Target Comics #3 - pt.3

We're visiting the latest story of T-Men again. The description of a funeral car does seem like a good clue, but I would stop and check to make sure there were no reports of a stolen hearse before going door-to-door.

We're still not at the stage of having impressively-designed villains yet. The Octopus looks like a bald Riddler wearing an octopus t-shirt. 

Lockets are both a good clue to find at a crime scene and valuable treasure to collect.

A hawser is "a cable or rope used in mooring or towing a ship." I've never heard that word before!

This is from the next feature, City Editor. The shack's cellar is nothing but a one-room cellar distillery, but you can imagine it as the entrance to a more extensive hideout, with some hideout dressing pictured.

This is that interesting and peculiar feature, Calling 2-R. The lesson here seems to be, if you're given a choice of who to fight, picking the littlest guy isn't going to do you any good. Indeed, there is no game mechanic advantage to attacking someone a few inches shorter than you.

It seems like this page is also demonstrating some sort of dodging mechanic, but bear in mind that anyone with 1 HD has only a 50-50 chance of striking anyone enough to do damage, so it's certainly possible for someone to miss three times in a row. 

There is no security the way we think of it in the utopia of Boyville, not even a necessary starter key to turn on a "bugoplane." 

I do not get that line "Back to the white lights for me" at all. I can't figure out if that is some pop culture reference of the time I don't recognize.

With that kind of a lead, it seems impossible for a flying suit to catch up. And yet, nothing ever seems to be beyond the technology of Boyville...

Yep, called it. So now the bugoplane is a "cosmoplane"? 

The design work on this feature never fails to impress me. Here, a simple spacesuit with bubble helmet is made uniquely different by elongating the helmet and putting bubbles on the front of it -- to magnify vision? That makes sense, considering the distance he's tracking the bugo-/cosmo-plane from. For comic book science, everything seems really well thought out here, down to the limited air supply in the plane. 

Even here -- notice how the motion of the propellers causes the ship to corkscrew -- because of course it would in outer space, with no gravity and no air to resist the propellers. And this is a comic book artist in 1940 who figured this out.

 
 

There's a little hiccup here with the science, when the boy opens the door into a vacuum and nothing gets sucked out of the room. The design of the ship is too small for the airlock it needs to make this scene work. The dizziness from lack of oxygen gets us back on track, though.

And that's that for this post!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Target Comics #3 - pt. 2

The first page of this story (which I didn't share last time) reveals that Bull's-Eye Bill is "of the Target Range - Arizona." Here we get a reference to Florence, which seems like our first big clue as to where in Arizona we are...though, on second thought, just mentioning the jail there doesn't necessarily mean we're near it. There's also the slight chance he means Florence, Colorado or Florence, Texas, but Florence, Arizona is definitely the largest and most important of the three Florences.

Oh look, the "good guy gets his hat shot off" trope!

The outlaws fail their morale saves. Losing half their numbers triggers a morale save, as does being threatened with guns by a fighter.

We're going to jump ahead to the next story, Lucky Byrd, Flying Cadet. The glossary of cadet slang could be useful for an aviation-themed campaign, but I think it's more remarkable that the author felt that camouflage was a term young readers would not be familiar with. Of course, everyone knows camouflage today, but could that be because we had to endure the disastrous fashion sense of the 1980s and the rise of camouflage pants?

Here, Byrd makes a skill check and is able to recognize the type of motor he's hearing. Granted, that's of limited usefulness, unless it also tells him what kind of plane he's hearing.

"Kerwhooomm" is a strange noise for a plane to make.

A nice twist with the cowboy is that he comes in all belligerent, like there's going to be a fight, but then turns out to be quite reasonable. This could be the result of good role-playing from Byrd's player, or a random encounter reaction roll.

I think I know what this "Randolph" is Byrd mentions -- Randolph Air Force Base in Universal City, Texas. Which, you know, has a nice generic comic book city sound to it, like Metropolis. Uvalde is a small city in Texas, so that works out too.  

This is a Harry Campbell story; Harry either lived out west or was very well-informed about life out west, as I've noticed before reading his Dean Denton stories.

 

I'm not sure if powerful magnets would be the most efficient method of opening a hangar door or not; I'm in the future, 81 years later, and my garage door still doesn't open that way. But I give Harry credit for always trying to ground his stories in science.

I'm normally perfectly comfortable with accents being spelled out, but it's bothering me a little this time because that accent seems like it would sound French to me. I'm curious why Harry thought the French would be sabotaging the American airplane industry...?

Lucky Byrd is right! First, the guard falls for the feigning sickness routine (save vs. plot to make that happen). Second, he wins that fight while still on the ground (granted, he appears to get a surprise attack followed by winning initiative on the first normal turn of combat). Third, shooting the door controls just happens to make it go down, when it could have just as easily not moved at all. As an Editor, if I didn't already have a random table for those controls, I'd try to come up with at least four results for shooting the controls (door goes down, controls explode, another door opens, nothing happens) and roll randomly on it.

That scientific explanation for the invisible plane is pretty sound; invisibility is explained much the same way in modern science fiction. Kudos, Harry!
 

And before we go we'll just peak in on the next T-Men story. Although called "Return of the Octopus," this is first time we've seen him and this is the first villain (of many) to be called Octopus (or some variation on that).

(Scans are courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Speed Comics #7 - pt. 3

 We're back with Ted Parrish, the Man of 1000 Faces as he crosses over into a wizard duel in a Ditko-esque magical landscape...oh, what's that? Scarlo is jumping and not flying in panel 3? Panel 6 is just horribly drawn, with a big, long perspective line inked as it vanishes into a solid chimney and the rest of the roof behind him just vanishes because the artist got lazy? Well, that's disappointing.

Speaking of disappointing...as the Editor in a Hideouts & Hoodlums scenario, it behooves you to ensure that the players feel like their presence in the scenario made a positive impact; that they wouldn't have been better off just standing back and letting the police do their job. You know, like how Ted totally bungles capturing Scarlo alive here, when the two officers might have stopped him had Ted not got in the way. 

But there will be times when the dice rolls go so badly for the players that terrible results will happen, and then you need to have in-game consequences. You know, like how Ted must surely be wanted for manslaughter now.

Now we're going to jump all the way to the last page of Biff Bannon. Dick Briefer is going full-on Mad Magazine (only 11 years earlier) here with the frantic pace, zany humor, and exaggerated violence. That got me thinking about the H&H rules for modifying campaign mood to fit the style of comic book story you want to tell. If you wanted to run combat in zany mode, maybe every attack should push at double distance in addition to damage (instead of replacing damage), and you could hit as many targets as you want with the same attack so long as the method or results would be funny and inventive. 

I don't think this would work for campaign play, as there would soon be no suspense about whether the good guys win (it wouldn't be funny if the bad guys could hit as many people as they wanted), but it would be fun to try in a one-shot scenario.

And now I'm jumping full steam ahead into Lt. Jim Cannon and the mystery of the needlessly elaborate plot device. I mean, you can sink a ship with icebergs, or you can sink a ship with mines, but does putting the mines on the icebergs really do any extra good? If anything, it makes the mines easier to spot, which is what happens here.

Maybe I'm just so incredulous because Devilfish is such a non-threatening name for a villain. Anything-fish doesn't sound villainous. "You may call me...the Goldfish!"

That does look like a really long submarine. The longest submarine in WWII was Japan's I-400-class sub; at 400' long it held the record for two decades.

This is from Landor Maker of Monsters, and this installment is a weird, soap opera-y one that our Hero (and his girlfriend) doesn't barge into until the second to last page. What's interesting here is that Creeta is clearly an android, with steel wires controlling her body inside, and her weakness is the screw in her neck that ...well, I'm not sure how it kills her exactly, but turning it seems to do a lot of damage to her.

Bob Powell seems to be really rushing the art here too. He could do much better.

This is from Munson Paddock's Mars Mason. Mars is an interplanetary mailman because, you know, we're never going to have some kind of electronic delivery system in the future. Comic book science is as goofy as ever here, with that heat radiation wave that is somehow different than radio waves, but that's nothing compared to a ship from Jupiter leaving after a ship from Earth and moves fast enough to intercept it before it reaches Mars. I think we're going to have to accept that the Jupiter Men have extremely long range teleport technology. 

What really works here is the creative alien design work and, even more interestingly, the villain name Killraye. That is great and suddenly I want to use it (though I'd probably drop the e).   

This, this is one of the reasons why the AH&H Mobster Manual is still not done after all these years. I'll be reading "new" comics and it's the same old human bad guys, blah blah blah, and I'll be thinking I've seen everything new I'm going to see -- and then Mars Mason fights Jupiter Men. Now the Mobster Manual has to include these! This is marvelously inventive, with the spiky heads and strange growths in their faces (are those fangs? Short tentacles? Something else? Who knows!). Their bodies seem to be separated into two halves sort of shaped like wings, which would seem to make sense for a lifeform evolving on a gas giant (if the gravity wasn't so crushing), each side ending in five appendages like giant fingers. Each appendage ends in a tool, either a club or a hook, that I'm guessing are not natural (but you never know in comic book space).  

This first panel makes it look like their heads can detach. Maybe the heads are the only real part and the rest of the body is just something they wear? Crazy.

Almost as exciting is the multi-ray torture machine. Which ray will it be? Sounds like this item needs a random table, although apparently the differences are just flavor text and all of them eat out your vital organs. 

If you're feeling cheated because Mars has to get rescued, keep in mind he's only a mailman. 

(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.) 

Miracle Comics #2 - pt. 2

Welcome back! We're not quite done with Sky Wizard yet, and neither is Hawk Armand and his pals Vera and Butch. In fact, Hawk now has the upper hand and is taking his prisoners to his boss' secret kingdom in the Himalayas. Is it Black Bolt of the Inhumans? Oops, too soon for that!

Hawk may be smart, but he doesn't get the difference between a map and a globe. On a flat map, it appears the fastest way to get to Tibet from Guatemala is east, but it's actually north!  It's 9,460 miles to the Arctic Circle and back to get to Tibet. Since we know from yesterday's pages that the villains were able to catch up to the sky island in a plane that could go 300 MPH, we know sky island moves slower than that. That means it will take 37 days to reach Tibet. No wonder Sky Wizard had so much time to get free!

Let's also take a moment to talk about Kee-Shan. Keeshan would become a name used by blacks (sparingly) by the 1980s, but would be meaningless in 1940. Unless it is a phonetic spelling? It 

matches no Arabic names I can find...

I don't know about famous, but Secret Agent K-7 really was a radio character with 15-minute weekly episodes in 1939. 

Secret explosives are a common MacGuffin in spy stories. It's not clear here if the thermite bomb explodes silently or drops silently. Either way, it would be a trophy weapon to mid- and high-level Heroes (and probably best kept out of the hands of low-level ones!).

Sometimes it's the simple things that jump at me while reading these old pages, like the clever idea of having a machine gunner hiding in the back of an old cart under a pile of wood. Saving that idea for a future scenario...

I'm only including this page because I am so baffled by what is going on in the top tier. It appears that K-7 has shot the machine gunner and the driver surrenders to him as he drives past...but in the next panel he's saying "Good girl" to Yvonne because she...got the driver? So, did they jump out between panels and attack the driver? Was Yvonne shooting too, but we just never saw her do it? Did she take the wheel and run the driver over?  What do you think happened?

Hircon is clearly meant to be a Rasputin-like character. I could call this mobstertype a hypnotist, mentalist, or even a rasputin (following my examples of fu manchus, genghis khans, and napoleons). Hircon is not a real name and suggests no nationality/ethnicity.  

Ironically, petrosene is more of a real life name, even though it is used as a fictional chemical compound here. Fulmites are not a real thing either, though nitro is obviously nitroglycerin.

Would he really kill his best friend? The theory is never tested in this issue, and Charlotta could be wrong about how hypnotism works. In-game, I would say that a magically charmed fighter could be tricked into killing his best friend, and any other class might if they fail a save vs. spells. I don't think normal hypnosis should allow this, though. 

There are a lot of ways for Heroes to foil being locked in a room -- shoot the lock, bash the door in, pull it off its hinges (if you've a superhero in the party), cast a Knock spell...heck, this door even has a glass window in it, so you can just break it, reach around, and turn the doorknob from the other side. Normally, the reason why you would do this to your players is so your bad guy(s) can get a head start on running away, but our charmed doctor squanders his lead by searching for a bomb.

Here's something I don't think we've ever seen before -- un-hypnotizing someone. I guess it makes sense that one would use the same skill to unhypnotize as hypnotize. 

We're halfway through the issue now and we're just going to peek in on Dash Dixon again before heading out for the day. Yes, Dash is still dressed like a bellhop with his tighty-whiteys on over his uniform (at least you can't see his undies clearly on this page). The only cool thing here is the villain, The Eyes, a blind spy who has two light-up glass eyes (not that it makes much sense that they light up, but it becomes a semi-cool visual on the next page (and maybe I'll show you next time!)

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

 

Target Comics #2 - pt. 3

Welcome to the new year. First post of 2021! Whew...this will be Year 7 for the blog...

We're still looking at T-Men, which on the surface seems a pretty generic government agent adventure strip, yet when I look at the details it can be surprisingly well-informed. Like here, the U.S.S. Lexington isn't a random made-up name; there was a U.S.S. Lexington aircraft carrier, the second one, sailing in 1940, and would be until it was lost in 1942 in the Battle of the Coral Sea.

Then there's this weird, two-panel dogfight where it's really hard to tell what is going on. Which plane is the bad guy plane? Well, it's the one on fire. Why is it on fire? It's unlikely the Navy has a plane with a flamethrower on it, so I think this was an engine hit from bullets, even though the artist skipped showing us the plane being shot at. "The chief must have..." what? Rigged the plane so the pilot couldn't get out? How exactly did he do that...remote control locks? That actually seems an idea ahead of its time.

Southport is a curious name. For a strip that doesn't shy away from naming actual naval ships, you'd think it would name Bridgeport, Connecticut -- right across Long Island Sound from Long Island -- and a likely candidate for being where the plane took off from. There is a Southport, New York, but it's actually upstate, about halfway between Scranton, Penn. and Rochester, NY.

I am amused by how much the Treasury Department values Agent Turner. "There might be a lead there. Go on...take a year. Longer if you need it! Don't hurry back..."

Moving on to the next page, I'm equally amused by the hungry spy chief who forgot to eat today and "I want the lunch box, too!" But seriously, these saboteurs are unusually smart, using proxies whenever possible -- like the guy they hired to fly that rigged plane, or this guy, who is going to be impersonated with the aid of plastic surgery, and the man's own lunch box for added realism.

Man, you should never cross that spy chief! Shortchange him and he'll gun you down in cold blood. I mention it because, for the only villain unnamed in this story (and the other two have cool names like Gazor and Count Karna), this chief really shows up most every comic book villain up to this point, short of the Ultra-Humanite, for cunning, intelligence, and ruthlessness. The chief is captured and we're told on the last page that he'll likely go to the electric chair, but I kind of hope he escapes so I can re-use him in a campaign someday...

 

 

This is from a pretty engaging ensemble feature called City Editor. The City Editor isn't the hero of the piece; he's more like Professor X, leading from behind, back at HQ, while a male and female journalist and the kid who, I'm guessing, sells the papers on street corners, go out and complete missions for him. Because these two heroes aren't combat-types (maybe the Detective sub-class from a past Trophy Case?), a single woman with a blackjack is a serious challenge for them. This is -- for a weapon so common in Hideouts & Hoodlums -- the very first time we've seen a blackjack, or at least this clearly.   

Funny, I never would have thought of that as a "coal hole," it just looks like a manhole cover to me. It turns out coal holes were a real thing (accessing underground coal bunkers), though you were more likely to find them in 19th century Great Britain than 1940 New York City. 

Only in a story where the reporter is a main character would the reporter be allowed to barge into the building in front of the police officers on the scene.

I'm pretty sure the police officers are just supporting cast in this scene, so it's kind of surprising that one of them is the one who knocks the automatic out of her hands and saves the day, instead of Phil -- but this can easily happen in a game system ruled by random dice results. 

Golf bags are a good place to search for hidden clues and loot!

Lastly...is Pinky a boy? He's looking pretty effeminate in those last few panels, particularly with those girlish legs and shoes in the final panel. Hmm...

This is from Calling 2-R, a marvelously inventive and ambitious feature, just one with a terrible name. This is utopian fiction, something we don't see often enough in comic books, so I'm certainly willing to forgive it for its lack of suspense when an ineffectual villain shows up here. Note how the force wall does damage when touched (maybe 1-3 points, certainly not much), but also repels him back 1-6'. It otherwise functions as a Wall of Force spell.

I suspect a lot of tracing went into these panels, but they're still quite impressive! 

Free healing in the barracks? If my future players see this strip they'll want to go here between adventures. They'll probably want a speed plane too; this super-metal would make it resistant to wrecking, and the speed it flies at would seem futuristic until 1956.

The trick with utopian fiction, of course, is that one man's idea of utopia is not necessarily another's, and I'm having a hard time with the privacy issues surrounding an all-seeing television eye, and the misuses that mind picture machine could be put to. Still, vehicles run on cosmic force? That's better than electric cars! And I've had plenty of players who would want those force guns and body protectors. The gravity diminishers that let them walk on air would make a great trophy item too!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)