Zip Comics #3 - pt. 1

Yay, it's Charles Biro's Steel Sterling! Panel 2 is packed with detail. Steel looks so cool in that suit. The way Steel amuses himself when he's bored is a trait we seldom see from action heroes, and the third identity was super-original at the time (we can call this the "Mike Murdock" mistake now, in hindsight).

"Notorious" is an odd term to use here. Steel isn't wanted by the law that I recall from issues 1 and 2, so I think what she means here is "famous" or "most talked about."  

Brazonia is Brazil, that's an easy one. Orio is a little trickier, since Brasília is the capital of Brazil. It's certainly unusual, from a RPG campaign perspective, to send your Heroes to another continent already on their third adventure, but there's certainly strong precedent for it, going back to Superman's trip to South America in his second story. Biro's Steel Sterling is very much intended to be his answer to Superman, with the invention of the twin used to solve the question of how the maskless superhero goes without being discovered, and Steel conquering South America around the same time in his career. 
 

I can't figure out what city "Colosso" might represent; it doesn't match any of the big city names in Brazil I know. 

Winged tanks should not be a thing, but golden age comic book writers really seemed to love them.

That is a long range for that magnetism power. It's impossible to say how far exactly, but those planes could be anywhere from 100-1,000 feet away already.

Foreign nations always seem to be turning their defense over to Americans; at least Steel used some powers to impress them first. 

Okay, sometimes Biro is moving too fast for his own good. Steel has been given 12 hours to stop Dr. Yar, so instead of looking for Yar, or questioning that pilot he captured (unless the plane crashed and the pilot died...?), he decides to keep up his second secret identity on a long boat trip. So long that it takes him 12 hours to get back to Orio? Or did Yar break his word and attack early (that does seem very villainous)?  

Here's a surprisingly tough call -- if Steel is wrecking the hatch on a tank, is he wrecking a door or a tank? When it's too tough to make a call, go in the middle; Steel is wrecking the hatch as if it was a robot.

Taking over the winged tank instead of wrecking it seems sound strategy. And you get a trophy out of it afterwards!

I'm not sure what tactical advantage the protective circle would have...but tank pilots can make mistakes and this was clearly a mistake, grouping up like that.

Steel survives the explosion thanks to the Invulnerability power. The fact that he's now worried about being hurt by fire proves that powers have limited durations, especially since Steel got his powers in the first place by diving into molten steel (we even saw a replay of it on page 1!).

Steel is going to regret wrapping himself in asbestos someday -- but nobody knew that in 1940. At the time, fashioning himself an asbestos suit out of the lining was quite ingenious. 

I'm a little apprehensive about allowing Heroes to catch missile weapons in mid-air, unless they are superheroes buffed with one of the Race the- powers, or perhaps some other related power -- I could see maybe Improvise Missile Weapon being rationalized, if Steel were catching it to then use as a missile weapon.

The range seems really impressive on those oil ball canons, but if Steel has seen the trajectory of enough of them, I could see letting him find the source with a successful Intelligence check.

Although the narration in the final panel says Steel is breaking into a building, it appears he is breaking through a fence outside the building. Steel walls wreck as tanks, but a steel fence, I might treat that as a truck instead.

Okay, I've had my fair share of quibbles with this story so far, but this page is gold. Henchmen with lightning guns! Steel showing a vulnerability to electricity (or at least thinking he is). Steel's smart tactics -- bringing down the roof to get at the villains out of range, and smashing through a wall to help surprise the main villain. Alligator men (anticipating the Monster Society of Evil?)! Although, between "Oogle gop!" and that suspicious looking seam between shirt and pants in panel 7, I have a sneaky suspicion these are just human hoodlums in costumes. 

Biro also anticipates something that at this time isn't yet true about Superman's stories: here the Black Knight is behind every plot, even in disguise, much like Luthor will later be in Superman stories.

Little details like how Steel recharges his powers from the static electric charge he gets from running his fingers through his hair help me really appreciate this feature. In H&H, you don't need to have a visual gimmick to activate your powers, but if you as a player decide to have one, it is up to you to play it consistent.

It looks like I was wrong about the alligator men being guys in costumes, unless those are amazingly good costumes. I would probably treat them as lizard men instead of statting alligator men separately. And yeah, I can definitely see 6 lizard men being able to take down one superhero with grappling attacks, particularly if the superhero has no good combat-related buffing powers left.

That the sound carrier looks like a giant megaphone is one of those comic touches that tells me Biro isn't taking this story too seriously, and neither should I.

The deathtrap is a good one, particularly for superheroes who can so easily wreck open doors...

 

But I'm skeptical about this solution. Does pushing a drill through a wall really not apply unusual pressure to the wall? In an instance like this, where I'm unsure if I should have a trap go off or not, I might allow the hero a save vs. science to answer the question for me.

Sterling's aim being perfect is worth noting because unbuffed superheroes don't get the bonuses to hit that fighters do. A lucky roll, or was he holding onto the Bulls-Eye power? 

I'm amused by how the colorist often doesn't know what to do with Biro's sometimes sketchy art style. When he doesn't draw lines on the sides of Steel's head in panel 1, suddenly he has no hair there anymore! And the colorist has no idea what to make of that guard. 

Things get really dark in panel 8 -- the Black Knight/Dr. Yar has apparently convinced Dora's father to concoct a chemical weapon, even after telling her father that he plans to use it on Dora. BK is either extremely convinced that he's broken the man's will, or isn't all that worried about whether whatever's in that cocktail will work or not. Perhaps it's just one last attempt to torture the old man before escaping.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

  

  

Amazing Mystery Funnies #19 - pt. 4

 And we're back, looking at more of Jon Linton today. Maybe it's worth reminding novice game Editors that it is important to make sure your non-Hero characters fail, so the Heroes can succeed instead.

I get that it's more dramatic to blast the ceiling away (even when it doesn't make sense to do so; I had this issue with the TV show 24 in the past...), but isn't Jon worried about debris falling on his own workers? Better unionize, people! 

The N in N-ray could stand for nitrogen; well before the nitrogen bomb, nitrogen was already being used in TNT and other explosives. The next page suggests it stands for neutrons, though. Which is interesting, because we were much further away from neutron bombs than nitrogen bombs in 1940.

20,000 MPH is super-fast, barely attainable by today's technology (we can only achieve it with satellites in outer space). That's (roughly) Mach 27, traveling through Earth's mesosphere, and...well, I'm not qualified to say how safe that would be, but with so much at stake in this story, I think it's certainly reasonable to take chances!

References to atomic power might seem visionary for 1940, but New York Times articles from then were already pretty specific about how atomic power would work -- "We have been brooding over the atomic power houses which are to do away with coal and in which uranium-235 is to sputter array in water and make energy so cheap that it will hardly pay to read meters..." (https://www.nytimes.com/1940/06/09/archives/science-in-the-news-atomic-power.html)

I'm less convinced by the science behind "Jon! We're dropping!" Wouldn't an equal and opposite reaction push them backwards instead of downwards? Unless...instead of being repelled from the force field, maybe the field is draining power from the rocket? But since it's an atomic-powered rocket, that's some impressive energy draining!

Spoiler: Jon saves the day, but Satan Rex escapes to fight another day.

But not to fight Speed Centaur, who is busy knocking hats off of bad guys. I find that image funnier than it probably deserves, particularly since, on the other side of the panel, Speed is kicking that guy so hard it probably would kill someone in real life.

The reference to a previous adventure, as vague as it is, was pretty rare in the golden age. Continuity didn't get talked about a lot because it was not assumed anyone was keeping back issues. 

Panels 4 and 5 serve to remind us that Speed is completely naked most of the time. I find the concept of centaurs disturbing on all kinds of levels, and this is just one of them.

I can just imagine the future producer of the Mister Ed TV show reading this as a boy and thinking, "Hmm, a talking horse..."

I cannot figure out why Simp and Flame are in quotation marks, while Speed and Reel are not. Simp and Reel are both nicknames. Flame is the horse's real name. Is Speed Speed Centaur's real name? Does that make Centaur his real surname? This feature makes my head hurt.

"I know, Reel, but they're only the hirelings! I want the big shot of this racket."

"But couldn't we have followed them and seen if they let us back to the big shot?"

".......Why do you leave all these decisions up to me? I'm just a horse with half a human on me!"

"Dope" is slang for a variety of illegal drugs, including marijuana, opium, and cocaine, so it's hard to say exactly what's in those pills. It probably is not marijuana, as I doubt you could infuse enough into a pill form to significantly affect a horse. 

Although Speed is acting like he spotted the pills before eating out of the feed-bag, he's sure acting like he's high on something -- because this is the second time he let the bad guys just get away.

Second spoiler: Speed wins!

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus)

 

Amazing Mystery Funnies #19 - pt. 3

No, "Arrows of Doom" isn't a Fantastic Four adventure (though wouldn't that be cool?). There are British research foundations, but not one called British Research Foundation (that I've found). Bwana is used as a form of respectful address in parts of Africa, so it's a weird name for head hunters. Matadi is the chief sea port of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the capital of the Kongo Central province.

Larry does something you don't normally see in these short adventures -- collecting rumors about the scenario before he heads into it. 

Though we're told that's a giant python, it doesn't look any larger than normal pythons, which can reach 15' in length. 
 

The arrow in panel 2 is puzzling. Did it pass through his shirt before going up into his head? 

You shouldn't be so surprised, Larry; poor Magu has already succeeded at three morale saves this adventure and his time was up. Speaking of Magu, that's apparently a real name you might find in countries like Tanzania (there's a Magu District in Tanzania).

But what is Larry holding over Magu's sleeping bag? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with what's being said in the panel. 

Just as I'm thinking about congratulating the author for his research, I'm forced to deal with the trope of bad guys being willing to kill everyone but the hero, who gets captured instead. Or is there some subtle racism here, that it's only black guides getting killed?  I think it's impossible to call here, because we can't see if the two men accompanying Ronald are black or not. Maybe Larry's guides were just unlucky.

It's really hard to take a villain like Debree seriously -- but what to make fun of first? Should I be making cheese jokes? Debris puns? Laugh at his outrageous mustache? 

Igor is not, as you may have guessed, an African name, but I think we can forgive this, especially if Debree is the one who named the 'holy lodge.' 

People who don't want to sound racist have always had a hard time figuring out how to describe people without sounding racist. Dark? Black? Granted, Larry is tied to a post that's about to be lit on fire, so he doesn't really have time to ask for the man's name...and yet, Larry does manage to fire off a pretty long speech instead...

Here's an interesting twist on the Western hero. Is it a modern hero or a 19th century hero? It's so hard to tell with the Mythic West, though a clue may be the posters on the walls advertising the menu, which seems more like a 1940 thing, as well as the price of 25 cents for bacon and beans.

I never would have thought of this -- and I'm not sure if it's really legit -- but maybe the next time I've playing in a game where I need to find out if someone's been out riding on his horse recently, I'll check the horse for sweat. Of course, this may not prove useful results on a hot day, or if the horse is sick...

It seems like everything has been wrapped up neatly -- unless the three robbers recant their confessions in front of the mob, or tell a new lie and implicate Jim. That is one mercurial mob. Maybe they don't care who they string up, they just want to hang somebody today! In a RPG like Hideouts & Hoodlums, you can roll randomly for encounter reactions of every individual in the mob, group them into sets of five and roll for every set, or just roll once for the whole mob. 

Wow. I did not see that twist ending coming! The Headless Horseman's a horsewoman!

This is Harry Campbell's Jon Linton (it's different from Dean Denton and John Law because it takes place in the future!). I like the building of suspense on this page with the running countdown. Harry always tries to add more realistic details to his stories than the typical comic book writer, which I appreciate, but without inches of latitude and longitude, those bombers are going to have an awful huge swath of Asia to search for the hidden city. 

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.) 

 

Amazing Mystery Funnies #19 - pt. 2

We're back, looking at Basil Wolverton's Space Patrol. Or is that pronounced Spaaaaace Patrol!? Last time, I was talking about Mercurians and lamenting that there was nothing unique enough about them to warrant statting them, but here we learn that Mercurians have thick rubbery hides - enough to warrant an AC of 6, 2 Hit Dice, and maybe even a -1 to blunt damage attacks against them, I'm thinking.

Last time I speculated about how I'd stat the Mercurian Mole-Men, and suggested they should be faster than normal. But if they can't catch two men in heavy armor, then I'm going to actually downgrade them to a Move of 9, while keeping their sleight of hand skill. And maybe they need some kind of burrowing skill - not that we see them use it, but because they are mole men?

Dryaks are going into the Mobster Manual first chance I get. They're enormous; I'd guess that critter must be at least 7' in diameter and 50' long (including the tail)? And if an atomic needle pistol can't pierce its hide, we may be talking an AC of 1 or lower! It attacks by bite, which probably does significant damage (maybe 3-18 points?), and I'd be willing to assign it at least 10 Hit Dice based on its slight resemblance to a D&D remorhaz. 

Interestingly, the dryak is not immune to fire, which you'd think would be a prerequisite for living on Mercury, but that's not the worst plot hole here, as our two heroic law enforcement agents, instead of trying to bring the criminals to justice, decide to roast them in a volcanic eruption. Hey, less paperwork, right? 

I think the obvious explanation here is that this story is too big for its page count and corners had to be cut sharply at the end. A lot of golden age stories suffer this. For a Hideouts & Hoodlums campaign to emulate that, scenarios need to have strict time limits, instead of continuing on to the next session, with the Editor wrapping it up by the most expedient method possible before the session ends. With no consequences (other than maybe missing out on collecting more treasure and trophies...)! 

sigh. After Basil Wolverton art it's a little hard to look at The Inner Circle again. At least I get to show off my high school-level French skills. The clerk is saying "You have your permit now." The native boy says "with me!"

Angcok Island is a fictitious name, which is just as well since it sounds ridiculous, and this is when there are real islands off Madagascar with names like Big, Crab, Klang, Pisang, Pom Pom, and Wan Man. This is one of those situations where you can't win; if you used a real name, people would probably assume you're making it up anyway.

On this page we learn a trick for how to make a compass screw up. There's also an interesting twist with the woman in the party, as we learn here she is an unwilling accomplice. It also seems to give our bad guy no allies, making this a pretty easy scenario.

 

I like how the native, instead of shooting gibberish like "Ooga booga," speaks perfectly fluent French. "Go!" he shouts. 

I'm sure it was difficult to find photo references for the natives of the islands off of Madagascar back in 1940. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I found one in a minute-

-and as you can see the artist did get the details about half right, according to the natives of Borneo. 

I'm not going to bother with the rest of the story -- it takes a racist turn as the good guys side with the bad guy to kill a bunch of black people because, you know, it would have been too easy to just turn the bad guy over to them and solve everything without further violence.

So instead we'll just into the next feature, Fantasy Isle (formerly called Tippy Taylor after its star). Tippy is exploring a natural cave complex that may or may not be the entrance to Hades. 

Witches are shown to be pretty dumb and easily fooled here. Demonstrating no special abilities, I think we're going to just ignore this story in any future write-up of witches as a mobstertype. 

Nor should we be very impressed with that grim reaper character who is easily pushed off a bridge. I think I just found another example of fake undead! 

The fairy tale giant seems a genuine threat. I think I need to include a percentage chance of them being encountered a sleep, like D&D dragons.

There are times, I'll confess, when I just want to throw up my hands and quit. To truly emulate some of these comic book stories, every bad guy -- even if it's a giant -- needs to have no more than 3 hit points. Because just about everything goes down in one hit! 

Buck up, Scott. Look! A Potion of Invisibility that doesn't turn your clothes invisible. That's a trophy item we haven't seen before (but looks very familiar from the first live action Fantastic Four movie...).

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

 

 

Amazing Mystery Funnies #19 - pt. 1

Followers of Great Scott! Press are probably aware that I've been working with the Fantom of the Fair much more recently than the last time he came up on this blog. This is ahead of where I am in reprinting his stories and...whew, this one is probably going to need some serious reworking before I would use it. I was never a huge Paul Gustavson fan, but I like his stuff a lot more than whatever fill-in artist this is (I've seen on Comic Book Plus this might be Al Anders or Will Roland). 

I think it's interesting that the Fantom has left New York for Maine because, in my fiction pieces detailing some of his backstory, he came to New York (and the new world) through Newfoundland and spent some time there, and maybe this was him heading back that way. Also -- plug here for the next issue of Funny Picture Stories where that Newfoundland story will be published -- plug plug! 

This is convenient, but also really weird and creepy, that the Fantom was hanging out in this guy's house for no other reason than to eavesdrop on his conversation with himself. 

But how "near" does the Fantom need to be to hear that? There is no exact limit in the rules for distance, but a common sense ruling from any Editor should tell you he would need to be inside the house or just outside an open window from the house at the furthest. But is the Fantom using a spell, like Clairaudience? Or a magic crystal ball off-panel to scry? But that still brings us back to the question: why was the Fantom monitoring this man?

I like the carnival setting because it seems a natural progression from stories set at a fair. 

Just like it's hard to believe the Fantom just happened to hear that conversation, suspecting Professor Trepper was a near-impossible leap in logic without using some sort of magic spell. Divination? 
 

The narration of panel 5 is interesting. Is the narrator unsure if the Fantom was surprised or not, or is only talking from Agar's perspective? 

Trepper has called in some roustabouts to help him, but as soon as one of them goes down the rest all fail their morale save, which was probably a single roll for the whole group. 

We're going to jump off of that pedestrian story and gaze upon the works of Basil Wolverton. Ooooo.  Ahhhhh. Seriously, those panels 5 and 6 are gorgeous. I've got nothing game mechanic-y to say about this page, so just enjoy.

One of the standard tropes of bad science fiction is to take Earth resources, give them an extra adjective, and then try to pass them off as something exotic and alien. True, green diamonds would be something new on Earth and probably really valuable, but what practical value would they have worth interplanetary travel for...?

We now know Mercury stopped being volcanically active 3.5 billion years ago, but Wolverton was right about it having volcanoes!

We learn that atom-needle pistols are more powerful than flame guns.

Thermo armor -- trophy armor that makes the wearer immune to heat damage.

I wonder how much $1 billion will feel like in the future. Assuming inflation never ends, I'm guessing it's going to be worth more like millions today, and that makes interplanetary diamond mining even less plausible. 

But -- oooh! We get a new monster, the vulkite, which looks exactly like an alien wyvern.

Here we get an explanation for what atom-needle pistols can do -- the ammunition explodes (like little atomic bombs?) once they're inside you. That seems like it must do a lot of damage -- at least 4-24? 

We also learn that vulkites have really good Armor Class because of their "heat-hardened hide" -- so maybe 1 point better than a wyvern -- and they are probably immune to heat and fire too. 

It's weird how a wooden door is surviving just fine on Mercury...

Mercurians are sure cool-looking and quite villainous, but stat-wise I can't see any reason in the story to stat them as anything other than human. I mean, he might as well be human since he can't do anything special.

Now, Mercurian Mole-Men, on the other hand, are really sneaky and have "deft movements." I would probably give them a low AC, fast Movement rate, and a good chance to pick pockets or perform sleight of hand.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Top-Notch Comics #4 - pt. 5

We're back for one last, short look at Kardak the Mystic Magician as he explores Atlant -- oops, no, this is Anderras, Atlantis' weird cousin. The unusual strain of mermen here are the underseas men; I'm thinking of giving them 2 Hit Dice and maybe a tail swipe attack, though I'm waiting to see them actually fight. 

Underseas men can be found in large numbers; I think I count 54 there? 

Kardak casts Protection from Missiles and Telekinesis, meaning he's at least 7th level.

It is SO hard to take these mocha men seriously, partly because they're horribly drawn and partly because of that ridiculous name. Are they part spider or part coffee bean? 

There are at least 27 mocha men here and the fact that the underseas men are still worried suggests the mocha men are physically tougher. The mocha men have up to four arms; one clearly has only three (maybe a war injury, suggesting he's a higher-level leader?). It's unclear if that band around their torsos is some natural part of their body or some kind of armored cummerbund. And some of them can ride giant spiders (which is pretty cool). 

What is the environment here? Why is there a giant cloud underwater? 

Kardak casts Wall of Fire, meaning he's at least 9th level.

Are the mocha men throwing hi-tech bombs? Maybe that's why they are winning the fight, because they are more technologically advanced than the underseas men? 

Kardak casts Earthquake, meaning he's -- oh, he's just ridiculously high level. 

What is the environment here again?? Are they under an air-filled dome? Is Kardak not concerned about his spell cracking it? 

Speaking of which, are underseas men completely amphibious, if they have air-filled domes? 

And how dumb is everybody if they keep thinking Lorna is casting the spells instead of Kardak? 

And don't think I've forgotten about the giant sea spiders. I'm thinking 3 HD? Maybe even 4? They do beat Kardak, after all. Kardak doesn't seem too worried about the sharks -- maybe they should have tossed him into a pit full of giant sea spiders instead?

 

The implication here seems to be that Kardak needs freedom of movement to cast spells, even though he seems to always be motionless when casting spells. 

Kardak has cast Fog Cloud and Levitate, seemingly at the same time, but he could have cast Fog Cloud first, waited for it to waft up into the room, and then levitated. 

Maybe the craziest part of this story is that Kardak wants to keep Lorna a prisoner down here. Crazy...or creepy? Is he waiting for Stockholm Syndrome to kick in so he has a chance with Lorna?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

 

Top-Notch Comics #4 - pt. 4

We're back and looking at the next page of Wings Johnson. Panel 4 looks very dramatic, but playing chicken that close with two airplanes seems like a terrible idea to me. It also gives the impression that facing really doesn't matter in aerial combat -- and in Hideouts & Hoodlums, maybe it shouldn't. In hand-to-hand combat, you don't get a bonus to hit for being right in front of someone; your odds are still about 50/50.

Finding a grenade in your plane seems like a dangerous idea, but in a campaign where trophy items are randomly dropped this makes more sense.

We're going to jump out of that story (nothing is every really resolved in a Wings Johnson story, he just hops from one dire situation straight into the next - as if anticipating how Marvel Comics will work someday!). 

...And we're going to jump ahead to yet another disastrously named comic book character, the laughable Bob Phantom. This particular story isn't too laughable, though, because you're going to be choking on the racism here instead. But if we look past that, we'll see an instance of game mechanics poking through here at the end, where the mobster gets a bonus to his morale save as soon as he knows his boss is listening.

This page gets really dark, as Bob completely fails to save an entire plane-full of people. Are there consequences? Only for the bad guy, as Bob now has an excuse to really cut loose on him.

And here we see something unusual; a superhero using an opponent as his instrument of wrecking things. The H&H rules are really set up to avoid this, mainly for game balance; the superhero is supposed to be good at breaking stuff and the fighter is supposed to be good at hurting people. Now, the superhero can knock a bad guy into a wall, essentially treating the wall as a club, and doing 1-6 points of damage (possibly modified by the superhero's Wisdom bonus). Wrecking things should be a separate action the player would have to wait a turn to do...but suppose the hero was buffed with a power, like Race the Train, that granted him an extra action per turn? Then he could legit wreck the wall at the same time as knocking the mobster into it, though it would confer no additional damage to the mobster. 

And check out the text around that newspaper article! It's the text from a story, but not from a made-up newspaper story. It seems to be cribbed from some piece of fiction. Maybe a text story from another MLJ comic book? I don't read the text stories, so I'm not sure.

I am really hoping that the writer of this story just didn't think it through. All the bad guys want to do is smuggle Chinese citizens into the U.S. Five times Bob has forced the planes to dump their human cargo into the ocean and kill them all. Never once has he teleported into the plane before it takes off, or waits for it to land and then catch the smugglers red-handed. It's really bizarre how Bob's player keeps making the situation worse every time he intervenes, and he just keeps right on doing the same thing each time.

 

You'd guess that pit was, what? Sixty feet deep based on the drawings? It seems unlikely that the boss could survive that fall, but Bob could just teleport down there and check. But this is a comic book story, so Bob would have to save vs. plot to interfere with a villain plunging to her death. 

Walt (it's hard to believe that his real name isn't Bob) goes to great pains here to hide Bob Phantom's involvement in the case, and this seems like it would be up to the personal preference of the player. Maybe it's just as well that there's no Popularity or Reputation mechanic in H&H, because it would hurt the players wanting their characters to act more anonymously.

I'm going to jump into the middle of Stacey Knight, M.D. If you do a good deed, but someone's forcing you to do it, even though you would have done it anyway - do you still get the 100 xp for doing a good deed? It's a question almost as tough as, why did these mobsters leave a kerosene can within reach of their prisoner? 

As dumb as the mobsters are, Stacey's plan is pretty bright. Not only does the fire distract his guards and puts their mobile hideout in jeopardy, but it draws the attention of much-needed help.

 

It's unclear if Stacey can boss the Coast Guard around because of his occupation or because of his level. 

Is that guy on the radio saying "Roosevelt" really slowly or spelling it out? 

The Roosevelt Field?  According to Wikipedia, "Roosevelt Field is a former airport, located 2.3 miles (3.7 km) east-southeast of Mineola, Long Island, New York. Originally called the Hempstead Plains Aerodrome, or sometimes Hempstead Plains field or the Garden City Aerodrome, it was a training field (Hazelhurst Field) for the Air Service, United States Army during World War I.

In 1919, it was renamed in honor of President Theodore Roosevelt's son, Quentin, who was killed in air combat during World War I.

Roosevelt Field was the takeoff point for many historic flights in the early history of aviation, including Charles Lindbergh's 1927 solo transatlantic flight."

Apparently, "auto-giro" is still a legitimate spelling, even though you never see it anymore. 

Good guys can pretty much go around punching bad guys with complete immunity, whereas in real life that cop could also arrest Stacey for assault, and Moriarty could still sue him for the assault even if Moriarty was found guilty of a crime.

And is this the biggest waste of the name Moriarty ever? You're going to use the name of Sherlock Holmes' nemesis on a guy who rigs boxing matches?

 

Before we wrap up this post we're going to take a sneak peek at Kardak, the Mystic Magician. Here we see an unusual type of mermen, for two reasons -- one, they have legs and fishtails, and two, despite obviously being mermen they are never once called mermen. They are referred to as underseas men, fishtails, and Anderrans (after the name of their city, Anderras). 

Oh, and Kardak casts Part Water, so, as commonly happens in comic book magic-user stories, we can expect the high-level spells to come fast and furious...

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)