Adventure Comics #48 - pt. 1

In this issue debuts Tick-Tock Tyler the Hourman. The narrator is pretty unspecific about his powers. His Miraclo gives him the "power of chained lightning" (though his powers aren't electricity-based) and "speed almost as swift as thought" (though he's never nearly as fast as the Flash). Rex's schtick (his first of several) is that he has a P.O. Box and advertises in the newspaper and asks people to send him their problems. Surprisingly, lots of people start taking him up on it, despite how sketchy that set-up sounds. 

In addition to Miraclo, Rex has a ring that contains "tear gas concentrate," enough to "mark an army cry," which seems a lot like that narrator's talent for exaggeration. That narrator shows up again to tell us Miraclo is a fluid that makes him, not invulnerable, but "insensible to harm and injury." That means he's unaware of or indifferent to harm and injury, which may not necessarily be a good thing.

For the only time in Hourman's history, Miraclo gives him the power to see in the dark (Infravision). Miraclo gives Hourman the "speed of wind," which sounds right this time, as wind can gust at 40-50 MPH and Hourman can only keep the car in sight, not gain on it. Though maybe he's still using the Race the Train power and holding back to see where their hideout is?

Hourman is relatively unharmed by being hit by a speeding car; I'm guessing that's the Imperviousness power, which means Hourman has four brevet ranks. We also see him using a leaping power; it isn't clear how many stories tall the building is (it's at least two), but it still probably falls in the Leap I category no matter how tall the building is.    

That tear gas ring that can stop an army? It affects just two people. It also seems to be just a one-shot trophy item, since it never appears again. 

Barry O'Neill is back to facing his old enemy Fang Gow, who has somehow hypnotized Inspector Le Grand's daughter, made her hate them, and made her work for an unnamed enemy nation. Barry decides to bust Jean out of prison in a scene straight out of a Western -- the French jail is so small the prisoners' cells line the outside walls, and the only substitution here is that Barry uses a car to pull out the bars rather than a strong horse (though *ahem*, I suppose it's still horsepower either way). The thought is that she will head straight to Fang Gow if freed, which is a pretty iffy proposition -- if I was Fang Gow, I would have included the hypnotic instruction to forget everything she knew about my location if Barry ever freed her.  

Apparently there's a "sinister dock section" in Paris -- that might come as a shock to the people of Paris -- and if you take the stairs down to the lower docks, you'll find a secret door to Fang Gow's newest hideout there. And maybe a flashlight too, since Jean didn't have one in her jail cell, but has one by the time she reaches the secret door. Don't forget to stock your hideouts with dropped items from the starting equipment list!

Fang Gow's new plan is to incriminate Le Grand by having Jean slip stolen plans into his diplomatic pouch when he goes to "Rumania." This is an easy one; Rumania is obviously Romania. Why even bother with fake names if you're going to put that little effort into it? 

The real surprise here is how Barry frees Jean from Fang Gow's mental influence. It seems they are using the magic-user's contest of wills mechanic to see if Barry can free Jean. But when did Barry become a magic-user? The other explanation is that they are both making skill checks to hypnotize Jean, loser is the first to fail his skill check. Poor Jean!

Fang Gow only summons back-up, three thugs, after losing the hypnotism duel. Barry uses a pistol on them only while they were at missile range, drops the only one with a gun (they are very poorly armed thugs), then drops his own gun and fights with his fists once they are in melee range. One of the remaining thugs has a knife and the other one is unarmed as far as we can see.

The gag filler Butch the Pup suggests that it costs $5 to repair a broken and ripped tent, and a fine of $100 to set up a tent on private property.

Ugh...let me just pause a moment to gripe about how low the art had sunk on Adventure Comics at this time.  Fred Schwab's cartoony art, seen here on Butch the Pup, used to grace Comic Magazine's poorer titles. Barry O'Neill, that used to be graced with the elegant art of Leo O'Mealia, now suffers the bleah art of Ed Winiarski. For some reason that defies understanding, Chad Grothkopf is now the artist on Federal Men (as he is on Slam Bradley in Detective Comics), though his ugly art bears none of the vitality of Joe Shuster. Even Ogden Whitney, competent as he is, is no Bert Christman, the original creator of Sandman. You would think every good artist in New York had already been drafted from this issue...

Oops, griped too long. I'll get to Federal Men tomorrow! (Stories read at readcomiconline.to)

 

Amazing Man Comics #10 - pt. 3

Iron Skull is back and so is Igor Raston (I don't recall him, but we're supposed to believe this is a grudge match between the two).

The fisticuff is fairly pedestrian, but I wanted to share this page to point out that it's not too late after a fight starts to have traps in the area activated. Indeed, traps going off can liven up a fight!

It's hard to say how much that platform weighs or how fast it's moving, but a good rule of thumb might be 1 die of damage for 180 lbs, +1 die each time that weight is doubled.

We've seen the annod-comptod machine before (I even statted it for H&H already). It normally allows anyone to use the Wreck at Range power freely, but here is an unusual use of wrecking, simply short-circuiting electronics.

Here we also get another trap, a simple one with a tripwire and four spear-holes, with the only unusual wrinkle here being that the four spears are somehow all aimed at the same spot.

It's possible that I.S. is using a defensive buffing power to protect himself from the spears, but it's also possible that they "missed," or he made his saves vs. missiles, and them crashing against his skull is merely flavor text.

Your powers of deduction are amazing, Iron Skull!

Here we see wrecking things being used more traditionally, but I point this out because I.S. is concerned enough about melee vs. what looks like five unarmed hoodlums that he takes that drastic an action. Or perhaps he really doesn't want Igor to get away. Shut up, Rensen, I've got to go catch up with Igor!

Iron Skull has to make a conditional threat in that last panel because of the save vs. plot he needs to roll before he can punch a lady.

We're going to all assume I.S. won and jump into the next story, featuring Minimidget (and Ritty, who has the same power but no billing). Ignoring their shrunken state, this is some of the best science I've read in a comic book in awhile. If they were in a rocket going 400 MPH and were thrown to the floor of the ship, I would expect them to take at least 1-4 points of damage and could conceivably be knocked unconscious.

It would take the rocket about 10 hours to get to Africa. I bet they're really hungry for lunch!

Does it make sense for the rocket to go slower? Actually, I think that's pretty good science too. If the rocket had leveled off and all its inertia was horizontal, then when it loses that inertia it will fall into gravity. Gravity wouldn't pull it any faster than 120 MPH (terminal velocity). That all gets scrapped if there was any downward momentum, which would have added to that speed.

I'm going to spare you this part where the superstitious natives see two tiny people and immediately assume they are gods. A LOT of these comic books make the racist assumption that blacks would worship anything they couldn't understand.

No culture ever had a god named Ramu, though there is a river in Papua New Guinea with that name.

Jumping into Chuck Hardy's adventure, we see how a flood can turn any environment into a nautical adventure. I'm not a big fan of this feature, but I definitely want to use natives riding huge turtles someday.

Lots of comic book Heroes have their own Supporting Cast, but you rarely see them fail their loyalty checks. You see that with the princess right here, which is nice.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.) 

Mystic Comics #1 - pt. 1

We're back to Timely Comics and their newest title in 1940. But don't expect any Bill Everett, Jack Kirby, or Joe Simon goodness in this one; this is pure 2nd rate-Chesler shop filler, cranked out because Martin Goodman wanted another Timely title on the shelves to capitalize on this new superhero craze.

So what does it give us first? Flexo the Rubber Man. Yes, Will Harr and Jack Binder took one look around the burgeoning crowd of superheroes in the field and said...Bozo the Iron Man looks like a winner; let's take that concept and make it even sillier. In a decision that would make for a hundred off-color jokes if this wasn't a family blog, the narrator tells us that Flexo is made of "living rubber" and filled with "secret gas." This rubber/gas combo somehow allows Flexo to outrun bullets (in Hideouts & Hoodlums, the Race the Bullet power), gives it the strength of an ox (wrecking things and Raise Car power?), and the ability to zoom through the air like a bird (Fly II power?). But narrators often exaggerate for new superheroes, so let's see if the story follows up on any of that.

Oh, and to make matters worse, the scientists who invented Flexo had to steal the supplies from the cancer hospital they work in. Nice job, leaving those cancer patients without the treatment equipment they need, jerks. It's almost a pleasure to see these two tied up by a mobster and his vamp/moll, who then steal radium from the two men. The mobster works for a mad scientist who need the radium for his death ray, of course. In one informative panel, the mobster explains that he would bump them off with a gun, but "the professor likes to wipe out his victims in fancy, scientific style," which basically explains every supervillain's deathtrap ever.

After activating Flexo to rescue them, we are told Flexo is running at the speed of a bullet, but that's our suspicious narrator again without any real proof. Flexo does leap -- very clearly leaping instead of flying -- and given the height of his leaps I would call this a very clear example of the Leap I power. When shot at, his rubbery hide provides the Nigh-Invulnerable Skin power. Then he uses Multi-Attack to grapple three mobsters at once. It takes a little bit more of a (ahem) stretch to see how stretching himself between the car and a telephone pole counts as a power, but since the purpose is to stop the car from moving, that seems to be the same as using the Raise Car power.

To find their missing radium, the unnamed scientists borrow a radium detector, or what we might call a Geiger counter, from the hospital. This Geiger counter has a really good range on it, though, because it can sense radiation from an airplane.

At the hideout, Flexo has to fight two electrically-charged robots. Flexo does really well at his wrecking things rolls vs. the robots, and demonstrates Electrical Resistance, his first level 3 power. In fact, since he hasn't even demonstrated a level 2 power yet, I'm wondering if he isn't demonstrating a power at all, but simply had enough hit points to take the hits from their electrical fields.

The hideout has a simple portcullis trap, but Flexo's solution to it, squeezing through the bars, might be our first instance of him breaking the H&H rules. Normally, I would call this flavor text for wrecking things, except that the bars are still intact and trapping the scientists even after Flexo squeezes through. For this, then, we would need a new power, perhaps some weaker version of Passwall, like a 2nd-level power called Pass through Small Openings.

Flexo defeats the mad scientist and his three hoodlums by spurting gas at them, which either does damage or puts them to sleep -- the story isn't clear. However, giving this robot a "breath weapon" is just like how I handled robots in 1st edition H&H, suggesting to me that maybe Flexo should be statted as a mobster, and a Supporting Cast Member, to the scientists, instead of a Hero with a race and class. This would eliminate any difficulties in statting him as an android superhero. But if Flexo is an android superhero, what level? One of his 1st level powers demonstrated could be his android ability, meaning he's demonstrated two 1st level powers and 1 2nd level power -- Flexo must have two brevet ranks, allowing him to start as a level 3 superhero, an extraordinary man.

Next up is Blue Blaze. This story starts in 1852 at Midwest College. It was difficult to pin down a specific college with so generic a name, but then my first assumption would be that Midwest College would be in the Midwest. What gets the story moving, though, is the tornado that sweeps through the campus and kills 85% of the people there. Finding out when major tornado touchdowns happened is easily done on the Internet these days and, possibly not by coincidence, a deadly tornado had ripped through downtown Arlington, Massachusetts only the previous year. I have commented before (see Whiz Comics #3) about comic book writers taking inspiration from headlines in the recent news.

While believed dead after the tornado and buried, Spencer is struck with "substrata dermatic rays" during his 88 years of hibernation, which is a term that doesn't really mean anything, but suggests that the rays are striking him under his skin. Is this how the author says radiation? If the narrator is to be believed, his strength increases 1,000-fold, which would make him able to lift/press about 50 tons -- or access to 5th-level Raise powers in H&H terms.  More incredulously, Spencer was supposedly buried in a skin-tight costume with attached cowl and a riveted girdle. and these were the clothes he died in.

Upon digging himself out of his grave, BB immediately encounters two superstitious hoodlums. They both fail their morale saves after he activates his Super-Tough Skin power. One of them "has a heart attack," but you know how those pesky narrators keep exaggerating, and there is a result of "faints" on the morale failure table. The other one simply surrenders.

The hoodlums were digging up bodies for a professor with a super-cool hideout, accessible by a secret elevator in an inn on the edge of town, miles below ground. The elevator lets out in a foyer which accesses a huge entry hall through a Dr. Suess-shaped archway. The hall looks posh at this end with checkerboard tile flooring and thick columns. Either at the far end, or perhaps in a side hall, the columns are thinner and decorated with skull motifs.

There are also traps. Red gems spaced around the hideout activate "tension beams," like a Hold Person spell. Then the rays whisk their prisoners on a high-speed tour of some nearby laboratories (the professor is quite the show-off) to Professor Maluski's audience hall (a "receiving" gem ends the tour here). Near the audience hall is a dungeon where 50 zombies are kept. The zombies are not supernatural, but controlled by ray receptors sewn into their shrouds. Maluski is armed with a "new type automatic," which seems to be a way of saying a Gun +1 to me. The zombies turn on Maluski with the control tube is smashed, which is conveniently keeps in the dungeon with the zombies. There is also an access to an subterranean stream in the dungeon.

The next feature is Zephyr Jones; despite this being a first issue, Zephyr has crossed over from Daring Mystery Comics #2. Zephyr and Corky are now making routine trips to Mars in the near future, when they are hijacked by a mad scientist and his daughter at gunpoint. "The Mad Astronomer" wants them to take him to Cygni, by which we can assume he means Cygni 61, a star 11.4 light years away. This is going to be an extremely long story if not for faster-than-light travel. And when they call him mad, they aren't kidding. He thinks there is stardust on stars that can cure any illness. No explanation for why they have to go to a star so far away to get that instead of our own star.

The science is wonkier than that; apparently the author thinks there are "lesser stars" between Earth and Mars, by which he seems to mean comets. These stars are covered with gasses and Zephyr figures out that if he can combust the atmosphere of a comet, it will propel the ship away at faster-than-light speed. This actually works, devastating the number of known comets in near space and somehow fails to destroy their spaceship every time they try it. En route they almost hit a moon, but are traveling so fast that they pass right through it. This reminds me of the Silver Age Flash vibrating through solid matter at super-fast speeds, but it does beg the question how they are interacting with comets to gain speed from them if they are effectively immaterial.

(Read at readcomicsonline.to)

Fantastic Comics #4 - pt. 2

Picking up where we left off with Samson...it's a good thing Samson didn't kill off Professor Brun last time, because Brun has invented the transporter! Seriously, this works just like a Star Trek transporter dissembling and reassembling molecular structures in different places. It gets Samson from somewhere in eastern Europe to Russia at the speed of teleportation.

Wrecking a factory is in the category of battleships, out of range for superheroes level 1-4, but pretty easy for one of Samson's brevet rank-boosted level.

Decomposing ray? It's an unfamiliar use of the word, but it's not technically incorrect, if the ray is breaking Samson into his component molecules. But, on the return trip, should that be a synthesizing ray putting him back together?

That is it for this month's Samson adventure. Now, this month's Flip Falcon might look, on the surface, as if "Orville Wells" (actually Don Rico) was tripping on acid, but what he'd actually done was steep himself in pulp fiction, while at the same time anticipating science fiction to come.

First up, we've got atomic weapons and ray guns that do damage, but not the catastrophic damage we know atomic weapons really do.

The three-armed aliens anticipate Larry Niven's three-armed aliens, but also the many three-armed races of Professor Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne. It's hard to say what their magno suits and ray guns do, except in the general sense of providing better Armor Class and damage respectively. It also appears the suits let them fly.


"Dictascopic" isn't a word; Don may have meant "diascopic."

I've written before of the enigmatic slave-giants. They have mainly observed things before, anticipating Marvel Comics' Watchers, but at the size of Marvel's Celestials. Why this one throws them miles away, and arranges for them to somehow land safely, will never be revealed.

"We're lost, Adele. I don't recognize this place," has got to be the most remarkably understatement ever while floating through outer space.

It's very rare for a scientist to get something wrong in the comics, but this illustrates there is always a chance of failure.

The path has a Rainbow Bridge vibe to it, and the future men with their weak bodies reminds me of the Kaldanes from Thuvia, Maid of Mars. Their bodies are vulnerable, being little more than skeletons held together with skin, but the mechanical hands attached to their chairs are very effective as long as they are attacked one-on-one.

Up to five future men are encountered on this page. Although I'm calling them "future men" because of a plot twist that hasn't revealed itself yet, the story calls them "terrible things," "insane men,"and "dreadful claw men." 

For being a million years in the future, you'd think these guys would have more advanced traps than a portcullis.

"Life vest" seems accurate; the claw men (that one's starting to grow on me) don't seem to have enough organs left inside them to keep them alive without their protective vests.

So these guys have a time machine, but never thought to use it themselves?

I like the artwork on that second panel.

This is from Golden Knight, though you wouldn't guess that from the top tier, which shows a girl wearing an extremely anachronistic dress.

The father's curse is an intriguing one, but if he's powerful enough for a curse like that...why doesn't he have the power to just go down the well? Curses like that are plot devices, not covered by spells that player-controlled magic-users can learn.

Apparently all you needed was a stout rope to get down the well...

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Amazing Mystery Funnies #18 - pt. 3

We're going to speed through the rest of this issue today, picking up where we left off with Larry Kane. This old castle is so like Old School dungeon design, with random layouts that don't make much real world sense -- like coming in through the main entrance and finding a long hallway lined with doors instead of, oh, maybe a foyer or something.

I didn't know this, but a garret is an attic that's been finished so it can be lived in.

Well, darn! Instead of some spooky ghosts, it's just some mobsters making all the noises. From the descriptions, if I was running this as a Hideouts & Hoodlums scenario (and don't think I wouldn't!), I would stat them as two robbers and a thug. Though I would personally shake things up in this story by having mobsters and undead in the house -- much like my Palace of the Vamp Queen module.

Spoilers: Larry wins. So let's jump ahead to the next feature, Spy A-5 (we're also told his name is Storm King, but that feels an awful lot like an alias as well).

The story is pretty run-of-the-mill, with this being like the eighth or ninth story I've read about an inventor with a stratoplane since I started reading these stories. The only thing worth considering here, then, is the game mechanic issue of the splashing-liquid-in-their-faces-to-distract-them trick. If I was a fan of the new edition of D&D and its mechanic of advantage and disadvantage, I might say the distraction gives them a disadvantage on their next attacks. While the mechanic is clearly popular with today's players, it's a big game-changer in that it alters the dice rolls far more than a small modifier does. I would have to say it goes against the flavor of H&H.

Speaking of flavor...the other use for this trick is simply flavor text to explain how Storm wins initiative on that turn. In H&H, the dice rolls determine the result, and then the result is described; you don't normally pick the result you want and then the mechanics help you get that result (although there are situational modifiers that will give you a 5-20% bonus).

Anyway, on to this next page. First, I wanted to point out that the mobsters are able to use escape artistry as a skill; normally we only see that working for Heroes.

We see corners being used for hard cover. We also see a Hero taking a rare hit and needing first aid afterwards.

For game balance, sometimes it's good to introduce trophy items with a built-in drawback, and this stratosphere has a doozy. Unless the pilot can keep the fuel mixing just right (skill check? Per take-off?), the plane explodes for, I'm guessing, a lot of dice of damage.

And now we get to Fantom of the Fair, and a really nice location for a hideout. I can imagine some cool, water-based traps in that place.


Is Dr. Loy babbling, or does he have voice-activated machinery?

So how tough are these things? We're not talking about golem-level tough if Loy can mass produce a thousand of them. Probably not even gargoyle-level tough, to make them immune to normal weapons. Rather, I'd say they have good Armor Class and that's why the bullet doesn't harm him.

But what to call them? Loy calls them his masterpieces, but that's a terrible name for a mobstertype.  "Weird hideous creature" is too long. I would shorten that, then, to The Weird.

Although the weird are undoubtedly tough, their chief advantage against The Fantom seems to be only numbers. I would give them maybe 2, no more than 3, Hit Dice.

The Fantom has gone from a mysterious figure with a fascinating backstory to just some redheaded guy in long underwear and cape. Or is the Fantom in disguise, as he definitely seemed to have black hair in his earliest appearances...?

I had to look up "water bubbler" and learned that it's a slang term for a water fountain, used in New England.

That the weird melt into puddles when hit with water makes them pretty useless, but also easy for low-level Heroes to face.

Fantom's chemical analysis seems like a longshot, depending on a) the weird's creator to not be from some foreign country, or smuggle the chemicals into the country, and b) that they were all made in the last six months.

And what is up with that ugly cowl the Fantom is wearing? It's like he has a red condom pulled down over his head...

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Tip Top Comics #6

Today we're going to go way, way back to catch something we missed before -- that comicbookplus.com actually has a pretty good collection of Tip Top Comics, from United Features.  Now we're going to be taking a detour backwards for a while and catch up.

And we'll be starting all the way back to Oct. 1936 for this blast from the past (if some of this gives you deja vu, it's because most of these features were also published in Comics on Parade). And first, I'm just going to show you this page of gag filler because I think half of it (all the left half too) is really funny.

In the middle of this silly page is some interesting problem-solving when it comes to crossing a chasm, or preventing others from crossing a chasm behind you.

I thought I should include this because it's so hard for people today to wrap their minds around how difficult cross-country communication used to be. "Six bits" is 75 cents -- almost the cost of a meal back then -- to make one long distance phone call.

I think I've written before about using "punk" as another name for wimpy hoodlums, the mobstertype at the absolute bottom of that particular hierarchy.

But I'm interested in this notion behind wedding feasts. A spell that would allow you to control someone once you have access to their table scraps? What would you even call that? Charm through Leftovers? But it does bear more thought...

Hideouts & Hoodlums players who come from a D&D tradition often know to listen at doors, but how many of them also sniff at doors? The chances of detecting something would be the same (= basic skill check), but the question here is, should it apply to a smell check coming from two rooms away? Depending on the strength of the odor, I might upgrade it to an expert skill check, or make it ineligible for a check at all.

Price check: $10 dresses.

This is an interesting point. Normally, there is no restriction on movement in combat, but should that always be true while grappling? As a general rule, I like encouraging movement in combat; it keeps things interesting to not be standing in one place the whole battle. So I would say that your opponent has to have at least a partial hold on you to curtail your movement.

We see a surprisingly few giant squids in comic books; most artists seemed to prefer making giant octopi instead.

I really like that design of a diving bell with mechanical arms. Half-robot maybe?

The mushroom is a Consumable of Diminution.

This also makes me want to run the classic D&D module Dungeonland, but for H&H...

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Jungle Comics #2 - pt. 1

Jungle Comics is what happens when a publisher (Fiction House) has one successful title (Jumbo Comics, packaged by the famous Eisner-Iger studio) and decides to launch another, but on the cheap. When Fletcher Hanks is your best artist (and you'll be seeing his contribution in a day or two)...

I was recently in a Q&A with Don McGregor on Facebook and I asked him about pushing the envelope for violence in comics. His response was that he wasn't trying to push violence so much as show that violence has consequences. Which is relevant here because violence is on display on practically every page of Jungle Comics, but a strangely bloodless violence, even when characters are getting stabbed in the face. I found some of these images too unpleasant for sharing on my blog, so you'll just have to take my word on the face-stabbing incident.

Today we're just looking at the first two stories from this issue, Kaanga and Red Panther (called White Panther last issue).

Kaanga is drawn by Ken Jackson -- often free of the constraints of any backgrounds -- and so stiffly that he can sometimes be mistaken for Fletcher Hanks (in fact, I'm not entirely convinced that Jackson isn't just a pen name for Fletcher, with someone else inking over him).

Compared to Kaanga, Arthur Peddy's work on Red Panther is positively dynamic, though still gory. Later, Arthur will join DC Comics and get to work on the squeaky clean later appearances of the Justice Society of America.

Now, let's talk about the pages! In the first one above, we get possibly the first instance of a stick holding crocodile jaws open in comic books. At least he doesn't kill it!

Ape men often look -- or are blatantly -- racist in nature, but this story skirts that problem by depicting the ape-men as white as they can get. Dr. Wratt may be the first mad scientist in comics who won't wear pants. Or shoes. Or socks. I think we can safely assume he's naked under that long shirt. Dr. Wratt may be evil, but he's not too evil; he operates on Kaanga using an anesthetic gas.

=====

Game mechanic notes: Sticking a stick in a crocodile/aligator's mouth requires a successful attack roll, followed by a failed save vs. science for the animal. The ape man achieves a surprise attack and lands a head blow that stuns -- unless Kaanga was just low on hit points from the crocodile fight, in which case Kaanga has been rendered unconscious at zero hit points."Torn legs" do not require miraculous cures in Hideouts & Hoodlums, just normal rest.

Wratt needs to only establish eye contact with his victim to hypnotize him, but we've had plenty of evidence of how easy it is to hypnotize people in comic books. He does have one limitation, though, he can only hypnotize someone to make them do something they already want to do (like escape the island). To "dominate another's will" he needs that big, stationary machine.

It's unclear if the machine does all the work, or if it only makes his normal hypnotism more effective.

A choke hold is a result on the grappling table in 2nd edition H&H.

Here is a very rare example of tripping two opponents at the same time.

===

Wait a minute...if the shore was that far from his lab, how did they see the hypnotized guy get torn apart when he "neared" the shore?





The island is in the middle of a lake (I didn't share the page that established that); the long suspension bridge is the only way to the shore of the lake. But couldn't Kaanga swim the lake...?

We see ape men can be encountered in groups as large as eight.

Are the crocodiles in the lake, a lagoon, or both?

Meanwhile, Red Panther is trying to save missionaries from headhunters.

===

A stunt never seen before, or likely since, in comic books, is swinging from a vine held in one's teeth and scooping up two full-grown people, one in each arm. I have toyed with the notion of restoring the multiple levels to stunts that they had in 1st ed. But how to distinguish 2nd level stunts from 1st edition ones? A thought I've had here is that a stunt should only be able to accomplish one thing, but a 2nd level stunt can accomplish multiple things (2? 3?) at once.

A skill check can discover a hidden trap if the Hero is actively searching for them, though Red Panther seems to just happen to spot one here as if by accident. 

A long established practice in RPGs is to combine traps with something to fight, such as a tiger in a pit trap.

===

It seems odd that Red Panther chooses to jump into the pit and kill the tiger, rather than simply reach into the pit and pull the man out. He could have even helped the tiger out and sicced it on the headhunters.

====

Red Panther is able to use a stunt -- cutting his bonds against the sword -- even though combat has already started because he has not yet taken a combat action.

This is not the first time the term "giant" has been used to apply to a combatant who is actually just normal-sized. This is why I was thinking of creating a pseudo-giant mobstertype.

A push attack does not need to be away from you; here it shows a push attack being used to move an opponent behind you.

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Miracle Comics #1 - pt. 3

Although the science was a little whacked in Sky Wizard, I still enjoyed the lead feature in this issue. But the rest of it...the rest of it is a train wreck, the kind of train wreck that's hard to look away from. So naturally I'm going to wind up posting most of it!

What? The narrator is helping Dash Dixon? Okay, maybe that's not as weird as it seems -- in game terms, it would be like the referee is coaching the player on what to do, which happens a lot, particularly when you're trying to teach a new player the game.

This is the first we're learning of Dash's bellhop uniform being metal. That means the pockets on his coat have hinges? This too is not too unusual, if the "metal suit" is just flavor text for Dash activating his Nigh-Invulnerable Skin power.

No, what really bugs me is that last panel. Why are they laughing and smiling about how they don't often use their biggest size of coffins? Are they kidding around about executing children? What kind of sick country is this?

Really? Wooden wheels? How medieval does this artist think Europe is?

80' is really high for a castle curtain wall, but Dash has to give it his "all", when just a few pages earlier he was able to jump up to a flying plane?

I actually like the last two panels. They not only give a good sense of motion between, but locking the mob inside the first room is a sound tactic.

"Stop! Metal Bellhop Diaper Man is on your heels!"

"When I count three, run for the orangu!"

Not only does that sound like a messed-up game plan ("Let's run towards the big ferocious animal we want to kill him!"), but why call it an orangutan if you don't even have room to put the whole word in your word balloon? Just call it an ape (and, frankly, it barely even looks like a gorilla, let alone an orangutan)!

No one is forcing you to kill the dumb animal, Dash! Don't do it!

Of course he kills it. Sigh.

The false chimney that serves as a secret roof entrance, now that intrigues me. But wouldn't it have made more sense to drop the poisonous gas into the false chimney, where there would be no room to escape it?

When did the doctor give him "anti-gas capsules?" Is this flavor text to go along with him making his saving throw vs. poison?

On a similar note, does Dash really have "high-explosive capsules," or is that just flavor text for how his wrecking things works?

This is the next feature, The Scorpion. Ooo, sounds like we're going to get a dose of pulp noir, right? No...the Scorpion is the curly-haired guy who gets captured on page 2 by gangsters. Gangsters who know exactly where he lives, and write him threatening notes, written the same way they talk..

The gangsters wanted to bring the Scorpion and his butler along so they could witness them stealing an armored car, before trying to kill them. When the Scorpion wouldn't even have known about their plans had they not brought them.

So, the plan was to roll the car down a steep hill so that the Scorpion and Judd would crash and die at the bottom, but the car veers off the wrong side of the hill and goes into a pond. Rather than letting the car take the force of the impact with the water, they decide to jump out and take their chances with landing in the water on their own, along with the risk of the car landing on them when they all hit the water. And then somehow the car bursts into flames -- on contact with the water. Uh-huh. It's so hard to even wrap my head around this so I can assign game mechanics to it.

Or -- is the Scorpion secretly a genius? Has he outwitted the deathtrap by changing the conditions of it, so that it is not a deathtrap anymore, but merely a trap, and hence doesn't cause lethal damage (at least in H&H terms)?  Yes, that must be it.

...Nope, don't look at me. I cannot explain away that goofy first panel. I guess they're meant to be jumping over the police officers' heads? But even with a running start, how are they clearing six feet -- vertically? Or do they have a levitate spell we weren't told about?

Stealing police motorbikes is handy because you never know what you'll find on them. In this case, it was a pouch full of tear gas bombs. I suppose I will have to work out how many tear gas bombs can fit in a pouch now. A quick Google search tells me that military pouches would not have more than 2-3 grenades in it, so that seems logical.

And lastly, this is Blanda the Jungle Queen. It says a lot about your expectations when "bland" is right there in the title.

The map is not a good trace, but I suspect that coastline is from the Gabon territory of French Equatorial Africa.

(Scans from Comic Book Plus.)