Fantastic Comics #5 - pt. 2

We're back for round 2 of Samson vs. Eelo! Although he doesn't look like your "traditional" merman, I'd already decided last time I would stat Eelo as a merman. So panel 1 is either proof that mermen have great swimming movement rate, or this is the first clue that Eelo is actually a supervillain buffed with the Race the Train power.

I've seen some interesting rayguns in golden age comic books, but an underseas gun is a new one. A heat ray shoots heat. What is this one shooting out? Underseas? Is it just a water pistol?

That is some significant wrecking going on there. A submarine weighs a couple of thousand tons, so we're talking battleship category. 

But a hero shouldn't have to do everything; eventually moping up the enemies gets to be rote, or antic-climactic. It's good, then, to have the "cavalry" come in and mop up the remainder, or the remaining sub in this case.
 

I like most of this page. Samson, stoically guarding the two reunited lovers...Eelo, almost heroically, pulling himself up for one more contest with Samson (Eelo must be a supervillain with a few more powers at his disposal, to think he has a chance here)...

And then Samson just hits him and kills him. Ugh. Death-Dealing Blow needs to be its own power. It would be more powerful than Super Punch because Super Punch just does a bunch of damage to knock out virtually any foe, whereas Death-Dealing Blow must make you save vs. plot or die. So, a level 5 power? Maybe level 6? At this point, Samson only should have enough XP to reach 2nd level, so he's either been gifted more brevet ranks, or he's had more all this time and was actually holding back.

Like with ultra-powerful magic-users in the comics, one could ask me, Scott, if superheroes are this powerful, then don't you need more power inflation in even the early levels for Hideouts & Hoodlums? Good question, random stranger, but two explanations for this: 1) the superhero class is based on the first year of Superman stories, before all this power inflation happens, and 2) there are certainly elements I don't want to emulate about the early comic books because I just don't like them. These include done-in-one-blow fights and grossly overpowered heroes.

"Mercury is getting closer to the Sun every year. Eventually it will be destroyed by the - ah, I'm just kiddin'. Mercury is in a stable orbit and is gonna outlast both of us, baby." Apparently Flip just likes to periodically test how gullible Adele is.

Now I'm being flip, but this science is so bad it actually makes me mad that anyone would write it in a book children would be reading. What if they repeated this nonsense in class?

You know...you'd think someone brilliant enough to invent a fourth-dimensional projector would figure out a way to put two separate seats into it. I suspect Flip just uses this as an excuse to get all hands-on with Adele.

I don't even know what I'm looking at with those aliens. Are they giant pigeon angels with halos? Are those beanie copters?

Darn, I was just getting excited about statting Mercurian pigeon angels, but those are just thought-wave helmets. 

Whoa, I thought the misogyny in this issue was just going to be subtle, but this just got way over the top. Not cool, giant pigeon angle impersonators! But what do we think about Flip now? Is he off the hook for sparing her feelings, or should he be honest and tell her that the aliens are women-bashing in front of her? 

A thought about the architecture: at first these look like Earth skyscrapers, but if the natives are birds...what if these "buildings" are actually solid perches for the natives to roost on top of?

Nice...looks like I'm getting something cool for the Mobster Manual after all out of this issue. Heidites are D&D basilisk-like monsters, but instead of having a petrifying gaze attack, they exude green slime from their skin! From a D&D context, this potentially makes them even more dangerous than basilisks. 

Heck, I'm so excited, I just added it into the manuscript now! *sigh* Now to fix all the layout of the book after it...

 

Jumping ahead to Golden Knight, we have a lot of people in chainmail here. Except the girl, of course, who is for some reason in a 20th century bathing suit instead of even a dress. The chainmail is AC 5, but it exists almost as flavor text -- if you hit the target, you can stab right through the chainmail as if isn't there.

I had commented recently on a Facebook post about monster tactics in D&D that the DM has to have some latitude for deciding how advantageous to make those tactics, that the Editor had to stop short of making them so advantageous that the players will switch to the same tactics.

Here, we see entangling with nets giving great advantage. The Golden Knight, despite having a sword in hand, can apparently not cut his way out, or stab through the nets. Now, if this is simply a failed saving throw, and the player knows it, maybe this won't become his next character's main tactic. But if nets work like this every time? Then he will, and he'll expect it to always work for him too, and should. 

Other than that, what bothers me most about this page? The spaghetti straps on The Golden Knight's tabard? The Gothic style of the castle in medieval times? The fact that the castle is brightly painted all over? Okay, it's actually all three.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.) 

Zip Comics #2 - pt. 2

When we left off on this story the other day, I was talking about how, game mechanically, Steel Sterling could get out of these chains without wrecking them. And yet, for some reason, he doesn't. He doesn't for a very long time, even allowing himself to be dropped out of the plane. It's a very odd sequence in an otherwise very enjoyable story. There is no reason Steel's magnetism-based powers wouldn't make escaping this very easy. I can almost believe that he is playing possum, thinking the Black Knight is taking him somewhere important to give more of his plot away. Then he can't escape during the villain's monologing because he blows his saves vs. plot and can't interrupt the monolog (this is officially in the Hideouts & Hoodlums rules!). A 3,000-foot drop would do 30d6 damage, which would still only render unconscious if this was not clearly a deathtrap, and that changes how damage works.

Magnetism is really just a label pasted over Steel's Superman-like powers; there's no reason I can think of why magnetism should make it easier to fall onto an iceberg, or how he's pushing two icebergs apart, unless there's a lot of iron content in that ice.

An iceberg can easily weigh 100,000 tons, so tipping one over is going to require a high-level Raise power buffing his strength. I'm still tinkering with a more uniform structure to the Raise powers, now leaning towards something like this:

Level 1 - 1 ton
Level 2 - 10 tons
Level 3 - 100 tons
Level 4 - 1,000 tons
Level 5 - 10,000 tons
Level 6 - 100,000 tons

It's rare when a henchman looks cooler than the main villain, but we have another example of that here. This supervillain, let's call him Liquid Fire after his weapon of choice, looks plenty intimidating! I'm not even sure what this stuff he's squirting is, as we're still two years away from Napalm being invented (I had no idea it was so early). The concept for Napalm has been around since antiquity, with Greek Fire, but I wonder if that was where Biro got the idea here, or if the concept for a modern version was floating around before Napalm...

Anyway, it's worth mentioning that any defensive powers that buff you from hit point loss do not protect you from other attack forms, like blinding attacks -- which is precisely why Steel has to dive in the water.

A yacht like that probably weighs about 35 tons, putting it in the level 3 Raise power category, or Raise Trolley Car. The description for Raise Trolley Car even mentions being able to shake out occupants.

The end of that story is confusing...how is Steel's job finished, if he just leaves Black Knight standing there with his anti-aircraft gun? Did he use Turn Gun on Bad Guy between panels? Or did Biro simply run out of panels to tell his story?

Speaking of stories, we're going to jump into the Scarlet Avenger's story in progress. SA, aka Jim Kendall, is kinda all over the place, stylistically. He keeps skulls around him to seem scary, then keeps electrical equipment around him to look nerdy. He uses "phono-vis" -- yet another television-radio trophy item -- to contact some of his operatives, but he also uses carrier pigeons to reach other ones.




For a mysteryman who should only be 1st level this far into his published career, SA sure has a lot of powerful trophy items at his disposal. Here he is, driving his rocket car, with a "super-solaric heat ray" apparently attached to his windshield (or maybe it pops up out of the hood, we really can't see it). The heat ray uses wrecking things, and can wreck at least up to the cars category.

It's usually the main villains who wear hooded robes, but this guy in panel 2 talks like he's just a lieutenant. This guy's no dummy, though, he bought a robe with pockets!

Yeah, that's not how a bullet-proof cloaks would work, unless it's got some mad science inertia dampening field around it. This is far from the first time armor has defied physics in a comic book, nor the first time bullets have.

I've never treated racketeers as a separate mobstertype,

and I probably still won't since I don't see them doing anything here ordinary hoodlums can't do.

The chief looks suspiciously like a KKK member who left something yellow in the white wash.

Hoodlums don't have a very good chance of carrying trophy items, but when they do it makes them much more dangerous. Note how the hoodlums divide their tactics; two are grappling, one is clubbing from behind, and the fourth is using the sleeping gas spray can.

I still don't like the Scarlet Avenger feature very much, but I have to say I like panels 6-8 here. The door in the extreme foreground gives a subtle sense of place, and the panel compositions on the next two are above average too.

At 1940, mustard gas was probably still the most deadly gas known to man -- unless this was a fictitious chemical agent.

One million volts sounds like a lot, but we can make Tasers that can discharge more than that these days. I don't think it's the electricity that lets SA bust through that glass.

A million volts could, I suppose, kill someone, but I think it's more likely to just knock them out.

That last panel makes me think the chief is hiding, but he passed gas and that's how SA is going to find him...

As your last resort you pull out your magnetic ray that can wreck through walls? That wasn't your first choice when you were put into the glass cage with mustard gas? There's something very comic book-y about that, though...enough that I feel like maybe Heroes should need to save vs. plot to use their most effective attack mode first.

How long can SA hold a million volt charge, when he keeps discharging it on people? And what about when he climbed in his car, wouldn't that ground his charge? The science here is a bit beyond me.

I get deja vu reading a lot of these Western stories, but none as much as this issue. Every facet of Nevada Jones' transformation into a Lone Ranger clone seems calculated for maximum rip-offidity.

All these Western tropes, despite their commonness, don't necessarily make much sense. If you're an outlaw trying to look less suspicious, it seems like a wearing a mask is the exact opposite direction you should take.

My favorite part of this page is the arrow pointing to the final panel, foreshadowing the arrow that strikes the dying man in the back.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Mystic Comics #1 - pt. 2

When we last left Zephyr Jones and Corky on the surface of the sun Cygni 61 the Mad Astronomer had a machine that sprays his secret formula on Zephyr and Corky. He tells them that this will protect them from the heat on the surface of the star, and apparently the blinding light and the crushing gravitational pull as well). Our boys are so gullible, or so smitten with his daughter, that they immediately go outside to see if it worked. Instead of walking on super-heated plasma, this seems to be a rocky place, inhabited by dwarfs that live in caves.

They find that at least nine star-dwarfs had captured the astronomer and his daughter from their ship. Most of them chase after Zephyr and Corky. The dwarves have super-tough skin (like the power, because the heat of the sun has hardened them), but are vulnerable to fire extinguishers because...ah, let's stop pretending any of this makes sense! These aliens remind me of the game Awful Green Things from Outer Space, where you're supposed to try everything on your ship on the aliens, because only one random item will kill them.

To top it off, Zephyr and Corky go back below ground to save the prisoners from eight more dwarfs. They defeat the dwarfs by throwing rope around a group of them and then pulling the rope off the cliff the dwarfs are on. Not sure why none of the dwarfs think to grab onto the rope and pull Zephyr and Corky down first, or with them. If the star-dwarfs are just too dumb, then a fair Editor would make some kind of intelligence check for them (trying to roll under a low INT score) before letting them fight too cleverly. They are very primitive, fighting only with clubs and darts from blowguns.

We've seen Heroes start avalanches to bury or block adversaries before, but Zephyr takes the cake by knowing just where to throw a rock to start an avalanche. That would take some kind of expert skill level in geology, I would think, followed by a successful attack roll vs. a low Armor Class.

The next feature is the 3Xs. The three "Xs" are private detectives, all working anonymously (although they wear no masks to conceal their identities, so it should take too long for people to figure them out), but go by 1X, 2X, and 3X. Each has an area of specialization; 1X does the detective work (high Wisdom score), 2X is a "walking encyclopedia" (high Intelligence score), and 3X is the strong-arm (high Strength score). A later caption explains that 1X is in charge and the other two are his aides (Supporting Cast Members). The 3Xs are good scrapers, but not great, as 13 hoodlums break into 1X's home to retrieve the glove and the hoodlums only fail a morale save and leave after beating all three of our good guys almost to unconscious. None of them use weapons other than blackjack/saps, during this battle. Later, 2X has a disintegrating pistol, a trophy weapon that does extra damage.

A taxi driver tells the 3Xs that his taxi cannot go over 70 MPH.

The Green Terror is a mob responsible for a rash of brazenly public kidnappings, covering their escapes with a smokescreen of green smoke. A clue left behind at the scene of their latest kidnapping yields a clue that requires an expert skill check in botany to identify -- a lost glove on the scene was permeated with the pollen of a rare orchid. Because the orchid is imported, they use freight records to figure out that when the mob came into the country, and when it plans on leaving. Of course, there are some holes in that theory -- what if only one member of the mob worked with orchids? What if the mobsters were on the ship coming, but not on the next boat going? What if an unregistered grower has the same orchids in their greenhouse and they weren't imported at all?

Their leader is also known as The Green Terror. One of the earliest supervillains in comics, The Green Terror is a green-skinned African with the vampiric power to live forever so long as he keeps drinking human blood. However, he's a real pushover in a fight and folds after getting punched by 3X once.

Next up is "Deep Sea Demon," but if you want my impressions on that story you can read here, because this is a barely modified reprint of Fred Guardineer's "Devil of the Deep" from Funny Pages v. 2 #1.

Dakor the Magician is the next feature, and like some other magicians we've seen he's light on actual magic and more of a detective. We also see, like in the 3Xs story, that travel out of the country seems to be public information, as Dakor's assistant Williams is quickly able to learn that their prime suspect in a murder is leaving the country for France.

(Read at readcomiconline.to)

Zip Comics #1 - pt. 1

At last we get to Steel Sterling, my favorite MLJ character and, with Crimebuster, one of my two favorite Charles Biro heroes.

===

This is the moment of John Sterling's transformation and Steel Sterling's origin. Normally, this would just be backstory and assumed successful...but what if this worked like Traveller and origins were generated by random rolls, with a chance of failure? What if John had died during character generation?

It is not where I plan to take Hideouts & Hoodlums, but it is still thought-provoking.

===

Could this be Beeville, Texas? Beeville is a real place, but a village of less than 7,000 people in 1940.

"Running his fingers through his hair" is a trigger that is never mentioned again. There is no game mechanic for superheroes to have to trigger their powers, not the way magic-users need components/requirements, but they could need requirements, at the player's choice.

The power he activates is Race the Train, though with an elaborately "scientific" explanation -- flavor text -- for how he catches up to the car. He then wrecks the car, a difficult feat for good men, but I already expect I'll be granting him a few brevet ranks, since so many early superheroes are "played" that way.

Nigh-Invulnerable Skin, combined with using himself as a living shield for the hoodlum. But is there another mechanic at work here? Since it's a trope of the genre that the bad guy gets iced before he can be spill on his boss, Steel might have had to save vs. plot in order to save him.

Steel is now using Race the Plane, explained with the flavor text of magnetic attraction. Next he uses Electrical Resistance, a 3rd-level power that made it into the 2nd edition basic book from 1st ed's Supplement III.

I would not require a wrecking things roll for a superhero to get through a barbed wire fence. Maybe a non-superhero, as a door, or a door at a +1.

Heroes have the same protections from both arrows and bullets, but panel 5 makes it clear that Steel is buffed with Imperviousness. 

Steel made his save vs. plot to shoot bad guys -- a very rare sight for a superhero!

While most other superheroes were fighting generic bad guys, Steel starts out with a real supervillain. Not games mechanics-wise, perhaps, since he doesn't exhibit any powers or wrecks things, but he has the costume, the trappings -- including relying on traps! -- and the habit of always coming back that mark a supervillain.

A 100' pit trap is a very dangerous trap, inflicting 10-60 damage, and the slimy walls ensure that no basic skill check will allow climbing out.

The rats are large rats -- not even giant rats -- so they probably have no more than 1 hit point each.

While door thickness doesn't matter for wrecking things, wall thickness certainly matters, with a -1 penalty per extra foot of thickness.

A clever use of wrecking things! Biro was already thinking of things to do with superpowers that Siegel hadn't thought of yet.

Steel uses Extend Missile Range I to let the Black Knight have it!

===

Making the villain fall into his own trap. Classic.

===

Steel does not use his magnetic power to follow the car this time. Is that because he's expended all his powers for the day already?

===

Another clever use of wrecking things -- yes, you can wreck part of a thing -- and doesn't count against his powers for the day. It looks like he was saving one last power -- Nigh-Invulnerable Skin, and uses it for his bold getaway.

Police motorcycles get "borrowed" so much in comic books, they might belong on the starting equipment list!

===

As you can tell, I really enjoy these early Steel Sterling stories. I hope it's not too long before I get to the next one!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Silver Streak Comics #2 - pt. 4

We're still in Duke Kelly, Ace Inspector.  The narrator calls these thugs, but they sure seem like superstitious hoodlums, a mobstertype that was introduced in Supplement I: National.  Haunted houses are, of course, a wonderful set of tropes to exploit for hideout-building.

There is absolutely no game mechanic that would explain how Duke just happens to be on the same road as the kidnappers at this particular moment; it's just a handout from the Editor.

Shooting people inside a moving vehicle is possible during a chase scene in Hideouts & Hoodlums, but negative modifiers for cover and speed are need to be taken into account. Duke's player must have rolled really high.

Throwing your gun after you run out of bullets is what happens when the Editor just keeps rolling really high for morale saves.

Duke makes an unusual choice, letting the hoodlum/thugs get away so he can go after Hix. But...how does Duke know that neither of these guys is Hix?  Did he ever see a picture of the man, between panels? And he's so confident neither of them is Hix in disguise? I suspect Duke's player is meta-gaming here, and figures this isn't a likely place for a boss battle to take place.

The 6' hedge leading straight up to the house is convenient cover!

The falling beam, poised to fall and hit anyone coming in the entrance, was a trap.

It turns out Hix is a supervillain! Here he uses the power Extend Missile Range I, turning Duke into a missile.  It's possible he also used Spook Bad Guys on the thugs earlier, meaning Hix is at least 2nd level (shameful man).

There is a serious design flaw in this hideout -- if you're going to install steel doors to keep people out, it's not a good idea to leave open transoms above them.

It's an interesting tactic here; most villains rig their hideouts to explode, but Hix went with slowly burning it down and then making it explode. It definitely gives him more time to escape that way!

I'm calling shenanigans on those porch roof physics, though. If their weight was really too much for the roof, they would go right through, not make it "gradually sag" to the ground.

Mister Midnite is a curious feature. These bad guys are called "The Little Men." Some of them look really weird, and the one with the mohawk definitely has fangs, but it's still unclear if these are just ugly midgets with woman issues or if this is supposed to be some non-human race.

The brute they use called "Noman" (long before THUNDER Agents!) appears to be undead, but let's wait and see if that turns out to be true.

Noman is given several colorful descriptors, but brute is perhaps the most telling for H&H. My entry on thugs may say something about how brutes are thugs who specialize in unarmed combat.

Now, bear in mind that Carruthers here is a superhero, so his embarrassingly fast smackdown is telling. In first edition, this would be proof that superheroes cannot use their powers when out of costume. But in second edition I removed that restriction because there were so many exceptions to it. I still think we can explain this, though, as an example of how low level Mister Midnite is, and being low level means Heroes are vulnerable.  Particularly if he rolled poorly for starting hit points, it is not inconceivable for a first-level Hero to go down in one hit.

It's almost impossible to follow what is happening in the first half of this page. What is the nature of this trail that is so easy for Mister Midnite to follow, but the police haven't bothered to yet? Mister Midnite stops time...and then just appears at the hideout entrance?

It's possible that Mister Midnite has used the power Find Evidence -- as-written, it does not find trails, but I have had players ask for a more lax interpretation of the power so it can be used like this. 

And as for the time stop...perhaps the Editor has agreed to ignore how much time it would take to follow the trail, in keeping with the flavor of Midnite's power. There is no hard and fast mechanic to timekeeping when out of combat; mostly it is just the Editor making common sense decisions over how long something should take.

I'm amused by the narrator pretending that he meant to get captured. I think it's pretty clear that Mister Midnite is a bit of a wuss and did not wind up in chains on purpose...

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)