Feature Comics #30 - pt. 2

We're looking at the second half of this issue of Feature Comics today, and are still in this month's Dollman feature. If you can't guess, Dollman has snuck aboard a German submarine since we last saw him. If you ignore the dynamic layouts and just concentrate on what Dollman is doing on this page, you'll realize there's nothing here he couldn't have done at full-size, backing my contention that a shrinking power is nothing but flavor text.

Now, he did, on the previous page, conceal himself in a crate too small for a normal-sized person to hide in...but the Editor could easily have changed the scale of the crates to fit the Hero.

I know where this is! the highest suspension bridge in the world was the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado from 1929 until 2001.

I am really impressed by the wrinkle in this story, that Rance leaves the time bomb intact to give the story a time limit. It's not really clear why. What would make this work so much better is if the time bomb wasn't safe to defuse, so the only way to do so is to find the man who left the bomb in the time they have available and trick him into defusing i for them. Which is almost exactly how this story goes, except for the necessity factor.

This is more of what I like from this story - not only finding out who the villain was, but finding out his backstory, looking for things to exploit so they can trick him instead of beating him up. It's all so ingenuously done that I would probably wind up giving Cameron a penalty to his save vs. plot to see through the disguise (the distance and bad lighting probably help too, so, -3?).

Here's an example of expert level sleight of hand from a non-adventure character. But I was more interested in sharing this page for the unusual word "bohunks." I don't know if you all knew this already, but bohunks is actually a racial slur, referring to an immigrant from central or southeastern Europe, especially a laborer.

We haven't looked at educational filler in a while. Things like this are very useful because, when I'm deciding how high or how far a Hero should be able to leap without some kind of buffing (either by skill or power or spell), I will look to world records, but of course world records keep going up over time. It's hard to believe that the pole vault record was "only" 14' back in 1940; now it stands at 20'!

We're jumping from there into Charlie Chan, where the artist does a great job of getting Warner Oland's likeness with all the shading. Here, Charlie lands on the nature of the bad guys' scheme from two clues. I've spoken about this before on the blog, how difficult it can be sometimes to distinguish the Editor misspeaking from deliberately leaving a clue in dialogue. The better clue, for a RPG, is having Chan realize the binoculars are expensive. I'm not even sure if one should need a skill check to determine that; I would think it would be obvious if a pair of binoculars was fancy enough to be expensive.

This page tells me pigeon blood rubies are worth twice what diamonds are worth. I wish it also told me what diamonds were worth in 1940, as that would be a good cipher for figuring out what all other gemstones were worth. Interestingly, I can find this information online, but only going back to 1960.

You don't hear about "pigeon blood" rubies often, probably because it is as violent as it sounds. Pigeon Blood Ruby meaning is primarily associated with its color that matches exactly with the blood drawn from a freshly killed pigeon.

I'm currently running a campaign where one of the Heroes is working to become a professional boxer, so I found this installment of Slim and Tubby particularly interesting. At first glance it seems that Slim needs a license and bond to become a boxer, but that's not true; he needs a license and a surety bond to work as a boxing promoter, something that's still true today (Slim is looking to become a promoter to promote his own boxing career).

We also see robbers armed with sub-machine guns here (well, sort of -- they never leave the car, but we're told they are that well-armed).

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Wonderworld Comics #11 - pt. 3

We're still here with Patty O'Day and her rival suitors, the aristocratic Mike and the common man, Ham. Ham was climbing out of the well (we saw him get dumped down the well last time) when he pulls this stone loose. Now, we can treat this as a secret door, but it's sort of a build-your-own secret door.

Mike is a very confident climber. Had he begun from standing on top of Ham's shoulders, I would have given him a +1 modifier to his skill roll.

I just googled some pics of French cars of this time period and while, yes, they did tend to have long bodies, and I did see some two-seaters that looked like three men abreast would have to be really comfortable with overlapping thighs...but I still don't think any cars of the era were that narrow.

More evidence of damage done to cars in a chase should trigger a random chance of complication, rather than assigning hit points to vehicles.











Complicating matters about the nationality of these villains, Egroe isn't a French name, but a Dutch word (I believe it means "grand"). Dutch separatists fighting in France?

It's interesting that the bad guys "miraculously" survive, suggesting that car wrecks should usually be lethal in the game. I've got plenty of conflicting evidence on that, but maybe only Heroes should have such an easy time escaping car wrecks.

We're going to leave that story and jump into the following Dr. Fung story. Here, in Persia, Fung and Dan are shown this well by an old friend. It seems like a trap, since there is no visible explanation for how the ground around the well gives way so easily, but apparently it is just coincidental instability.

That is one of the craziest monster designs I've ever seen. I'm not even sure what to call them -- unicycle ghouls? The captions only call them things like "weird creatures" and "strange beings." How do you even rationalize a species evolving to have a built-in wheel?

Complaints aside, I like the idea of pneumatic tubes transporting Heroes quickly between levels of a hideout.

And, of course, we end this page with the cliche of monsters adopting a hot human woman as their queen.

For no reason whatsoever, one of the unicycle ghouls is a gigantic unicycle ghoul, about 20' tall. If unicycle ghouls have 1 HD (I would be skeptical about giving them more, since they should be knocked over easily), then this fella must have at least 12 HD. Rather than being presented as their leader, this thing is just one of them, so it's refreshing to know this race doesn't go in for hierarchical societies, except for elevating human women.

It's hard to imagine the young lady has never thought to scream at the monsters to take advantage of their sensitivity to sound. And then, perhaps she has, but enough of them made their saves that they could always stop her.

We're going to jump ahead again, this time into Munson Paddock's Tex Maxon, the Phantom Rider. The stop, drop, and roll campaign would not start until the 1970s, but that doesn't mean people didn't know that's what to do when you catch on fire in the 1940s.

It's interesting how guns only make lots of smoke when the story benefits from it. I'm not sure if guns every actually made that much smoke, or if this comes from old cowboy movies exaggerating the smoke clouds.

While dropping out of a tree on your opponent looks impressive, I would assign no more than a +1 to hit modifier for it, making it questionable if it was worth all the effort of clambering to get into position for it.

Surprisingly, this "Spark" Stevens of the Navy story may be our very first set in Guam. By October 1941, all U.S. dependents and civilians on Guam would be evacuated, but here at the beginning of 1940, Guam would have a burgeoning population of 22,000.

There's little that need be said about the "damsel in distress" plot hook, except that it's so. darn. easy.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)