Thrilling Comics #3 - pt. 1

It's no Multiverse of Madness, but on this Dr. Strange adventure we get a trip to the Orient. Or at least as far as Chinatown, so far. Is this page worth sharing? I thought it noteworthy for three things. One, "plans for canal fortifications" felt like such a welcome relief from the upteenth adventure to revolve around a stratoplane or a new type of torpedo. Two, there's the interesting distinction between Chinese and Manchurian. Although we think of Manchuria as part of China today, and it was pretty much assimilated by China long before 1940, throughout most of the 1930s Manchuria had been conquered and "liberated" by Japan. Three, most heroes' contacts in Chinatown are "respectable" businessmen who turn out to be criminals, but this story skips over all that and reveals this guy Fang as a gang leader from the start. This is better (and less racist), as it frees up the rest of Chinatown to be represented by real respectable businessmen. 

That's got to be pretty embarrassing, falling for the ol' go-in-first-while-I-lock-the-door-behind-you trick. Almost as embarrassing as the collection of racist cliches in panel 3! But even that may pale in comparison to how incredibly dorky Doc looks in panel 4, with his incredibly misshapen shoulder, Don King hairstyle, and his short pants that barely reach his socks.   

That is a lot of attackers coming at Doc, but he does have a tactical advantage of bottlenecking them on the same side of the railing. 

More interesting to me is the last panel, with all the hideout dressing in the corner. There's a box, a pail, a coffer, a barrel, a chest, a...couch? A drip pan for oil changes? It's harder to tell with the smaller objects.

Trap doors with slides to lower levels? How D&D-like! A room filled with coffins? Also D&D-like! We only differ when the action moves away from the hideout to a new locale -- though cargo ships can also be hideouts!

I'm pretty sure Doc just killed four men with his Raise Elephant power. 

He could have wrapped up the adventure right there by capturing the men on the ship and learning from them who they worked for, but instead he inexplicably leaves the scene to go talk to someone, so the ship can slip away in his absence, and then has to get lucky trying to find it again. He can't track over water, so this is just a question of a lucky wandering encounter, and/or the Editor just being nice. 

Doc is pretty rich, owning a yacht and a plane already. We've talked many times about brevet ranks for this game. Do we need to start talking about ...brevet starting money?

Doc is lucky that plane isn't a rental!

There isn't any mechanic that would determine if your foot catches in something, so that's simply Editor's Fiat.

Kicking a plane out of the water...hmm. I'm tempted to say that's Extend Missile Range with several Roman numerals after it...but since it isn't used for combat, this could just be flavor text. 

More important is the following panel. How far can a superhero swim? Non-superhumans have swam over 100 miles without stopping, so the fact that Doc swam 30 isn't that impressive. Maybe it's the speed that he swam it? But that could be measured easily with a Race the- power. Anyway, back to my original question...I'm going to say that H&H Heroes can swim 1-6 miles per point of Constitution they have.

Hoo-hum, the old cliche of the warship disguised as a tramp! 

Shielding himself from fire is easy, that's just the power Fire Resistance at work. But shielding or blocking someone else with his own body...that requires a different mechanic, one that is universal in application and not specific to a certain power -- since there are many circumstances in a H&H game when the Heroes might need to shield people.

I am reminded of a recent time I ran Monsters!Monsters!, the Tunnels & Trolls variant where you play the monsters. In it, the only game mechanic outside of combat was saving throws. Need to hide? Make a saving throw! Trying to duck behind cover? Make a saving throw! Shield someone with your body? Oh! Hmm...

There's some insidious history alteration going on here I should point out. Kachukuo isn't a real place, but it looks like it's based on Manchukuo. Yes, Manchukuo had a ruthless dictator, but that dictator was Japanese, not Manchurian, and he was Hirohito -- Manchukuo was a puppet state created in Manchuria by their Japanese "liberator"/conquerors, as I alluded to at the beginning of this post. Suggesting that the Manchurians themselves were the bad guys suggests Japanese sympathies which surely evaporated in December 1941.

 

Besides that, there's a rare (at this point) example of a superhero punching a villain upwards into the air. The H&H mechanics deal with converting damage into feet pushed at a 1:1' ratio, but if that should be modified to account for gravity, I haven't done so yet - nor will likely do, honestly; sometimes realism just robs us of chances to have fun.  

The old man being attacked feels like a wandering encounter, while the twist of the "main bad guy" being so civil is refreshing, even if he's just being civil in a Bond villain-way.

Doing random good deeds have a way of coming back to help Heroes later, like how the old man knows a secret entrance. It would have been nice to see how the secret door operated! We do get some nice hideout dressing, with the carved pillars, and the closing walls trap is a classic. 

 

I think it's interesting how there's guards stationed at the secret entrance. I guess Kong doesn't like to take any chances? Or perhaps they too were just wandering encounters, heading back to their guard station.

 

It's interesting that Kong is so sure this cage will work when he knows Doc just busted through a stone wall. I wonder what the bars are made out of/what they were treated with? 

I also like the prismatic raygun, each color having a different power. This one is quite powerful - not for the charm ray, but the raise dead ray.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)
 

 

Mystic Comics #2 - pt. 4

Back to Blue Blaze! A sudden cave-in forces Blue Blaze to break out his higher level Raise powers and we observe blue flashes radiating from his body, flavor text any player can choose, but then has to be consistent with.

There's an odd plot hole where Blue Blaze learns the man who just walked out of the room was the bomber, but instead of just walking through the door and capturing him, BB ignores the man and speeds off to the next mine the bomber had threatened.

Second plot hole: Even though Blue Blaze's speedster has unlimited speed, Barko (a terrible name for a villain, by the way) somehow gets ahead of him on the way to the mine. Does Barko have a speedster with even more unlimited speed?

Blue Blaze's Raise power might still be active from earlier, allowing him to catch a heavy boulder. If the boulder missed him then he didn't need to lift it, but if it hit, I'm hesitant to let the Raise power thwart it...and yet...I have to admit that the Raise powers are currently of limited utility except when you need to lift something heavy, and that's seldom going to be important during combat. This warrants more thought.

Next Barko shoots out one of BB's car's tires and makes him swerve, but a skill check helps BB regain control. So how does Barko follow that? He sics two dogs on BB. BB chokes the dogs to death. Not cool, BB! 

Barko has a pair of ice guns that put BB in a block of ice. Hold Person with flavor text? BB is only faking so he can get taken to Barko's hideout, which is sound strategy, or would be if he didn't let Barko leave, just so he can chase him to the next mine. If he really wanted to stop the mine attack, he could have just knocked Barko out sooner. At the mine, BB punches out two thugs working for Barko first before taking out Barko, following the Hideouts & Hoodlums rules about taking out underlings before you go after the main bad guy (just like in the H&H play-by-post game I'm running now!). 

The next story is Taxi Taylor and His Wonder Car. It's your typical story of a mechanic who invents a car that can do anything, tries to gift it to the U.S. government, he gets laughed at, out of spite, he keeps the car without even showing them what it does, he becomes a taxi driver with the car that can do anything, until he just happens to overhear spies in his backseat one day. So what is "anything"? It can intercept radio messages, like most radios can. It can transform into a plane, though it isn't the first car-plane in comics. It can also transform into a sub - also not the first car-sub in comics. It can fire "contra-magnetic electric rays" that can neutralize magnetic mines, and now we're finally in new mad science territory. 

The German spies are called Swastikans, by the way - perhaps the most obvious stand-in for the word Nazi ever in a comic book. 

Oh, the wonder car has 6" steel plates all around it, so acetylene torches can't cut through it. That's a difficult game mechanic to rationalize because armor normally only makes something harder to hit, not more resistant to energy attacks. Perhaps this is special steel plating that confers fire resistance.

Taylor isn't reluctant to cut air hoses and kill underwater Nazis. 

Back to mad science, the wonder car can emit gas bubbles underwater that cause enormous suction, enough to pull a ship underwater. That is also hard to rationalize with game mechanics. Maybe some kind of wrecking things? 

The wonder car has a collapsible ladder that can project out of the top of the car. There is a belt and rope attached to a winch that will automatically reel back in in two minutes. There is a trampoline-like net that pops out of a hatch in the top of the car, and I don't even know how Taylor activated that before falling towards the car. The car also has two revolving chemical water jets for putting out fires. Taylor even has a fireman's hat in his car, just in case he has to put out fires. 

There is a nice trap in the spies' HQ. When the wall safe is touched, electricity causes one's hand to be stuck to it. Raising the stakes of the trap is that the building is on fire and a temperature-sensitive bomb (controlled by a thermometer) is rigged to go off nearby. Taylor takes maybe 2-7 damage from being pulled away from the electrified safe, but is still only lightly injured. 

Next up is The Invisible Man Known As Dr. Gade. When I first read this story a few years ago I graded it with an A. Will it hold up as well this time?

In his origin story, Gade is working in front of an open furnace in his lab when an assassin comes up behind him and pushes him in. Now I'm interested in giving assassins a backstab ability so they can increase their damage from behind, but then transfer those points of damage into pushing. 

Soaked in chemicals he was pushed into, and then set on fire, the strange reactions transform him into a ...magic-user? Because what he demonstrates when he comes out is is Invisibility and Resist Fire. Well, not normal Invisibility, because Gade is still invisible after punching and grappling, so it must be Improved Invisibility. 

Gade is not a live and let live kind of guy. Just for trying to kill him, Gade knocks the thug/assassin from earlier out a 40th floor window. As the two guys who hired the assassin wait to shoot Gade once he becomes visible, he forces one of them to shoot the other by moving the man's hand. That's not something the game mechanics of H&H is really set up for, and I'd be inclined to say that the Editor rolled to hit Gade, but rolled so badly that he accepted the player's suggestion that the bullet hit an unintended target. 

Although Gade is angry for being initially given his powers, apparently they were only temporary and wouldn't have lasted, so Gade had, between scenes, invented a ray that bathes him with the same energy and renews his powers. For some reason that's not clear to me, he can't turn visible easily on his own, but he's wearing some kind of a belt or harness with a button on it and when he presses it, the device...maybe dampens the energy field that render Gade invisible? 

Mystic Comics #2 - pt. 3

Let's resume with Dynamic Man, just as DM is surprised by a headblow that knocks him out for 1 whole hour. When he comes to, he's in one of those cliche deathtraps where the spiked walls are closing in on him. Rather than fretting, he simply wrecks his way through the ceiling and escapes. This is a problem I have in Hideouts & Hoodlums, where it is hard to stick superheroes in deathtraps if they can just wreck their way out, but I'm glad that the earliest superhero writers seemed to be grappling with this problem too.

It's important for mobsters to leave clues behind in their desk drawers. I'm amused that the ship they plan to sabotage is called the Batavia, as there's a town near here called that. It's odd, though, that Dr. Vee goes along personally to sabotage the Batavia, but stayed in his hideout when the train was to be sabotaged. Maybe Vee just doesn't like trains?

One punch from Dynamic Man sends Vee flying off the ship and, it appears, Vee goes sailing pretty far through the air. We're told he survived, but it's hard to imagine an old man being able to take that kind of punishment. To have punched him so far, DM must have been using the power Super Punch power, which means Dynamic Man has access to a 4th level power. 

Lastly, I think it's interesting that DM loses interest once the master criminal is defeated and lets the police mop up the lesser spies.

Space Rangers is set in the year 2300 and it's a future where just about everyone has spacecraft that you can crisscross the solar system in and space rangers dress like 1940 police officers. New elements have been discovered, and "plinium" ore is the "only substitute for radium" -- which is a really unusual thing to say. Has all of the radium in the solar system been used up by 2300? This is a pretty forward thinking sci fi strip if it's thinking about the depletion of natural resources already in 1940. 

Space rangers' ships can travel from Earth to Mercury in two days, and they need to find the space bandit Black Hawk. It's hard to take Black Hawk seriously since he wears pointed shoes and what looks like a bathrobe. 

The rangers, Bob and Nibbs, are overwhelmed by at least 11 bandits, probably more. For some reason, they don't have a weapon more hi-tech than wooden clubs among them (even for missile weapons all they have is wooden clubs!), but that's okay because Bob and Nibbs have lost their guns, somehow, between panels -- but we're reminded twice that they lost them! We're left to imagine what their handguns could do, but the weapons on board the spaceships can paralyze and disintegrate. 

And it's not just weapons that are low tech on Mercury; once they captured Bob and Nibbs, the two rangers are tied up with simple hemp rope. And they don't even tie good knots!

Moving on to the next feature, that's Blue Blaze, the super hi-tech zombie. When I saw this scenario was about sabotage at an anthracite mine I was expecting something hi-tech, but that's just a fancy word for hard coal. The hi-tech comes in Blue Blaze's new car, a "supercharged speedster capable of unlimited speed." Infinite is awful fast for a Movement rate, though comic book captions are notorious for hyperbole.

Reaching the mine super fast, almost like he's teleported there (hmm...), Blue Blaze searches the wreckage and his "superior knowledge of science" helps him identify bomb parts, which sounds like a successful Intelligence check to me.

(Read in Marvel Masterworks: Mystic Comics Vol. 1)

Mystic Comics #2 - pt. 2

Next up is Flexo the Rubber Man. This is like old home week for me, as both of these heroes (Mastermind Excello and Flexo) were played in my 1962 Marvel Super Heroes campaign I ran two years back. 

Flexo's inventors, Joel and Joshua, aren't ones to rest on their laurels; they're already hard at work reinventing those common comic book staples, the torpedo repeller and the new, more deadly explosive. And our enemies are up to the same tricks, because they have one of those dime-a-dozen rayguns that turn off electric motors. The 2nd edition basic book has no tables for specific trophies, but if it did, they would be weighted by frequency and these items would have some of the widest ranges on the table. 

Joel, captured by spies, is placed in a pretty lame deathtrap; he is tied to a tree with rope and left for wolves to eat. Wolves? Do these spies think they're in Siberia? The spies also don't think to check Joel's pockets, or they would have found the portable transmitter. Portable transmitters are also pretty common among comic book characters, but what makes Joel's different is that he taps on a button on his jacket, Morse code-style, and that transmits the message. 

When Josh gets the message, he takes the hi-tech approach of using Flexo to get him there and the low-tech approach of tying himself to Flexo's back with rope. I hope you're really good at knots, Josh! The comic book doesn't really explain how Flexo flies, but in the RPG campaign I ran that Flexo was played in, we came up with the idea that he shoots gas out his butt for propulsion. 

Josh reaches Joel just as 4 or 5 wolves arrive and, even though the wolves have shown nothing but curiosity about Joel so far, Flexo is made to viciously attack the wolves.

Flexo lifts their plane over his head (its head?). I think a 4-seat, single prop plane weighs about 1.5 tons, which is almost to the point where the power Raise Car tops out. Then they follow the repeller because it's magnetic and their compass in the plane points towards it because...you know, magnetism has no range to it.

As they charge into the spies' hideout, the marching order is unusual in that Josh and Joel go in first, with Flexo trailing behind. You'd think the human beings would want to use him for cover. Unless Flexo just moves really slowly on foot? 

The entrance is trapped with dynamite and all three of them are buried beneath "a mass of rock and heavy timbers" (without specifying how much a mass weighs). The entrance is trapped with dynamite and all three of them are buried beneath "a mass of rock and heavy timbers" (without specifying how much a mass weighs). The panel is pretty dramatic, with it looking like the timbers are exploding towards them instead of just falling. I would rate that as at least 3-18 points of damage. It makes sense that Flexo is not harmed by it if he buffed himself with a strong defensive power, but what's really surprising is that Josh and Joel only have scratches. I had considered them noncombatant supporting cast members - but are they actually mid-level scientists with a fair amount of hit points?

Although Josh and Joel normally control Flexo with a remote, it seems it can respond to voice commands too. The really interesting thing about Flexo is that bullets don't just bounce off of him like you'd expect from a rubber robot; instead, Flexo reseals after being punctured, like self-sealing tires. Only, as far as I can tell, self-sealing tires weren't a thing until 2006, so this seems to have anticipated the technology.

Flexo's "machine gun blows" must be the Flurry of Blows power. What's harder to describe with game mechanics is when the spies' car bounces off of Flexo, as there's not really a good power for that. Bounce Back Blows, maybe, if you let it work on vehicles and not just living attackers. Bounce Back Blows is powerful, so Flexo has a lot of brevet ranks. At this point, Flexo should still be just a first-level superhero. 

Moving on, the next adventure features Dynamic Man, and it starts with a curious mystery. Saboteurs are planning to blow up a bridge to crash a train. Dynamic Man is riding, in costume, on the top of the train. Is that because he knows the train is in danger, or is it just coincidence? Like Mastermind Excello, Dynamic Man has Clairvoyance and can see the bomb being placed, but Clairvoyance only has so much range, so he shouldn't have known about this until the train was close. 

Dynamic Man can fly fast enough to catch up to a speeding car, which is difficult to do with Fly II, and might require Fly III if the car had enough of a head start. He is buffed, possibly with Imperviousness, or relying on Nigh-Invulnerable Skin and a little luck, before going in so he doesn't have to worry about the bullets bouncing off of him. He picks up the men with ease, suggesting he has Raise Car activated, and appears to be beating the men against the ground like clubs, doing clubbing damage to them (which would be 1-6 points only -- unless he is also buffed with one of the Get Tough powers). The one surprise is that Dynamic Man seems to have a power that works just like rayguns that shut off engines, though you might be able to duplicate that effect with Wreck at Range, if the Editor allowed you to use it on just the engine and not the whole car. 

The bad guys' car has a special add-on; a radio transmitter in the back seat so their boss can listen in on everything...

(Read in Marvel Masterworks: Mystic Comics vol. 1.)

  

Zip Comics #3 - pt. 4

Just in case I've never made this clear, I don't just include stories I like on this blog. War Eagles makes me a little sleepy...but I include pages that interest me, illustrate how well my game Hideouts & Hoodlums emulates these comics, points out ways it could do so better, or just things I need to rant about after reading. 

This page is the second of those, and it illustrates that administering first aid only required intent and physical contact; you do not need a first aid kit (they do help, though!).

Hoo hum, the ol' "Guards, come quick!" trick worked again like a charm and...ooo, what's this? One of them doesn't make it out? Now, this woke me up and made me take notice. We so seldom see failure in the comic books, but of course it's quite easy to hit a fleeing opponent, particularly with a high rate of fire. And missing your hear noise roll? Sure, that can happen in game. 

Of course, Kermit is only supporting cast. Would they have turned around and gone back for a player character?

 

It looks like the boys are escaping in a Fokker, or maybe a Heinkel, but it has to be a two-seater and that canopy looks odd for either plane. The pursuit planes look like Stukkas, and it's amusing to think of a Fokker outrunning a Stukka - but hey, it's comic books, and random chance is king in Hideouts & Hoodlums as well. 

Oh, these crazy kids. The number of things that have to go right for this plan to work...no wandering encounters en route to the air field, landing unseen near the airdrome, finding a single guard out of sight of all other guards...

...the guard knowing where the prisoner is, the guard giving up that information, the guard's uniform fitting, getting a surprise turn for the bombing run, not getting shot by anti-aircraft guns on the way out, only one guard left guarding the prisoner...

Mind you, a lot of these are familiar tropes of the genre, but still...

"He ain't heavyyyyy, he's my brotherrrrr" -- Oops, wrong war!

What? Tom is still flying around bombing the fields? Where are those anti-aircraft guns? Why are four soldiers manning a machine gun instead?

Yeah, the kids easily win in the end, so no surprises there. This next feature is Captain Valor, and with a witty script by unknown-to-me scribe Abner Sundell (a name to watch for here!) and lush visuals by Mort Meskin, I'm feeling like we should just ignore the jaundiced look of the orientals and soak in the rest of the story...but at the same time, it occurs to me that there must be a lot of junks floating around in the sea and, if Tsin hadn't fired on them, Valor would never have known this was the right one...

This mobstertype is going in Mobster Manual part II: M-Z as a pseudo-giant, a bad guy who is bigger and tougher than a thug, described as a giant, but obviously isn't literally a giant by any literal measure. 

"Bullseye!" seems to suggest a critical hit, but it also could have just been maximum damage. 

"That spinach I ate" -- great Popeye reference!

Hmm...here I was just raving about Meskin, but...look at those awful, stubby arms in panel 3...

You'd think that Valor would be taking continuous hit point loss by hanging from his thumbs, but he seems to be feeling like he just woke up from a nap here. 

I've no objection to the half-pint escaping from being tied up; supporting cast get skill checks too. And last-minute rescues are one of the reasons to keep supporting cast around! 

Valor doesn't seem to be actively recruiting supporting cast here, so the Editor must be elaborating on a very positive encounter reaction roll here.

Heyy...where did that flare gun come from? Did they tie him up with the flare gun still on him?

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Master Comics #1 - pt. 3

 This is still Frontier Marshal, and we're being told that every type of criminal -- every mobstertype -- is heading towards Big Savage. Bandits, we've had stats for those in Hideouts & Hoodlums since ...well, not Day 1, but close. Do we need stats for rustlers and fugitives from justice, at least for some future cowboy genre-only supplement (an idea I've toyed with for years now...)? 

I don't know...rustlers shouldn't be especially good at anything other than stealing livestock. Well...a cowboy's horse is livestock. What if a rustler could fight for control of a cowboy's steed, in some variation of the contest of wills mechanic for magic-users? 

Fugitives aren't especially good at anything other than escaping, so...maybe fugitives should have a higher chance of evasion? Maybe a higher skill chance at hiding in shadows?

Mr. Clue is a story I thought I was going to enjoy, about a detective who focuses on solving mysteries solely from the clues left behind at the scene. But this story takes it to ridiculous extremes; by this page, Mr. Clue has been attacked for times -- shot at, flowerpot dropped at him (well....maybe that one is more like a point of damage missed), a rockslide targeting his car as he drives past, and now a safe dropped at him. Mr. Clue could easily stop following his clue and just go after the person dropping things at him (how hard could it be to find someone who dropped a safe?).

Also, I'm going to spare you from the following page, where Mr. Clue reveals how he solved it from a clue that shouldn't have really proven anything.

Streak Sloom? Oh...Streak Sloan! The new comic book feature with the worst title font ever teaches us that whale oil was still extremely valuable in 1940, and that one ship could carry a half-million dollars' worth of it.

The island hideout idea isn't new, or that Sloom -- sorry, Sloan simply has to patrol randomly until he finds it. What's unusual here is that the main villain is the first encounter inside the hideout. It reminds me of the classic D&D module, G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King, where the king's hall is up front in the palace and, if you managed to kill him, the whole rest of the fire giants are thrown into chaos. Like anyone running G3, a lot of reinforcements should, and do, show up quickly here. 

It's disappointing that a super-submarine just means that it has extra storage capacity for transporting whale oil and salmon...though, I suppose if you stocked it with more soldiers, maybe you'd be able to fight back against a coast guard patrol. 

I think the best thing about this story is Black Jack Bannon. He wears the furs of a back woodsman, but thinks of himself as classy, so he smokes a cigarette in a long holder. And that's one intense, smoldering stare in panel 5!

Can you cause a gun to jam just by hitting it? We've seen plenty of evidence of guns being knocked out of people's hands by thrown objects of every size, shape, and weight, but this could be a first for forced jamming. Unless the gun jam is just a coincidence afterwards? 

The realistic-looking telegram at the end is a nice touch.

El Carim is a bit of a trickster. While Jane Grey comes to him in tears about her missing father, El Carim slips some paper into a toaster and then casts Phantasmal Image on his monocle. Or can he really invent magic items? Whatever mechanic you decide to use for scientists, you need to decide if you're going to give that to magic-users too and if you think they need the extra ability.

El Carim casts Protection from Missiles and Rope Trick here. Or perhaps the monocle is a magic item, a Monocle of Bullet Attraction?

By this page I think it's clear that El Carim doesn't actually carry magic items, but these items are flavor text for his spells, like Telekinesis and Hold Person. 

It's so refreshing to see a magic-user getting defeated by a pair of mobsters, just like a normal low-level magic-user would be.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.) 

Master Comics #1 - pt. 2

Although we haven't been told yet, I'd bet good money that Ken is secretly the Devil's Dagger. This is twice now that he's openly clobbered hoodlums as Ken so I'm not sure why he even feels he needs a double identity.

Letting the mobsters go so they can be followed back to their hideout has got to be one of the oldest tricks in the book. What's interesting here is that the hideout is a gas station, converted from an abandoned hotel. I never would have thought of that in a hundred years. It's actually kind of brilliant; he would suspect it was a criminal hideout, when they let any stranger who asks go inside their front door to use the phone. What's not brilliant is that there are zero guards inside stopping Ken from exploring the place.

Without special permission from your Editor, your starting SCM should not have levels above 1 (as an "ex-prize-fighter," the implication is that Pat is above 1st level).

The highlight of this page is panel 6 -- I see so many comics in this project with minimal backgrounds that I treasure ones that a lot of planning seemed to go into, that show us a glimpse into the real lives of our heroes. From here, we can infer that Devil's Dagger is well-read (books on his desk), a fisherman, and a marksman. 

Bullet-proof glass is listed as a special add-on for transportation trophies, but tinted windows should be on that list as well. 

It's worth mentioning, I think, that if Ken hadn't taken the time to change clothes at home, he would have got there in time to stop the villains from nearly escaping.

It's also worth mentioning that it was a good idea to have a SCM waiting outside with directions to call the police after X minutes -- though, in a Hideouts & Hoodlums scenario, you probably want to leave yourself more time than that to explore a hideout.

Throwing a dagger so that it snatches sheets of paper and pins them to the far wall is definitely a stunt.

It looks like Devil's Dagger has a clear headshot in that third panel, but we're told Jeff (and what kind of master criminal name is Jeff?) escapes. Maybe it was just a flesh wound (1 point of damage)?

This is from Morton Murch the Hillbilly Hero. It is...really awful. Morton is a weird cross of comic hillbilly and serious action hero. The science is ridiculous. His hot-air balloon is stitched from quilts and full of methane. The floating island has a volcano on it. The island that isn't attached to the ground has a working volcano on it. 

The island people take Morton as a leader and he modernizes them by teaching them how to build anti-aircraft guns -- bear in mind, he is supposedly an uneducated hillbilly. He also must have precognition because he has them do this just before enemy aircraft arrive. Oh, he also builds a flexible glass net, flies over the enemy fleet in a slow-moving hot-air balloon, and nets all the planes. This campaign world would be perfect for players who want to be able to do anything, no matter how impossible.

 

Although it's hard to take Shipwreck Roberts and Doodle seriously (isn't "Shipwreck" a nickname you would give someone who causes shipwrecks?), Dr. Drown is such a great name for a villain I'm shocked it hasn't been recycled since. Dr. Drown has a French assistant who looks like Igor and sounds like Batroc and, best of all, new mobstertypes! Yes, he creates his own sea monsters, like Dr. Demonicus at Marvel in the 1970s-80s. 

I would like to call these first ones sea dragons, but...

...the assistant Romez, who quickly loses his French accent as soon as Dr. Drown reminds him he's Spanish, calls them brontosauruses. Which is an odd thing to call them since they're much smaller than brontosaurs, don't look like brontosaurs, and breathe underwater unlike brontosaurs. So sea dragons it is! They aren't very big, but they are trainable, so they could in theory be trained to fight. I'd put them somewhere in the range of 3-4 HD. 

The next new mobster is a giantocrab. That's right, not a giant crab, but a giantocrab. You can tell it's not a giant crab because the artist didn't reference any real life crab and just made up something goofy, a rock monster with human-like arms. It's both goofy and creepy at the same time! I would also give it up to three grapple attacks per turn. The giantocrab proves to be too much for Roberts and Doodle to handle, so I'd make it at least 6 HD, maybe 7...

...and give it a really low AC (maybe 3 or 2?) since it appears to be made of rock. It's unclear if this is supposed to be a naturally occurring sea monster or if it's one of Dr. Drown's creations. Drown is able to shoo it away rather easily.

It's also worth mentioning that Drown's hideout is a submerged yacht with all the comforts of home, including this nice-looking study with desk, bookshelves, and a safe just right for Heroes to break into.

Sea dragons only have flippers, so they lack claw attacks, but they can grapple instead. 

If Dr. Dream is firing torpedoes, then what is the Radar gun? Do they mean the torpedoes are Radar-guided? 

The colostopus must be bigger than a giant octopus, so...maybe 10 HD? 

Frontier Marshal is one of those cowboy stories that is hard to place in time, here thanks to the anachronistic look of Helen Wright. I spent a lot of time writing about the Mythic West in Supplement III, a sort of "demi-plane" where time flows differently and the "wild West" continues to modern times.  

I can find no evidence that "pipe" was ever slang for "look," but "pipe th' duds" doesn't seem like it could mean anything different. Plus I can find on Google other people who have been posting the same question online, so this is surely not the only instance out there of pipe being used this way.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

   

Wonderworld Comics #11 - pt. 2

We're still looking at this month's Yarko the Great feature and those wacky Indian Mysterymen are up to their hijinks again. That panel 3 is really weird - if you plan on killing him in his sleep, why would you straddle him on his bed first?

The art in panel 4 reminds me so much of Vince Colletta.

It's not clear from this story if Yarko is just passing through, staying at this hotel temporarily, or if he normally lives in this hotel, which used to be more of a thing. Given the size of that balcony, it's a very nice suite he's staying in.

Initially I found panel 1 confusing. Is Yarko jumping into the pot? No, that's the mysteryman cultist he kicked off of him on the last page. Yarko has already teleported off the bed, as revealed in panel 2. I would be tempted to say he was using the simpler spell, Poof!, but there's no cloud of smoke accompanying the spell.

Panel 3 is either showing Telekinesis or Protection from Missiles.

The caption in panel 5 refers to the cultist as a Hindu, the man's words in panel 4 make him sound like a Muslim. More importantly, the earlier pages that show them having secret meetings on a mountaintop reveal him to be a cultist (a statted mobstertype in 2nd edition Hideouts & Hoodlums). Perhaps the nature of this cult is that they mix Hindu and Islamic beliefs.

The final spell cast is revealed by Yarko's words "That will hold you" -- it's a Hold Person spell!

A cursed jewel that makes anyone looking at it save or die is pretty serious stuff. Since Yarko openly wears his twin jewel all the time means they do not share this ability.

Kohat is a real city in modern-day Pakistan.The "Order of Aribah" is completely fictional.

The significance of being the seventh son of a seventh son stretches into antiquity, across multiple cultures.

Yarko is using the spell Project Image, which apparently has a super long range.

As goofy as it always looks, Iger's Shorty Shortcake is at heart a solid adventure story, and perhaps the first one ever set in Guatemala. I don't think there's any particular reason why this story would need to take place in Guatemala, though I suspect Iger simply thought it sounds funny.

Here we have a mad scientist who doesn't look that much more comical than some other mad scientists, and his water magnet is not that much goofier than a lot of comic book science.

Birds are a tricky thing to stat accurately because, even if you make them bigger, a hollow-boned animal still doesn't have much mass to assign hit dice to. However, if you go up to 40 x normal size, you can get a carrier pigeon that weighs (unless my math is way off) 1,300 lbs. That bird is 7+2 Hit Dice, and has a wingspan of 80'!

If the world's heaviest worm, the Megascolides australis, was subjected to 40 x growth, it would weigh 700 lbs. and have 4 Hit Dice. However, at some point we need to max out the Hit Die gain from enlargement, or a 100 lb. Shorty would grow to 80 tons and have 266 20-sided Hit Dice!

It seems odd that Shorty assumes the water shrunk him, not that the lightning changed him (as often happens in comics!), or that the duration just coincidentally ended.

A glider seems like a nice trophy reward. Good for getting Heroes from plot location to plot location, but can't do much else to spoil scenarios (unless outdoors, and Shorty simply rains dropped items down on mobsters).  

Loraine spies have to be from the Alsace-Lorraine territory that, at this time in 1940, was still part of France! The politics of these revolutionaries isn't clear, but it seems they would be a political group wanting either independence or want to be annexed by Germany, which would be a very bad call, but -- hindsight is 20/20, right?

Cab drivers are a good source for plot hooks. Even international ones, apparently!

"Pan-chromatic film" sounds fancy, but "a panchromatic emulsion produces a realistic reproduction of a scene as it appears to the human eye, although with no colors." Almost all modern photographic film (since 1906) is panchromatic. All this is from Wikipedia, of course.

It's a discouraging start to your scenario when your best fighter gets beat up and dropped down a well in your very first encounter.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Champion Comics #5 - pt. 1

After a long time away we come back to the first Harvey Comic and the continuing adventures of The Champ. This is a nice first page, with just a little recap, and launches us right into some action where the last chapter left off -- but I'm not sharing this page for any of that. I'm sharing it share with you the unusual word "wetting." It means the act of making something wet, and usually applies to urination, but not always and clearly doesn't here.

The guy with the motorboat is just a handy wandering encounter.

This is the first and, as far as I know, the last mention of La Grange, Illinois in any comic book.Curiously, there was never an airport in La Grange, so why this relatively obscure town got name-dropped, when there were plenty of towns with airports near Chicago, like Evanston, Park Ridge, and Wheeling, that could have been named instead, is a mystery to me.

Hideouts & Hoodlums has no guidelines for learning skills; all Heroes are meant to be naturals in any subject the moment they make their first successful skill check.

I'm amused by this comic book logic. "It's okay that the Army is giving me a fighter plane to use over U.S. soil, because I'll have an Army Reserve pilot with me and I've been deputized by a local police chief." This is so crazy, and yet so perfectly encapsulates the "anything-can-happen" feel of the Golden Age of Comics.

I wish I could identify this fighter plane. It looks realistic enough that it probably based on a photo reference.

We never do get an explanation for why the Champ's hunch turns out to be right. I would have thought that, 24 hours later, the blimp would be miles away instead of sitting there, hoping for a rematch.

Rays that can stop motors are a dime a dozen in these early comics and should have the best chance of being encountered of any mad science invention. But the real icing on the cake here is being able to broadcast onto your enemy's radio to taunt them as you're killing their motor. And then have your men take potshots at them before they plummet to their deaths, just to rub it in!

I particularly like this page. Rescuing people off a mountain in a blizzard might seem like a subplot that takes The Champ in a totally different direction, but put the scientist he needs to talk to in that blizzard and suddenly it becomes an important complication in the main plot. The Editor, just like a good writer, needs to carefully plan the placement of his characters.

I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but The Champ is an interesting bridge between the sports genre and the superhero genre. The Champ seems to be able to do anything he sets his mind to, but within the confines of sports (and aviation also, apparently).

Game mechanically, though, the easiest way to explain super-skiing is with the stunts of the Mysteryman class. Another possibility is a Strength check to ski while holding someone, followed by Dexterity check for each crevasse and gully.

Searching for concealed things in the sky is more difficult than you'd think. It seems like they get a new roll to spot the blimp every 1,000 feet.

How does The Champ know the "infernal ray" will set off grenades? Wouldn't they more likely not function, like motors?

Climbing the dangling cable isn't anymore difficult because of how high they are, but it certainly would end the campaign for him if he fell. I do think there needs to be a common sense maximum possible damage limit, if you take this much damage you're dead even if it's not a deathtrap scenario, though rather than having a set amount in the rules I'd rather that be left to the Editor's discretion.

This first panel makes me wonder if it should be an optional rule to let the player decide if he wants to take physical damage or be moved back a number of feet from the combat. I would very rarely allow this, but I could see it being a good thing for keeping a solo game going.

Panel 2 has me confused, though. How exactly is The Champ trapped in the flaming gondola? It looks like the fire is mostly in front of him, licking a little bit at his flanks, but not keeping him from running out onto the catwalk at all.

Should explosives do more damage on a direct hit? Something to consider.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)