Slam-Bang Comics #1 - pt. 2

Okay, the planes going dead are explained (as if we needed it, as cliched as the rays are), but what we never get explained is how the machine guns have no effect. Bulletproof armor on the planes?

Also, take a look at the jowls on War Bird. In the Golden Age, a Hero could debut in his late 40s. 

It's nice that Von Kruhl was kind enough to write his note in English for us, despite being Serbian and writing this for Frenchmen to read.

Where is the searchlight that was on the front of the plane before? Perhaps more odd, what was holding it in place on that smooth surface?

I do like that, as hi-tech as Von Kruhl's forces are, it's an ordinary pair of binoculars that foils him.

We don't see enough of this tactic, where the hero sneaks into the enemy's hideout and, instead of engaging the enemy, wrecks their stuff. This makes especially good sense in the aviator genre.

"Look! A Frenchman!" Is the thinking there that only a Frenchman would be sabotaging their planes?

"Hammer-like blows" would normally be flavor text, except that it seems pretty clear War Bird is hitting them with a wrench, which would be heavy enough to do normal club damage.

You can probably guess that War Bird gets away and wins the day, so we'll jump into Jim Dolan. Jim is in the reporter hero genre, but with the twist that he's an editor.

The list of his past accomplishments seems like a set-up for starting him out with a brevet rank. It's also a pretty good list of scenario ideas you could add to a longer list, and the final panel illustrates the advantages of making the police chief your supporting cast (something I saw being put to good use in my last H&H campaign).

I'm not going to address everything on this page; we've talked about trip attacks and improvised weapons plenty of times. We could talk about movement and if rushing out the door should really be faster than standing up (hint: in H&H it's determined entirely by initiative rolls). But I'm mainly sharing this page because the mobsters are not only using hot irons as torture devices, but somehow have flaming hot irons. Did they soak those things in kerosene first? They look pretty fearsome; I might let them do 2-7 damage as melee weapons.

I've talked before about smoke and heat damage from trying to rescue in an arson scenario, but what's interesting here is that Jim spots a clue in the fire, when he clearly wouldn't have had time to do a search. This has to be a freebie from the Editor, as every skill check should take at least one melee turn, and in most cases should take one exploration turn. 

Does Jim have to roll to hit to land in the net? To truly be fearless, one would think he does, but it makes equal sense for the firemen to roll to hit him with the net, and as long as two of them succeed their rolls, they catch him. 

It's interesting that Jim doesn't know his Bible well enough to know the psalm without researching. His Editor could have spared him the trouble and let him have an Intelligence check to remember.

The clue seems like a bit of a stretch to me, though...

I'm not personally cool with Heroes holding guns on people's faces while interrogating them, but it does happen in games.

Swimming from the patrol board to the yacht is a smart tactic, giving him a chance at surprise he would have lost had the patrol board pulled up alongside the yacht.

We'll jump ahead to Lucky Lawton, this anthology's western feature. I could mention that the law was tougher in the Old West than many give it credit for; even in self-defense these two still have to make their case in court. Or I could mention that Pal can act without being ordered to, making me suspect that Pal the dog is actually being played as a Hero character. But what really catches my eye are the hashmarks on the wall of the jail outside the cells. What would the sheriff have been keeping track of like that, and couldn't do on a calendar...?

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Slam-Bang Comics #1 - pt. 1

This is my first time ever looking at this issue. I know none of these characters become hits, but I'm hoping for a gem in the rough...

This is Diamond Jack, the Green Lantern before there was Green Lantern. He's got an interesting amount of hubris to him for what should be a 1st-level Magic-User. Of course he's not; the Magic-Users never are. Here he casts Protection from Missiles and Polymorph Any Object, neither of which are 1st-level spells.

I was long ago asked why Hideouts & Hoodlums bothers emulating D&D's low-level Magic-Users at all, if you never find them in comic books; but this is precisely why comic book Magic-Users are always so boring, so unbeatably overpowerful. I choose not to emulate that.

A gangster chief is a master criminal, while thugs are their own mobstertype. 

Magic-Users never seem interested in keeping secret identities, or keeping their magic a secret. It's a wonder that the existence of magic stayed secret as long as it did. 

I think this is the third time we've seen Cure Light Wounds being cast. 

Here's where things start to get interesting for me. The mobsters just happen to know a witch? And what to make of this smoke dragon? Is it a spell, like an Aerial Servant? Or is it a conjured, living (or "living"/enchanted) creature?

That the smoking dragon disappears as if dispelled instead of killed makes me lean towards treating it as a new spell. Speaking of which, this Create Sword spell may be a new spell too. What he does to the spell is the all-too familiar Polymorph Any Object spell.

On this page the dragon is now consistently called a demon and is treated as if it is a mobster instead of a spell. You would think the witch would know which it was...but I'm thinking consistency isn't the priority in this story.

It's possible that Jack was able to use the Disguise spell here, but only if the smoke dragon-demon is in humanoid form here. Otherwise he had to conceal himself with a higher-level illusion, or even a Polymorph Self spell. 

The witch's spellbook is her "wand," just as Jack's ring is his "wand." 

This suggests that Polymorph Any Object is a permanent spell, or this is a higher-level permanent version.

It's interesting how Jack uses no magic to disguise himself as one of the thugs, but still can't help himself and uses a Knock spell on the door.

If jack opens the safe for them, has he really caught them in the act of doing anything...?

I wonder if magic-users should get extra XP for when they defeat opponents without spells, given how many times I've seen powerful heroes choose to settle things with normal fisticuffs instead.

Tom Sharp would itself be a pretty decent name for a strip. 

This is not the first time I've seen fighters given experience in the Spanish Civil War. I wonder if this is how you explain brevet ranks for fighters, circa 1940? 

The Lafayette Flying Corps was the name given to the American volunteer pilots who flew in the French Air Force (Armée de l'Air) during World War I. I don't think its name was changed to the French Flying Corps during WWII.

Sermia sounds like Serbia. It's an unfortunate bit of naming, since Serbia was a victim during the war, invaded and occupied, with many deaths.

This is not the first radio-controlled plane we've seen, and it's far from the first ray gun that kills engines we've seen -- surprisingly, this is the first searchlight mounted on a plane we've ever seen. Apparently it's a rare feature, but then so is night flying...

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)

Popular Comics #49 - pt. 3

UGHH...the new Blogger is so terrible, I hate to even work with it. We'll see if I can plow through and at least finish this issue.

Captain Tornado finally earns some points -- despite how Jane is dressed, he keeps his eyes facing nice and high -- and then promptly tosses them away with senseless violence. "Giant eyes! I can't even see what it is, if it's dangerous or not, or what it's intentions are -- but I'm a'gonna shoot it anyway!"  

That's a pretty dynamic first panel for a strip this otherwise...well, I still don't know what to make of this strip. Let's try to work it out together, shall we? 

Pro: Moon Mountain Manor sounds like a great name for an adventure module.

Pro: Although the Village of Rose Hollow seems to be fictional, there is a Rose Hollow Valley in Baxter County, Arkansas that is near the Ozarks.

Con: A minor quibble, but newspapers don't print their headlines in color.

Pro? Con?: The story turns conventions on their head by having the unattractive scientist in the lonely laboratory overlooking the village be the hero instead of the villain.

Con: The laughably named Mancho Phyroe. Mancho makes me think our hero is Spanish, but what to make of Phyroe...?

Using field glasses to read cablegrams at a distance is a sound tactic.

"Yugrarvia" surely refers to the then-Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

This page brings up a good point about the importance of thinking about where your hideouts are getting their electricity. If from the local power grid, it is too easy for the Heroes to turn that power off, but if the hideout has its own dynamo, you must place it somewhere. 

I am wondering what is supposed to be so "horrifying" about that laboratory. It looks more "intriguing" than anything.

"Soft-shoe prowl" is a cool term.

This is a rare occurrence of a Hero using a chimney to navigate vertically through a hideout, but it is a good idea to be prepared for this in-game.

I'm amused by, not only how the death ray says "death ray" on it, but that he's advertising it took nine tries to perfect it. 

There are no unexplored frequency bands in the vicinity of the X-ray; those are ultraviolet rays and gamma rays.

1,000 miles is a crazy long range for trophy weapons, but not that unusual in the comics. Consider carefully its effect on game balance, since players can get their hands on these. 

Wing-walking was a stunt for Aviators in 1st edition Hideouts & Hoodlums.

Gas tanks exploding is a fairly critical complication for aerial combat.

Shark is smart to rescue his opponents, as it does give him people to question for information.

In 1940, the "medical magic of the hypodermic" likely refers to morphine.

Here is a rare occasion of Asians speaking an actual foreign language instead of broken English.

The Syndicate sounds like a criminal organization, but here seems to be refer to a national alliance (the Axis, perhaps?). It does not seem to be a coincidence that the bad guys here seem to be Japanese.

Being able to throw destroyers against the Heroes does make it a seriously high-level challenge.

 

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Popular Comics #49 - pt. 2

I believe I had given the Power Dive stunt a bonus to hit when I made the Aviator class, but I've since learned in playing Dawn Patrol that power dives are for gaining speed, as done here. I don't presently have a rule to cover this, other than how a piloting skill check allows you to go a little faster than normal.

Once again, we're given a teasing clue that the Masked Pilot is either someone very famous or very influential, or both. Or he's carrying Doctor Who's psychic papers.

Penguin Pete, which is really a better adventure strip than it has any business being, reminds us that a "miss" in combat doesn't necessarily mean you missed your target, it's just that you caused no damage. Although I could have arrows do less damage to alligators...?

Don't forget that mobsters can wreck things, just like any non-superhero Heroes, with just two dice instead of three. That should be enough to smash a rowboat...though I could give them a +1 bonus when wrecking with their tails, or just mention that alligators can wreck things behind them with their tails.

We're going to spend the rest of this blog post spending more time looking at Captain Tornado than it probably deserves, but maybe we'll learn something about creating fictional civilizations.

Rule #1: Dress the natives exotically. Don't be afraid to make your Heroes confront a male guide wearing a thong-backed banana hammock.

Rule #2:  Rather than try to imagine new technologies, you can recreate modern conveniences through different means and still make a society look advanced. Here is a mechanical elevator. Also note the locals live in a place that resembles the courtyard of a fancy hotel.

Phosphorescence is a real thing, of course, but some unknown process must amplify it so it operates as sunlight. Of course, it's also possible that all the grass in this cave is astroturf, and the trees are fake sculptures, just to give them the feel of being aboveground. 

That the door "mysteriously opens" feels somewhat laughable today when every store has automatic sliding doors, but while the concept of automatic sliding doors is very old, the way to make this work electronically was not invented until 1954 -- so this is actually "futuristic" tech in 1940!

Note the trope of how visitors always get to visit rulers directly, instead of being made to interact with some underling who reports back to the ruler (which seems like it would keep the ruler much safer).  

Holy cow, this page is pretty terrible. "I'm free, white, and 18 and he can't boss me"? Really Jane? 

And while that's pretty overtly racist, that's nothing to how terrible this alien caste system is, with its two slave castes who either get their tongues cut out or aren't allowed to ever see light. 

If I didn't already hate this evil alien race enough, now we find out that they rip the wings off of giant butterflies and wear them. I guess we also find out from this that these aliens are hollow-boned, allowing them to fly.

The concept of species degenerating to the point where they no longer understand their ancestors' technology can be traced at least as far back as H.G. Well's Morlocks.

And we learn from this page that water pressure, instead of electricity, is how they work their technology. I wonder if water pressure could run a plane...?

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

Popular Comics #49 - pt. 1

The radio drama allegedly always used true cold cases from the FBI files, and the Gang Busters comic strip at least started out the same, but how true is that by 1940? I can't find any evidence of an actual FBI agent John Winston, though Winston being the middle name of John Lennon is, admittedly, clogging my search results, and there's no reason why the name couldn't have been changed to protect a still-active agent's identity.

Richmond, Virginia is of course a real place. I can't find a Calvert Bank in Richmond, but there is a Calvert Drive in Richmond, and perhaps there was once a bank there? 

The Tri-State Gang was real. According to the Sword and Scale website, their crime spree ran "through Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia during the early to mid-1930’s."

By this page, the scene has shifted to Baltimore, Maryland. The names of the streets seem to have been changed to ...protect the innocent streets. Although there is a Harvey Street in Baltimore, it is commercial instead of residential, and doesn't intersect with an Elm Street. 

The map hardly seems necessary, since the maneuver of blocking the intersection with cars is really not elaborate. 

The story of the Tri-State Gang is actually pretty interesting, but you wouldn't know it by this rushed retelling. Indeed, the Gang Busters comic strip often has a bland sameness to its stories.

So we'll skip ahead into Martan the Marvel Man. I'm pleased with what this installment is trying to do, showing us Martan and Vana getting to know Earth, but I'm skeptical that they would immediately understand our comedy as quickly as they do here. Even more interesting is that this is an alien invasion story, but with the twist that Martan and Vana are on the ground with regular people and get to see how they react and deal with it.

The locations are worth mentioning here. It's unusual that the aliens land somewhere in New Jersey and San Francisco and not more obvious targets, like Chicago, New York City, or Washington, D.C. Likewise in Germany, the aliens skip Berlin and are landing in less important areas of northern Germany.  

On a page I'm not bothering to share we also learn that the invaders are Martians, but the story ends with us still not even having seen the invaders yet. Maybe next time!
 

I am leery of this page because of the gruesomeness of that final panel, but two points here: one -- and we've seen this elsewhere before (and done better) -- is the idea of mistaking dinosaurs for dragons, or having dinosaurs and dragons be one and the same thing. It's a fanciful idea today, but much less was known of dinosaurs in 1940, so it would be easier to equate them with fantasy creatures. 

Second, and going along with how less was known about dinosaurs, pterodactyls are here displayed acting like carrion-eating vultures, when they were actually fish eaters, more like seagulls and albatrosses.  

Again, pretty gruesome, but I appreciate that the author knew the poisonous fumes are at least as dangerous as coming into contact with the lava (oops, Jurassic World 2 seemed to have forgotten that!). I would say anyone within 10' would need to save vs. poison or take ...let's say 2-8 points of damage from it, per combat turn within that distance.

Rekra is a weird name, but it actually is a name! I'm not entirely sure from where, but Google searching seems to be pointing to it being Slovakian. So this Slovakian spy has a gas gun and gas mask. Well-outfitted! This is a variant gas gun too, one that sprays paralyzing gas instead of sleep gas (both are chemically fanciful so, why not?). 

Oil line to motor broken is a good random complication in aerial combat (though this time it's being faked by plane thieves!). 

Out of the Sun was an aviator stunt in 1st edition Hideouts & Hoodlums, and here is used to give the Masked Pilot a surprise bonus while tailing the hijackers. 

This could be the earliest mention of Nicaragua in comic books. It's interesting that Nicaragua, being a neutral county in this story, gets to keep its name, but the villainous country is called "Vulcania." It's pretty easy to figure out which country that is, as El Salvador is known as the Land of Volcanoes. Although ruled by a dictator, Nicaragua was at least officially on the side of the allies during WWII. Although Nicaragua's dictator, Somoza, was corrupt, he wasn't as bad as El Salvador's dictator at this time, Matanza, who had more than 30,000 of his people killed.

(Scans courtesy of Comic Book Plus.)

 

Feature Comics #30 - pt. 2

We're looking at the second half of this issue of Feature Comics today, and are still in this month's Dollman feature. If you can't guess, Dollman has snuck aboard a German submarine since we last saw him. If you ignore the dynamic layouts and just concentrate on what Dollman is doing on this page, you'll realize there's nothing here he couldn't have done at full-size, backing my contention that a shrinking power is nothing but flavor text.

Now, he did, on the previous page, conceal himself in a crate too small for a normal-sized person to hide in...but the Editor could easily have changed the scale of the crates to fit the Hero.

I know where this is! the highest suspension bridge in the world was the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado from 1929 until 2001.

I am really impressed by the wrinkle in this story, that Rance leaves the time bomb intact to give the story a time limit. It's not really clear why. What would make this work so much better is if the time bomb wasn't safe to defuse, so the only way to do so is to find the man who left the bomb in the time they have available and trick him into defusing i for them. Which is almost exactly how this story goes, except for the necessity factor.

This is more of what I like from this story - not only finding out who the villain was, but finding out his backstory, looking for things to exploit so they can trick him instead of beating him up. It's all so ingenuously done that I would probably wind up giving Cameron a penalty to his save vs. plot to see through the disguise (the distance and bad lighting probably help too, so, -3?).

Here's an example of expert level sleight of hand from a non-adventure character. But I was more interested in sharing this page for the unusual word "bohunks." I don't know if you all knew this already, but bohunks is actually a racial slur, referring to an immigrant from central or southeastern Europe, especially a laborer.

We haven't looked at educational filler in a while. Things like this are very useful because, when I'm deciding how high or how far a Hero should be able to leap without some kind of buffing (either by skill or power or spell), I will look to world records, but of course world records keep going up over time. It's hard to believe that the pole vault record was "only" 14' back in 1940; now it stands at 20'!

We're jumping from there into Charlie Chan, where the artist does a great job of getting Warner Oland's likeness with all the shading. Here, Charlie lands on the nature of the bad guys' scheme from two clues. I've spoken about this before on the blog, how difficult it can be sometimes to distinguish the Editor misspeaking from deliberately leaving a clue in dialogue. The better clue, for a RPG, is having Chan realize the binoculars are expensive. I'm not even sure if one should need a skill check to determine that; I would think it would be obvious if a pair of binoculars was fancy enough to be expensive.

This page tells me pigeon blood rubies are worth twice what diamonds are worth. I wish it also told me what diamonds were worth in 1940, as that would be a good cipher for figuring out what all other gemstones were worth. Interestingly, I can find this information online, but only going back to 1960.

You don't hear about "pigeon blood" rubies often, probably because it is as violent as it sounds. Pigeon Blood Ruby meaning is primarily associated with its color that matches exactly with the blood drawn from a freshly killed pigeon.

I'm currently running a campaign where one of the Heroes is working to become a professional boxer, so I found this installment of Slim and Tubby particularly interesting. At first glance it seems that Slim needs a license and bond to become a boxer, but that's not true; he needs a license and a surety bond to work as a boxing promoter, something that's still true today (Slim is looking to become a promoter to promote his own boxing career).

We also see robbers armed with sub-machine guns here (well, sort of -- they never leave the car, but we're told they are that well-armed).

(Scans courtesy of Digital Comic Museum.)