Fight Comics #2 - pt. 2

I really expected Saber to be a one-shot, but he's back -- and wearing more than his underwear this time!

Yes, while other Heroes are gathering information and following leads to uncover spies, Saber just has to walk into a room and immediately senses them. I wonder if we need a Detect Spy power, and not just Detect Evil...

So often the term "freeze" is not literal when applied to paralysis, so it's somewhat novel to learn that the paralyzation raygun the Antarticans are using is actually a freeze ray.

Saber doesn't even have to fill out paperwork to requisition an electro-heat ray gun. He just asks for it and he gets it!

You can tell the filler strips by how they stretch out a story by enlarging the panels. There is little here that warrants a three-panel page -- though I do like the visual of the fore-mounted ray guns on the submarines, all firing in the reader's direction...

No one knew about climate change in 1940. Imagine, expecting there to be ice around Antarctica in the future!

Although called a ray gun, the "electro-heat" seems more like a protective feature of the submarine. Resistance to Cold?

Remarkably, the crews of these submarines are still alive, despite being underwater for who knows how long in paralyzed submarines.

Yes, it seems like a strategic victory, blowing up the munitions plants and air bases...but if the Antarcticans put those things within their city, and you blow up the city...war crimes? A far more satisfying story would have been Saber infiltrating the city and sabotaging the munitions plants and air bases from within.

What a drop in art quality poor Kayo Kirby endured this month! William Willis does us no favors on this sketchy, near background-less work. The story is surprisingly deep, with Kayo almost losing the will to live after his career tanks, but making a comeback after a new manager shows he believes in him.

I wonder what drug this is, that a little drop mixed in water can make a boxer this much. At the end of the story, when Kirby realizes what had happened and catches someone trying to drug his water again, he forces that man to drink it and that man drops on the spot. Powerful stuff!

This is Kinks Mason. A ketch is a two-masted sailboat.

Sargasso is a legitimate problem for sailing ships, but this seaweed seems intentionally grabbing the board. I can't decide, though, if I would stat Slimy Seaweed as a mobster, or treat it as an environmental hazard...

Seaweed Men seem like an unique spin on mermen. These creatures are half-plant, half-animal, with their heads in a literally vegetative state to varying degrees. They must be tough too -- three of them are able to overpower Kinks before Kinks can even draw that knife at his side!

Hmm...whirlpools acting as underwater solar panels? Underwater chlorophyll factories? Ah, comic book science...

Men can be transmuted into Seaweed Men, leaving me to wonder if any seaweed men evolved naturally, and if not, who created the first ones? We also see what a fully transformed seaweed man looks like. We might call the queen a Half-Seaweed Man and stat her at 3 Hit Dice, while a full Seaweed Man would maybe be 5 Hit Dice...?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Flash Comics #2 - pt. 2

Hawkman shows up third in this issue. New York City (I presume) is struck by a major earthquake (no other DC characters notice because there is no shared continuity yet). The cause is unusual; a mad scientist calling himself Alexander the Great has created a machine that increases an object's weight 1,000 times, and that is what caused the earthquake. It takes an hour to warm up the weight-increasing raygun before it can be fired.

In this story we learn that Carter and Shiera are engaged, and Carter has promised to give up adventuring when they marry (so, of course, they never do marry).

In a rare sign of heroes drinking, Carter is mixing a drink in a shaker. These are clearly adult heroes; not only does Carter end the adventure by offering Shiera a cocktail, but it's clear from Shiera's dialog that she just spend the night over at his place.

Dinner is served at 10, way later than any dinner I've ever eaten.

Shiera calls Carter's costume "robes."

Shiera gets them invited to dinner with Alexander by revealing Carter is Hawkman to him. Alexander, more like a Bond villain than a comic book villain, offers Hawkman $1 million to not interfere in his plans, and genially tells him he can visit anytime. Indeed, security is so light at Alex's mansion that Carter is able to sneak back in and test if the machine will work on ninth metal (Carter carries around a small sample).

We learn that ninth metal is not composed of atoms (but are not told what it is composed of. Solid energy?)

Hawkman arms himself with a trident and net, even though Shiera recommends a sword. The trident and net are also both made of ninth metal (not all his weapons are, apparently).

Showing off how well-read he is, Carter makes a reference to "fling the gage," a way to say "give an ultimatum" that comes from the poem "In the Vanguard" by Scottish poet Alexander Anderson.

Hawkman is still low level; he gets beat by a single mad scientist armed with only a pistol, and has to be saved by Shiera.

In one of the earliest examples of superheroes keeping trophy items, Hawkman keeps one of two weight-increasing machines left in Alex's mansion (after wrecking the other with an axe so no one else can have one).  

Next up is Johnny Thunderbolt, which has not yet been shortened to Johnny Thunder. Johnny "accidentally" casts Charm Person four times, on two police officers, a complete stranger, and a boxer, to get them to do what he says. When he finds a bully harassing a lady and makes him bounce across town into a hospital. It's more difficult to say what spell that would be. Telekinesis, possibly, or a new spell called ...Compel Movement? It would be a 2nd level spell that makes 1 target move in a certain direction for the duration. He also casts Fear, which makes four people run away from him.

The woman Johnny rescued immediately becomes his temporary supporting cast member, since she thinks he's cute.

The newspaper headlines make it clear that Johnny is in New York City.

Previously reprinted by Dell, Rod Rian of the Sky Police is in these early Flash Comics. This installment sets the time of the strip at 2500 AD. We also learn that telurium is a metal only found on the Moon, and that Earth has a world government that uses earthons instead of dollars as its currency. 10,000 MPH is a very fast speed to be approaching the Moon; most Moon landings arrive at around 5,000 MPH. The remainder of the pages are the same ones reprinted in Dell's The Comics #7, and feature the Mephisians.

The Demon Dummy continues the melodrama of Harry Dunstan, a ventriloquist whose sanity crumbles after losing the love of his life last installment.Talking to himself through his dummy, Harry convinces himself to become a destitute drunk and get himself arrested, so he can exact revenge while in jail. We also find out that "hooker" used to also mean a "good, stiff drink." 

In The Whip, Rod Gaynor buys the old villa that the original Whip was said to have owned 100 years ago. The place has a reputation for being haunted, supported by doors that swing open on their own (as the building shifts, perhaps). There is also a wandering encounter in the house, as Rod and his servant Wing meet the sheriff inside.

The Whip is opposed by The Association, a group of rural mobsters. They spend $10,000 to hire five assassins, who apparently work for $2,000 each.

Fighting the assassins, the Whip is able to entangle one of them with his whip and hurl the man against the wall hard enough to hurt him. That's tricky to emulate with game mechanics because the entangling attack and the hurling attack should be two separate attacks, giving his opponents twice as long to shoot him. As the Editor, I would consider how much damage the attack would likely do in total and, seeing how it would not be much, would condense it into a single punch attack (with the rest just flavor text).

The Whip entangles a second assassin with his whip, jumps out the window, and that pulls the assassin out the window with him. I would treat this as an opposed grappling attack, but with circumstances giving the Whip a +2 situational bonus.


(read at fullcomic.pro)

Smash Comics #6 - pt. 1

Oops! Almost passed over this issue!

I love Will Eisner's early Espionage stories so much, I'm half-tempted just to post the whole thing...but I'll be strong and just post the relevant pages here.

This time, we're treated to yet another obvious stand-in name for Germany -- Govania.  Thalga is obviously Hitler. You might think Stadt represented Himmler, but Hitler made Himmler, not the other way around. Stadt better represents Franz von Papen, an ex-chancellor who helped Hitler rise to power so von Papen could get his office back. But, was this common knowledge in the U.S. in 1939...?

The last gold rush was 1896, but I'm sure in 1940 people were still hoping for another one. I could spend my whole blog, or start a new one, talking about how good Eisner's art was, but note how panel 7 represents the swirl of activity around the discovery of gold, represented by water-like ripples around the upraised hand, as if it was the Lady of the Lake offering up that gold nugget...

I've nothing to say here, because I'm completely stumped by the reference to an "East Rush." I have no idea what event that is referring to and can't find anything on such a thing having happened.

This page is great for the tidbits of backstory we finally get on Black X.  It's a shame Kadu-Kan is an entirely throwaway reference and never comes back in a story. Google Translate detects Kadu-Kan as Malaysian for some reason, but can't give me a translation. I suspect Kan is Khan misspelled.

Black X's technique, of drawing out his opponents by making himself a big target, happens to be one of my own personal favorite strategies in RPGs.

As mentioned in Black X's write-up in Supplement IV: Captains, Magicians, and Incredible Men, Black X seems to have remarkable ability to request trophy items from Espionage Division at short notice, including this fighter plane that just happens to also be packing a torpedo.  Spoiler alert to my future players: I don't usually give out trophy items this cool.

Chic Carter spends a lot of his time reporting from Moravia. The last time I wrote about Chic Carter, I thought Moravia was fictitious. And, since I write in what seems like a vacuum here, no one corrected me that Moravia is a real place in the then-Czech Republic. Now, Krasnow, that could be fictional city.

This would be a difficult scenario to actually play, because so much is happening around Chic, but he doesn't really have to do anything but observe. He gets the opportunities to do good deeds, or to take over fighting for others, but he has to decide very quickly if he is going to take those opportunities. And if he decides not to live dangerously, this is going to be a very boring series of the Editor just describing exciting stuff going on around him the whole time.

I think this is a weakness of the newsman genre as a whole and why it will be difficult to emulate in Hideouts & Hoodlums game play...though, that said, I haven't actually tried one of these scenarios yet to test that theory.

Speaking of the newsmen genre, Chic gets followed immediately by Flash Fulton, the Ace of Cameramen. Here's a perfect example of Flash not taking any active steps to fight the fire, even though the opportunity to do so is right there. He's just doing his job and filming the situation. Of course, danger still finds him even though he's not actively looking for it.

He also gets to wear a trophy item asbestos suit (though I don't think he gets to keep it).

The game mechanic issue on this page is subtle and not immediately evident. When Tony shouts out and warns Flash about the boom, does that make the boom miss? H&H has no active dodge skill -- if the attacker missed, it's just assumed you dodged (or something else happened that saved you). Now, what did likely happen here is that the shout did not make the boom miss, but took away the surprise attack it would have had and made the attack roll happen during the first (and only) turn of combat.

Splashing water in unconscious people's faces does not wake them up in H&H. Rather, the two mobsters were only stunned and the duration of the stun just happened to wear off while they were being hosed down.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Silver Streak Comics #1 - pt. 1

Here we are, finally at December 1939, and with our first comic book from Lev Gleason, or Your Guide Publications, as the company was called this early.

Comics had plenty of yellow peril villains by now -- Fang Gow, Chen Chang, and even Fu Manchu -- but none as monstrous as the Claw until now.

Ricca is a fictional South Seas island. Judging by its population of 10,000, it must be a medium-sized island; Fiji and the Solomon Islands far eclipsed it in population at the time, while 10,000 was well above the populations of Easter Island or the Pitcairn Islands. The name may itself be an inside joke, since the artist here is Don Rico.

How big is The Claw?  When I statted the clawed giant for Book II, I arbitrarily set them at 12' tall, but gave them the ability to grow to 100' tall. Here, in his very first appearance, Claw seems to be 50' tall -- and possibly immune to heat.

The flames actually seem to be behind the throne, but that could be some kind of trick. When The Claw expands to what appears to be hundreds of feet tall, that could be some kind of trick too. A projected image of some kind? The "hypnotic hum" is telling -- maybe some sort of mass hypnosis, making everyone think they see a giant that size?

Jerry Morris has a humdinger of a potion there -- a potion of invulnerability that also protects from mind-controlling attacks. What a superhero he would make if he just made more of the stuff!

The trap is a rather clever twist on the dropping cage cliche, since this cage becomes portable.

What is described here sounds an awful lot like the spell Nightmares from Supplement III, but with a reversed version called Happiest Dreams. Other than its addictive quality, it's unclear what game mechanic effects happy dreams would give.

This also means The Claw is at least a warlock (5th level magic-user).

Is a leach-boat going to need to become a trophy item? There's a pretty good description here of how it works.

Acetylene torches have been on the trophy list since Book II.

The lethal qualities of carbon monoxide make it ideal for traps, if not a weapon, Since it would count as a poison, I wouldn't let Heroes use it.

Gas masks, on the other hand, are super handy. Some Heroes build their whole personas around their gas masks. Here is a chance for Jerry to pick up five of them in one haul!

We also see that Jerry's potion lasts at least a full day here -- which seems like a really long duration, until you realize Jerry spent most of that in rest turns.

This is why Jerry isn't a superhero -- superheroes are usually selfish with the source of their power and keep it to themselves. Jerry makes an invulnerability potion, and just hands out samples to anyone who agrees to go fight beside him.  Good way to keep morale high, Jerry!

This trap, with liquid fire raining from the ceiling, looks like it would be pretty deadly if you don't happen to have an invulnerability potion in your system.

In an unusual, if not singular occurrence, the good guys are rendered invulnerable, but not their clothing. There could obviously be some hilarious role-playing opportunities here.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum)