The Dress Suit, Part 2

Let's see how Doll Man tackles the nightmare that is... The Dress Suit!

I find it vaguely interesting that everyone in this story immediately assumes the Dress Suit is an empty but animated suit, rather than, say, a nattily dressed Invisible Man.  I guess the concept of an Invisible Man is too far-fetched for a man who compress his own molecules by force at will.

"I'd better look sharp!'  Let's see how that goes:

CLOMP!

Yeah, you're in a blue unitard, Darrel; there's no way you can "look sharp" in comparison to a LITERAL DRESS SUIT.

See? I told you it was a horse in there.

Darrel Dane consistently forgets he could utilize his amazing power of being a six-foot tall man; well, he's committed to the bit, and so wallops the Dress Suit right in its lack-of-chest.

I just assume that's some sort of curtain tassel rather than a green witch's broom.

Then the Dress Suit reminds us why being doll-sized isn't the best possible defense.

The whole apartment is going to have little Dane-shaped indents all OVER the place.

Meanwhile, somebody DOES notice that Darrel never called the police and just how shady that is.

Dr. Roberts is an accomplished enabler.

I appreciate Martha's healthy skepticism of her boyfriend, which is refreshing for a Golden Age girlfriend. 

She's proactive, too. In a braver comic, SHE would be the main character.

Well, I guess WOMEN are good for calling the police, while a real MAN like Darrel Dane has surely already recovered and is hot on The Dress Suit's clompy trail.

Or perhaps he's lying as a crumpled heap of tiny broken bones near the desk the Dress Suit slapped him to.

"There not much the police can do", Darrel?  Other than save your stupid life.  Upon a moment of reflection, I am really impressed by the Dress Suit.  Most Doll Man villains just go "A Tiny man?! What even IS this?!" and get their asses handed to them by a wisecracking action figure.  But The Dress Suit didn't even waste time LAUGHING at Doll Man, it just kicked and smacked him around like, well, a DOLL. From the effects of which pummeling, the police try to revive Doll Man...

Imagine being badly concussed while someone is trying to give you a drink from a water bucket larger than your head.  It's not Darrel's finest hour.

Once awakened, Doll Man tells the police, "It was a headless ghost, who was really strong, and I have no intention of getting involved again."

Our hero.

I don't know who this detective is, but he is now my favorite Doll Man character.

"Hm? Dress suit? Weird. Any way, here's an ACTUAL CLUE."

Doll Man puts on his anti-reading glasses and reads the giant headline.

I can just hear the writer's pitch: 
"So, imagine Nikola Tesla as a ghost criminal."

The police make it clear to Doll Man exactly what they can do.

"Am I going too FAST for you, Doll Man?"

All this may be too fast for research chemist Darrel Dane, but it's red meat to Adult Jimmy Olsen, who appears as if by magic.

How is the newshound there so fast?  Was he eavesdropping in the hall?  Even Johnny Quick didn't get to breaking news this quickly.

"This is my chance to duck out!" Our hero.

I should just accept this Insta-Reporter at face value as a device to hurry the plot along, but I am still hung up on the sequence of events.  The only sensible sequence I can piece together is: 

• Martha sees murder;
• Martha runs home and reports such to her father and boyfriend;
• the boyfriend (Darrel "Doll Man" Dane) says he will call the police but doesn't and instead goes Dollmanning at the scene of the crime and gets his tiny patootie whooped by an empty dress suit;
• while Doll Man is laying in an unconscious heap of pain, Martha (wisely doubting that Darrel called the police) calls the police herself;
• the police come, find the corpse of the victim and the unconscious heap of Doll Man, whom they revive with the relative equivalent of a bathtub of drinking water;
• the police detective determines the suspect and motivation by simply reading the paper before Doll Man is even on his feet;
• this murder, um, goes on The Teletype--somehow? Which Reporterman reads and immediately shows up?

If this is correct, then The Teletype -- however THAT worked -- must have been faster and more efficient than the internet.

"How was I to know that being six inches tall and without police backup would wind up being a liability?"

Martha (love her) has no patience with Darrel's folderol and tries to angle herself a transactional favor in exchange for not reporting Darrel to the police for obstructing justice. But it turns out Darrel is ALREADY headed to prison...!

"Quiet, you two! RADIO BEMBA is on The Teletype!"

Martha may not be curious, but I am DYING to know what Flimsy Excuse (tm) Darrel was going to gin up for his trip to the State Penitentiary, which he really didn't have to mention to her at all.

Yeah. If a six-inch chemist couldn't stop the Dress Suit, what could a platoon of armed, uniformed, trained law-enforcements offices hope to accomplish?

How do you think Doll Man knew where Mr. Tate lived? The Teletype?

I wonder what Doll Man's plan is? Will he take Mr. Tate into his confidence so at to protect him better?

I...
well, I'm just not to say ANYTHING.

Aren't many heroes who do stake-out by hiding under the target's pillow. Let's see how that goes tomorrow.

The Dress Suit, Part 1

By request of Absorbascommenter Tad, we present, "Doll Man Versus The Dress Suit" (Doll Man Quarterly No. 9, Summer 1946).

I think the original story idea was Versus the Gingerbread Man, but the Pastry Lobby stepped in.

Uncanny though it may be, the Dress Suit cannot distract me from the fact that the potential victim is apparently sleeping upside down in his bed.

It begins with Doll Man's squeeze, Martha Roberts, walking home with a freshly baked chocolate cake on her head.  It was part of the agreement with the Pastry Lobby.

It easy to make fun of "The Dress Suit" but, this is honestly a terrifying sequence and a great example of the Golden Age mastery of staging and style.

That's pure horror movie right there.

Words (and backgrounds) are not always needed (or desired).

Fortunately (?), Doris's house is really close to this horrific murder scene.

Just a block away means even a six-inch may can get there pretty quickly.

Again; this is art, people.

"No, I haven't called the police yet, dad, you dumb-ass; you scientists haven't invented cell phones yet and it was ONE BLOCK AWAY."

Typically, Doll Man craves action more than justice, so he lies about calling the police about a murder. Do Martha and Dr. Roberts ever notice that Darrel didn't call the police? Do the police ever show up?  Whatever! It's DOLL MAN TIME.

Doll Man Fact: In the process of shrinking to his six-inch size, Doll Man must first travel to Saturn!

I must pause to appreciate the typewriter-ish font that Doll Man stories use for captions.  It really helps ground a world in which a man compresses his own molecules simply through the power of will.

Sure, Darrel. Whatever lets you sleep at night.

"Who needs the police? What can THEY do that a six-inch tall research chemist can't?"  Never change, Doll Man.  

Let's just skip over the hour that it takes Doll Man to climb those steps, shall we?

Doll Man's on the spot, so that a MAN can confirm The Hysterical Woman's wild assertion that a man down the block was just stabbed to death.

Thanks, Dr. McCoy.

If there is any advantage to being only six-inches tall, I should think it would be stealth, but Doll Man botches that almost immediately because HINGES.

Remember that "CLOMP! CLOMP!" for a bit.

Consider just how oblivious Doll Man must be for the following sequence to be possible.

I guess when you are only six-inches tall, anything larger tends to fade into the background.

How does an empty dress suit go CLOMP CLOMP? Is there a horse inside it?

Oh, yeah, that is pretty terrifying.  Although I am surprised that, at his size, Doll Man can even NOTICE that he doesn't have a head.  Let's see how Doll Man deals with the situation tomorrow....

Swords!

 The Sword of the Atom (Ray Palmer) versus the Sword of Atlantis (Aquaman).

Sometimes, the Sims is VERY satisfying.

"The Flash Is Born" killed the Flash

Having recently gained access to all the episodes of CW's Flash series, I decided to watch them to see just Where It Went Wrong.

The series was amazing is so many ways, I think we would all agree.  But it also shot itself in the foot many times. Many have opined on Where It Went Wrong, but I wanted to nail down my own opinion.  

It didn't take long.

It was Episode Six, which I had almost completely forgotten.

[Even before that, the choice of Multiplex as the villain of the week for the SECOND episode was definitely... non-ideal. But a villain with improbable powers does not immediately break a show whose premise is "believing in the impossible". Besides, it was overshadowed by Harrison Wells at his funniest ("... I eat.") and scariest (unexpectedly getting out of his wheelchair and stabbing Simon Stagg).]

In Episode Six, titled "The Flash Is Born", the villain of the week was Tony "Girder" Woodward, who had been a childhood bully of Barry's. Empowered during the particle accelerator event to turn himself into solid metal, Girder beats the crap out of the Flash a time or two and starts hitting on Iris (um, metaphorically). Barry fusses about being unable to defeat his now superpowered bully and the S.T.A.R. team determines that do so Barry must Run Faster Than Ever and hit Girder with a very precise punch.

Barry, eventually, does just that and Girder is imprisoned in the "Pipeline" at S.T.A.R Labs, newly renovated to contain supervillains, whereupon Barry unmasks and reveals to his bully that it was his childhood victim who defeated him.

The elements that are the downfall of the show are present only six episodes in. Sure there were other problems with the show (the proliferation of heroes, many more powerful that Flash; the intrinsic childishness and ickiness of his infatuation with Iris; the overuse of Evil Speedsters; the writers writing to keep the existing cast on the show, rather than let the direction of the storylines determine the casting).  But those aren't what doomed the show; These are.

Overpersonalization of Everything. In this episode,  that means a villain with a personal connection to the hero, which is a Marvel trope. We are interested in seeing the Flash do cool stuff and have to creatively defeat villains, not in seeing Barry wrestle with personal demons.  But it WAS a CW show and, although the Flash showrunner should be commended for never being embarrassed about it being a comic book show, they MIGHT have been better off being a bit MORE embarrassed about it being a CW show.

Barry overcomes self-doubt, again and again and again. Everyone who watched the show noticed and got tired of this pattern and this is the episode where it actually BECAME a pattern (after his crisis of confidence nearly stopped him from defeating freakin' MULTIPLEX).  Over on Arrow, Oliver Queen leads his team (even if it's often rough going); on the Flash, Barry Allen is always the one being lead by others.

Barry and his Team use his powers exotically (and stupidly) rather than simply. It is maddening to watch the writers have them insist that Barry MUST PERSONALLY PUNCH Girder (which MIGHT wind up atomizing Barry).  Geez, Barry; learn to THROW A ROCK.  Or just hit him with a BASEBALL BAT.  Such things are harder than your fist and you won't atomize yourself if they don't do the job.  

Is Jay really THAT much smarter than Barry?

Jay Garrick knew he wasn't confined to close combat attacks. And he BRANDED accordingly.

Barry, supposedly a scientist, is wildly emotional and has zero control over his emotions and make no attempt to keep them from determining his actions.  And, oddly, for someone so riddled with self-doubt, Barry NEVER questions whether his feelings are an appropriate guideline for action.  

I assume the writers intended for our hearts to swell with sympathetic joy and pride when Barry reveals his identity to Girder.  But any comic book reader naturally just shook their head; you don't EXPOSE your secret identity to a VILLAIN simply out of PRIDE.  Anyone who's ever read a Golden Age Batman story knows the inevitable fate of a bad guy who learns a secret identity: the bad guy gets killed, almost immediately. Sure enough, exactly that happens to Girder in the next episode.  This is where the writers started painting themselves in corners that made the plots predictable.

The Not So Secret Message of The Joker's Outfit

Okay, a YouTube video, professing to explain the history of all the Joker's costumes, made me mad enough to write this post.  Why am I continually surprised at the shoddy scholarship on YouTube?!  Why do I keep imagining that I will learn something by clicking on these videos?

BAH! FOOLS!

In this case I never got past 01:10, where the video describes the Joker's original costume as "straight out of film noir gangster films".

This, for those of you who are not familiar with sartorial history, is incorrect.

"Gangsters" did not wear TAILCOATS.  Nor flat-topped hats, nor vests, nor wing collars, nor string ties. These are elements of clothing from 40 to 50 years earlier than the "Gangster Era".

Nor dress gloves.

I get it. When you are a child every four-legged animal is "doggy" for a while, until you learn more terms and details to distinguish among quadrupeds.  So, too, if you are a contemporary unstudied person, you lump together decades worth of clothing styles in a big box labelled "OLD".

I am more empathetic than I sound. My husband is a costume designer (his work above), and compared to HIM, what I know about clothing can't fill a thimble.

So I will explain to you what the Joker's original outfit is meant to evoke (which would have been MUCH clearer to people in 1939). In short, the Joker is outfitted AS A CARDPLAYER.

Are you familiar with the Gambler, from the Injustice Society?
Does his outfit look familiar?

The hat that the Joker wears? It's not a "fedora"; it's literally CALLED a "Gambler's Hat".

Its top is FLAT and low, unlike a fedora or trilby.

The string tie? Its common name is a "Kentucky tie", and it's associated with Southern cardplayers (and those who drifted to the Wild West with their style intact).

Such as this guy in this Western film.

And WHY is the Joker dressed this way? It's obvious: he's coded as a CARD PLAYER. 

John Carradine ("Stagecoach"1939) would have made an interesting Joker.

And a sneaky one, not a good honest cowboy type, but a sneaky, sneering, aristocratic SOUTHERN one.

The first image of the Joker is from the splash page of his first story shows him...
dealing a hand of cards.

The time we see the Joker smile is when he self-identifies as a cheating card player.

The pinstriped pants and spats...

Or the "stirrup" pants, another old-school element 

...are also part of the look. Everything about the Joker's outfit says "shady gambler."

There are some echos of the Wild West UNDERTAKER, but the hat, the color of the suit, and pants and spats undercut that association severely, leaving "gambler" the only on-target association.

Thanks to period films and closer proximity to the era, the Southern/Western Gambler was a more familiar trope when the character of the Joker was introduced. This type of clothing (particularly in a usually "villainous" color) was really all the Joker needed to be thematically costumed.  

With due deference to the artists of the Bronze Age, a lot is lost by outfitting the Joker in contemporary styles and there is a reason these looks don't stick (despite their effective color scheme).