see a pillow used in a trap, but placing radium ore inside it is devilishly weird and perfect for Hideouts & Hoodlums. I suppose there is a saving throw vs. science required every hour before the radium gives you amnesia?

This is Rance Keane, and here's an interesting fact: if you want to know if a mine has been played out, you can just call the U.S. State Department and they can tell you over the phone.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Detective Comics #27 - pt. 2

There was a time when Speed Saunders was top billing in Detective Comics, but now he just gets to come second after The Bat-Man. A beat cop who must know Speed summons him to the scene of a corpse found on the riverfront, tied up and strangled. Speed sees an unusual design on the man's collar that he takes to be a clue. Smartly, he heads to the public library to research it. Weirdly, the library is open to him, even though it appears to be nighttime. Did Speed just break into the library, because he couldn't wait until morning to look for clues? That sounds exactly like some players I've had...

Speed finds a weird trap in a man's house; behind a secret wall panel is a mannequin arm holding a gun, so that one only has to pull a string at the back of the arm to make the gun shoot. It seems overly elaborate at first, but it would allow someone to murder within the house without getting any powder burns on the killer's own hand.

Buck Marshall, Range Detective, does a first class job of searching for clues -- checking for how much blood leaked from each wound, checking the local soil against the soil on the dead man's clothes, checking the nearby horseshoe prints, considering the effects of the weather on dating the tracks, considering the direction of the shots, checking for loose hair, and considering the length of the stride to estimate a man's height -- all things a Hideouts & Hoodlums player can look for while investigating.

In Spy, the Chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee dies -- which is actually kind of a funny pun, because in 1939, the Chairman of the Commitee's name was Martin Dies.  Or is it the same Committee? Bart Regan says there were five members on the Committee, but there were actually seven members in 1939, a fact that should have been easily verifiable, and none of the actual member names are even close to the fake ones used in the story.

Here's another wrinkle -- though Bart Regan is often referred to as a spy, his actual credentials here show he works for the Secret Service. Or are those fake credentials? That could be a good trophy item...

Bart has an interesting encounter with a wandering encounter; when a gunman climbs through his hotel window, Bart is immediately incredulous. "How in heck could you have known so soon that I'm on your trail?" Bart wails at the unfairness of it. But the gunman turns out to be a hungry thief, unrelated to the case. I can just imagine an out-of-character exchange going on, between player and Editor, with the player complaining that the Editor was using knowledge of the player's actions unfairly, and the Editor backpedaling and changing the encounter.

Bart encounters an unusual murder weapon -- miniature "bombs" wrapped in cellulose and concealed in food. The cellulose dissolves and the bomb goes off on the inside, apparently for lethal damage (though it's hard to imagine a bomb that small doing much damage...). It's also hard to believe the enemy spymaster falls for the old "switch the bananas when you're not looking" trick - but I guess he missed his save vs. plot.

I learned a history lesson from The Crimson Avenger when he refers to a miniature camera as a "candid camera". And here I thought that phrase was invented for the TV show!

Again, The Crimson shows unusual abilities -- leaping a 6' fence, climbing the drainpipe of a building, and snapping rope bonds when tied up -- all too weak to be superpowers, but possibly Mysteryman stunts.

Bruce Nelson is investigating a Voodoo-related murder in New Orleans, and the author seems to have actually done some reading on the subject; the crosses and snakes at the murder scene seem like appropriate motifs. I wonder if the Creole words are authentic or just gibberish. Anyway, I always try to put some research into my scenarios like that.

Bruce encounters a harmless snake -- obviously not there to challenge him, but it did frighten him enough that he whipped out his gun and started shooting. He also finds the murder weapon -- devil smoke, a "green, gummy substance" that, if burned, produces a lethal cloud of smoke. Good for a deathtrap!

You don't have to learn languages in H&H, normally, but if the Editor did insist that your Hero had to learn a language, Cosmo the Phantom of Disguise learns Chinese in just 30 days. Cosmo, in disguise, gets a job in a Chinese shipping business. In the back of the shipping room, concealed behind boxes, is a secret door that opens onto a passage that leads below the wharf behind the building. Then a second secret door opens into the back of a fake coal barge.

And, lastly, Slam Bradley takes a trans-Atlantic clipper to Switzerland, which might have necessitated a save vs. plot to arrange. As I understand it, there were a lot of travel restrictions on traveling from the U.S. to Europe during the War.

(Issue read at ReadComics.net)

Feature Funnies #19

Hideouts & Hoodlums' combat rules do need to take special maneuvers into some consideration, but I am very hesitant to allow a combat move like this neck twist (demonstrated in Joe Palooka), which bypasses the hit point mechanic and automatically* removes a combatant from play (*and, yes, I realize that it wouldn't really be automatic if a saving throw was allowed). It seems too much like the superhero power Sleeping Nerve Pinch to allow just anyone to use.

This next page serves as an example of why I don't want too realistic a combat system for H&H, but for a different reason. While super-neck twists could end a fight faster, complications incurred in addition to hit point loss -- like blurred vision -- would slow fights down and put combatants at an increased disadvantage the more they are already losing. It may be more realistic, but it does not make for epic fight scenes where the good guy, on the ropes, keeps fighting in peak form all the way up to the end. Further, such an additional penalty might scare players off from risking hit point loss during combat at all.

It turns out not to be a real banshee haunting Lena Pry and Daniel, so I won't be adding that mobster-type to H&H yet, but this story never does explain, over the following pages, how the "banshee" survived being shot in the head. Fake undead still needs to become a mobster-type (not sure if I'll call them "fake undead" though), and maybe they should have some measure of real undead's special defenses until unmasked?

Although comedic, Archie O'Toole is still an adventure strip and could serve as the basis of a light-hearted campaign. I definitely think Count Morris Hackula of Brooklyn would make for a fun encounter. Here we see the traditional vampire power of being able to turn into a bat (and could this be ghosted by Will Eisner? Countess Hackula looks an awful lot like one of his femme fatales...). Except, on the next page, we learn that the Countess isn't really a vampire, but a jitterbug. When she bites you, you go mad and don't want to do anything but dance. It's a ...somewhat intriguing notion, though I don't know if I'll be adding jitterbugs to the mobster section anytime soon.

You never know with these non-fiction pages how non-fiction-y they really are. This one is As Strange as It Seems, and while I'm not sure how representative that really is of West Indies fashion in the 1930s, it's the first panel I've seen set in the West Indies in modern times. I just recently ran two H&H scenarios in that part of the world and had to rely on real world research to guess at what it was like.

True or not, I like the idea of "living lanterns" being a regional thing there and, if one of those scenarios ever sees print, I might add this in for color.

I could also see an exciting story where the hero finds himself in a horse race with little or no rules...

This is Espionage, by Eisner. I normally feel I can trust Eisner to have done his homework, but I'm a little incredulous this time that you could get a working plane in the cargo hold of a ship and not be asked for an inspection (though I suppose the machine guns could have been hidden elsewhere during inspections?). I'm also a little ...surprised that Black X keeps something in his wallet that identifies him as spy.

Speaking of things that surprise me, if a lariat is really able to stop a tiger, as shown here in Big Top, then why even bother using other weapons? Special maneuvers with lassoing is going to need more thought.

Here's an idea for incorporating war tactics and strategy into a game without war -- stage it as two "armies" of half-pints having a snowball fight, so that no one gets hurt in the scenario (well, unless one side fights dirty and switches to ice balls...).

This is from Off the Record. The first gag I think is pretty funny -- and the second one is another goat joke! Am I going to have to go back to tracking how many goat jokes I've seen so far?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)