Jumbo Comics #14

[Adminenkainen]

It's high time I did some reading again!

Ah, Sheena...the Bob Powell art is pretty, but the stories.... This one starts with the bored, listless natives, "gladly accepting the break in their monotonous lives" to build a bridge, based on Sheena's boy-toy Bob's instructions. Granted, at least Bob isn't ordering them to perform slave labor - they asked him for his advice - but it's still weird that he's telling them to build it with vines instead of wood.

Moving on to game mechanics - the action begins when Sheena is going to swing across the chasm on the bridge's first vine. She wisely ties the vine around herself, a precautionary step I don't think enough players take. In fact, I doubt I would even use a game mechanic for the swinging over, because precautions were taken and there is no need for speed. Now, when the head hunters shoot the moving vine with an arrow and snap it, that was either a very lucky attack roll or a fudged die roll to move the plot along (something I personally abhor, but not against the H&H rules).

It's unclear how deep the gorge is, but Sheena appears to fall at least 50', luckily into water. I Believe I've written elsewhere that falling damage should be minimum if you land in water...though I can't recall if that has been codified in a rulebook yet. Do I need a Wilderness Survival Guide...? In the river at the bottom, Sheena encounters three crocodiles - a really tough encounter! Luckily they do not all attack her at once and only one actually fights her; I think this is a natural approach with animal encounters, to only have a random number of them attack.

That the head hunters could hit a swinging vine with an arrow, but miss Sheena while she's climbing a stationary rope, makes me think there is likely some dice fudging going on here.

When Sheena is reunited with Bob and their pygmy friends, they are ambushed by more headhunters, who appear to be at least 13 in number. The pygmies are quickly slaughtered. Sheena is grappled and captured by only two headhunters, while it remarkably takes five of them to take Bob down, finally rendering him unconscious with a machete - which has a very RPG/abstract combat feel to it.

The writer did some prep work for this one; I learned that a kraal is a traditional African village of huts, typically enclosed by a fence. The headhunters decide to let a tiglon kill Sheena and Bob; tiglon isn't quite right, but a tigon is a real thing, the hybrid offspring of a male tiger and a lioness (and different from one of Napoleon Dynamite's ligers, which are a hybrid offspring of a male lion and a tigress). I would just use the stats for a lion for a tigon.

This would probably be it for Sheena and Bob, but Chim the chimpanzee has gone for help and summoned reinforcements from a nearby shrewdness of apes (yes, that is really the word for a group of apes). Not only can chimpanzees communicate with each other as well as humans, but chimps can communicate with gorillas, and at least one gorilla lives with this shrewdness that is largely chimpanzees. At least 20 apes - and one large monkey, because there is a tail on one - descend on the kraal and decimate the natives, just to save Sheena and Bob for...reasons? The headhunters' chief said, before all his people died, "white people, no good," and it's really hard to argue with him, except to maybe include kill-crazed apes in that short list of no good things.

The chief tries to take revenge with a bow and arrow and hits Chim on Sheena's shoulder. A few things about that - Sheena, to her credit, did not ask Chim to climb onto her shoulder and does not appear to be intentionally using Chim as a living shield. It's certainly possible that the chief was aiming for Sheena, but his Chim instead, because when you fire into a melee your target should be randomized between all the combatants in that melee. But lastly, it's perhaps even more likely that the chief was aiming for Chim because he has far more reason to be made at the apes than at Sheena right now.

Sheena chases off the chief and he is killed, not by Sheena, but by a "wandering" encounter with a giant Venus flytrap (straight out of H&H Book II!). Technically, the chief was wandering, and the plant was stationary.

Sheena returns to the kraal just in time to "save" the apes from some surviving pygmies with poison blow guns, but since those blow guns didn't do much for them against the headhunters, my money would have been on the apes wiping out more humans.

In a one-page epilogue, Chim recovers from his arrow wound "quickly," but it takes days for Bob to recover from his wounds, suggesting that the rules are either right to have hit points recover slowly and incrementally, if Bob took more damage, or perhaps that healing should be completely randomized, which is an interesting thought.

When the bridge is built, it turns out to be 200' above the gorge's bottom below. Which means Sheena would have taken 20 points of damage from the fall? Of course, it's possible - even likely - that the location of the bridge was changed.

[Adminenkainen]

Moving on, Peter Pupp's adventures have dropped to a mere two pages, and are clearly not Bob Kane's work anymore. Peter and Tinymite try to stop a large yellow peril hoodlum (maybe a pseudo-giant instead?) by pouring glue around his feet while he's not looking, but because they do not have a surprise turn, they are still in range for a grappling attack from "Fooy On Yu." Contrary to H&H rules, Fooy On Yu is able to grapple two opponents at once, but perhaps he has the power Multi-Attack, or an Editor might rule that an opponent two sizes bigger than his opponents gets two grappling attacks per turn.

In Will Eisner's The Hawk, there is two pages of world-building, as we learn about Caluga and Jamaica's secret slave trade, and see the governor of Caluga murdered by his...wife? Mistress? Far from the kiddie fare of Peter Pupp.

When we finally see The Hawk on his ship, he's eying the governor's ally, Captain Smollet, and his slave ship. The Hawk attacks slave ships only, so he's watching for clues that Smollet is a slaver. In one of those uncommon moments of tone deafness from Eisner, he implies that the slaves were actually singing in the hold of the ship and have to be told to stop. The Hawk doesn't spot any clues, but Smollet attacks first and The Hawk is cool with self-defense. The ships' canons apparently do nothing to each other, even at close range. The Hawk and his crew manage to board the ship, and Smollet goes down from a single sword swing - though not unconscious, so maybe it was actually just a tripping attack.

Searching Smollet, The Hawk finds the governor's letter, cluing The Hawk in that this is his next adventure location. The Hawk, who still doesn't know the governor was involved in the slave trade, goes to warm him that something is up and talks to the spy/assassin/mistress instead. She tries to convince him to leave, but The Hawk is too noble for that and he and his men stay to bolster the island's lightly manned garrison. The very next day, Claw Carlos (cool villain name), the pirate the lady spy works for, shows up with three ships. Again, cannons just turn out to be flavor text and the real fighting happens man-to-man as the pirates reach the island. I wonder, though, if both sides still have to announce they are firing canons, to cancel each other out, or if only one side fired, then there would be some effect/damage taken.

It turns out that The Hawk was never fooled by the spy's acting - sense motive as a skill check? He returns to the governor's mansion just in time to find Carlos has arrived via a secret tunnel into the mansion. Carlos is winning the sword fight, though a lot of what he's doing - throwing vases and making secondary attacks with his hook - are likely just flavor text. The spy, accidentally shot by Carlos in The Hawk's stead, gets a final action before dying - something that only happens by Editor fiat and not by game rules - and shoots Carlos, so they both die. By H&H rules, both should only be unconscious, but the mood setting is ratcheted up in this campaign, so that zero hit points means death instead.

Spencer Steel starts in a novel way, with a plot literally falling out of the sky. Spencer has to pull his wife (a rare married character!) out of the way as a man falls to his death on the sidewalk right in front of them. The story takes place in Las Vegas. The author, likely Eisner, makes a claim that Las Vegas had the most modern police force in the country at this time. All I can verify is that Las Vegas' Clark County Sheriff's Office was the largest in the state of Nevada.

The chief of police knows Steel by reputation and agrees to meet him (Steel is likely halfway to level 4 by now, making him the equivalent of a police sergeant). The mystery is that someone has killed three women, and now a man, over two weeks, always by dropping them out of a foggy sky, after dropping mimeographed pamphlets on the city announcing his crime. While investigating, Spencer meets a man who is the husband of the first murdered woman's business partner and claims to know who the killer was - but wants to wait to tell Spencer the next day in a very public place. If Spencer had ever read a mystery story, ever, he would do everything he could to get that information out of the an immediately, or watch him 24/7, because you just know he's going to get murdered. And yet, even when the man is an hour late, Spencer is still only slightly suspicious about foul play.

The husband, who also came to the appointed rendezvous, carries business cards in his wallet, as well as a razor blade for sharpening pencils (which seems a dangerous practice; I wonder how common that ever was?). The clue to who did it - SPOILER! - is the first murdered woman's husband, because he cut his finger on that razor, then typed a new leaflet to drop, but hit the keys one typically uses with that finger lighter than the others - which is a pretty good clue, though a bit circumstantial.

Anyway, it turns out to be right, and Spencer soon finds an oddly fish-shaped hot air balloon on the roof of the factory the killer owns. Now, why Spencer thinks to look there first and not at the man's home, or someplace more like an aircraft hangar, is not explained - maybe he already checked everywhere else first and then came here. Now, if this was a superhero story, the villain would be called Fish Man and have a fish-themed costume to go along with his balloon, but disappointingly when the villain shows up he's dressed normal.

The deathtrap is pretty ordinary, but it's not. Instead of just tying up the hero, he's going to inject Spencer (and the other guy, who he hasn't killed yet) with morphine to make him too sluggish to resist. Spencer's only opening to escape is that the killer makes the mistake of injecting the other guy first and carrying him all the way to the balloon, which buys Spencer a few minutes alone. Normally, the hero uses this chance to snap his bonds, or finds something sharp to cut them with. Spencer pulls off his tie and uses it as a tourniquet on his arm. It's a clever story idea, but I immediately see two problems with it - if Spencer's arms are tied, how does he take off his jacket to hide the tourniquet under it (and I dare anyone to roll their sleeve up on a sportcoat one-handed quickly), and even then he has a close to 50/50 chance of guessing the correct arm he's going to be injected in. After that, it just comes down to playing possum and then grappling for the killer's gun. A curious thing - Spencer has to be rushed to the hospital and it takes doctors 30 minutes to save his life, so it seems like the killer was using overdoses of morphine to kill his victims, not the actual drop from the balloon.

I won't finish the issue today, but let's dive into Stuart Taylor in Weird Stories of the Supernatural. It's been so long since I read the last issue, I have no clue where Stuart is - the future? Another planet? Both? The interesting part is that Dr. Hayward shows up! This actually used to be Dr. Hayward's feature, but his assistant Stuart sort of took over the feature. Dr. Hayward was working on the time apparatus when it accidentally sent him here - which is exactly the sort of excuse Editors need to come up with when a player shows up for the next session and his character wasn't there before.

A possible ethical dilemma - there is only one "time suit" between Stuart and Hayward, so only one of them can safely go back to the present - is disappointingly sidestepped when they just announce they'll build another (also - if they invented the time suits in the past, why don't they already exist in the future?), but this story element is tossed aside so more giant monsters can show up! And the monsters are doozies - cyborg cyclopses! They don't actually use the term cyborg - that won't be coined until 1960 - but they are half robot, half man, and 200 feet tall! The Golden Age doesn't go for half measures - threats are either ordinary guys with guns, or impossibly tough monsters. How many Hit Dice do I even give a 200' giant, if a 10' giant has 8 Hit Dice?

[Adminenkainen]

The aforementioned cyborg cyclopses are only armed with spiked clubs, which is one saving grace; the challenge level would be that much higher if they had an autocannon in each hand. It doesn't really matter because for some reason our heroes fly their borrowed rocket ship within striking distance of those spiked clubs and a "crushing blow" makes the ship break in half and crash to the ground. I have waffled over the years on how to treat vehicular combat, but am leaning towards assigning vehicles hit points. In the crash only Ronald, the SCM, is hurt, which could be because each passenger got a saving throw to avoid harm (the benefit of seat belts?), or the Editor waved off damage for the Heroes and treated Ronald's injuries like flavor text.

The giant robots - that's what they're actually called most often in the story - are the products of a mad scientist who looks like an alien, but he's actually just a misshapen (and for some reason green) human. A mutant? Altered by radiation? He's got the backstory and appearance to be a supervillain, but his name is just Rufus. Ronald, Rufus...naming conventions are pretty boring in this future!

Because the rocket ship crashed, the Heroes completely fail at the scenario - the robots succeed in wrecking the city. Because this is a RPG, though, the players are free to change their own goals and decide to avenge the city instead. Ronald, through some leap in logic, assumes Rufus must be behind this and they spend three days searching for him. Now, you would think this would be easy if they just follow the robots back to their base, but apparently the robots are never recalled but just left in the smoking ruins of the city. The Heroes have no clues to follow until they happen to spot green vapor coming out from the ground. There is no reason that they were heading in this particular direction, so they just got insanely lucky - or the Editor just put the adventure location directly in their path to speed up the game.

Rufus knows they are coming because he watches their approach on his televisor, and it's interesting how many comic books anticipated security cameras; the first video surveillance system wouldn't be invented for nine more years. Rufus activates a magneto-electric ray that paralyzes all three of our Heroes (even though none of them are made of metal), and then activates a pit trap that dumps them into a holding cell. Now, at first it seemed unnecessary to paralyze them first, but then I realized that if they blew their saves from the paralysis, they would have no chance of saving themselves from the pit trap, so maybe it makes sense?

Apparently surnames are not a big thing in this future. Ronald's full name is Ronald of Glen, like he's in the Middle Ages.

In addition to being a holding cell, there are exactly enough extending mechanical arms that can shoot out of the walls to hold three prisoners, but the flaw is that one of them has a loose bolt. Well, that's flaw #1. Flaw #2 is that Rufus rotates the wall they are on into his adjoining laboratory, full of explosive machinery. Flaw #3 is that he doesn't send a guard in to search them first, so Hayward still has a pistol on him. When the machinery doesn't blow up on the first shot, Hayward just shoots it more until it does. Curiously, despite the fact the previous page just established that Rufus didn't have time to search the three Heroes, on the last page they are all drawn in their skivvies. So...either they immediately stripped down to their underwear to celebrate victory, or Dr. Hayward was hiding his pistol in a very strange place. OR, the art was a real rush job on this issue. Some pages are up to the Lou Fine standard, but apparently not every page was drawn by him and I'm guessing that a tight deadline messed up this story.

Moving on, next up is ZX-5: Spies in Action. ZX-5 is on a plane bound for China with his fiancee, Manya Massal, who was only his girlfriend last issue (I think, I read it five years ago so I only have my notes on the blog to go from!) - and I can't believe I let that name go by last time without commenting on how unusual it is. Manya can be a Russian name, but it can also be an Indian name. The last name Massal could mean she's French, Jewish, or also Indian. The nomenclature evidence seems to be that she's Indian, though she is a fair-skinned and blonde so that seems to throw that possibility out the window.

They are flying on a commercial flight and another spy is aboard, watching ZX-5. The spy is able to go up to the cockpit and ask the pilot to send a telegram for him and I am pretty suspicious about if that is a thing.

In an unusually progressive move for a comic book of the time, the Mongolians talk in perfect English and dress like they're in modern times. The only weird cultural thing is making up that Mongolia has a queen and that she legally has to marry by 20, but the whole plot revolves around stopping those trying to stop the wedding, so I guess we have to overlook this. Name-wise, the groom is Lan Tsu; Lan can be either a Chinese or Vietnamese name, while Tsu is a common Chinese surname. The bride is Yum Ling; Yum can be Chinese or Arabian and Ling is Chinese. None of these are Mongolian names.

But things quickly get stupid - a spy is caught eavesdropping on the queen and ZX-5 lets him go - but does not even try to tail the spy back to his bosses. Instead, he decides to stay with the royal couple, just in case anyone tries any more attacks on them. But then the master spy from the plane turns stupid too; when his sniper failed to kill the groom because he couldn't get close enough to the palace for a clean shot, he decides to go himself - with a knife. Common sense would tell you a knife has less range than a gun, and the master spy predictably gets spotted trying to sneak in through a window. The master spy, cornered by ZX-5 and held at gunpoint, is holding a cord in his hand that ZX-5 somehow doesn't see and then, instead of just yanking the cord, takes the time to scratch off the insulation so he can short the wires, which seems to me would be more time-consuming than just yanking the cord. After a lengthy struggle, ZX-5 wins. The master spy is revealed as Karol Attra, a "Godania" spy - and here's that weird name game again. Karol suggests Hungary, but Attra is a Muslim surname.

The story could be over there, but Yum tortures information out of Karol to find out who he works for. ZX-5 earlier said torture doesn't produce accurate information (which has been proven to be true), and he's right in this story too. Though a Mongolian named Sin Fu (also not a Mongolian name) worked under Karol Attra, Karol claims Sin was giving the orders. So the story continues, with ZX-5 kind of anti-climactically going after Sin Fu. ZX-5 sneaks through a window into Sin's house while soldiers distract him at the front door. Sin and ZX-5 shoot at each, but only Sin dies from his wound.

Quickly jumping into Wilton of the West, this story is (I think) the fifth appearance of The Crimson Rider, a female cowboy mysteryman (mysterywoman). The scenario is going to be investigating arson. Indians have been blamed for the arson, but The Crimson Rider is suspicious because she has seen no Indians in this area. The evidence seems pretty compelling, though - the Indians are tying up the owners and making them watch their homes burned down (an interesting new angle to this story). The Indians are caught in the act by Wilton and Wiley, Wilton's sidekick character. Wiley shoots a knife out of an Indian's hand and Wilton grapples an Indian. Their morale breaks and the Indians flee. But were they really Indians? Find out next time...

[Adminenkainen]

Most of the next page moves the plot forward, introducing a motive for the arsons in a plot to overthrow the local sheriff. When Wilton shows up and trains a gun on his suspects, he spots someone trying to get the drop on him (Wilton isn't actively looking for someone; the gunman simply fails to achieve surprise), and then does one of those cliched shoot-the-gun-out-of-his-hand tricks that has to be very easy game mechanically (and pretty much is, in 2nd ed). The actual evidence of wrongdoing doesn't come from Wilton at all; The Crimson Rider produces a suspect who has already confessed to being a disguised Indian arsonist, and Wilton's other sidekick, Snorty (wow, that nickname would mean something totally different in the 1980s...), comes bearing the corroborating physical evidence. Usually, in a H&H game session, the goal is to make the players' Heroes the stars of the story, but sometimes to make a story move to its conclusion, the supporting cast has to do more than its share.

Lastly, we're going to look in on Inspector Dayton and observe how he solves a case. He's looking for a missing person, last visited by "orientals." His half-pint supporting cast member, "Patch," comes to visit Dayton at work and Dayton asks an interesting question. Apparently in the last issue Patch helped Dayton by distracting bad guys with fireworks, and Dayton finally asks where he got his fireworks. "From Sung Sin," Patch says. Hmm...an oriental sells fireworks to an underage boy, orientals visit a missing man - they must be connected! And of course, this is a comic book, so they are. Sung Sin (Sung is a Korean surname, Sin is a Chinese surname) owns an antique store in town, and in his basement is a cell where he's holding the missing man, Anderson Case. Case accuses Sung Sin of running an opium ring, but here's the interesting twist to this story - Sung Sin is actually a vigilante, trying to take down the opium trade. He's capturing opium from the real trade, then boats it 12 miles out to sea and dumps it into the ocean. But his methods are illegal; indeed, he kidnaped and is starving Case to force him to sign a confession to his crimes (would that even hold up in court...?). Dayton has to make the moral choice of opposing Sung Sin, or quietly looking away from his methods, and actually chooses the latter. Dayton must be of Neutral Alignment?

Other interesting details: the Editor, playing Sung Sin, uses player knowledge to make Sung Sin seem extra mysterious (Sung Sin not only knows who Dayton is, but why he came). Sung Sin's gunmen get the drop on Dayton at one point, but instead of locking Dayton up, Sung Sin only asks for his word not to try to escape for 12 hours. I wonder how many players would abide by that..

The version I read was at comicbookplus.com/?dlid=17537