You remember Doll Man? The lunatic chemist-crimefighter whose size-changing chemical affects his brain and lives in Escher City, with its idiosyncratic perspective and avant-garde decorating style? Who we've seen fight a diamond-thirsty hunchback, a box of chocolates, and the U.S. military?
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| It's easy to blame Escher City, but in fact, as that train shows, the idiosyncratic overly dramatic perspective is just something that follows Doll Man around. No doubt it is visually evocative of his perspective as a tiny person (or as a lunatic). |
Today we join chemist Darrell ("Doll Man") Dane in medias res, as he motors at full speed with his colleague (and father of his Gal Pal Martha) Dr. Roberts to recover a dangerous formula stolen from Roberts by foreign agents who are now on an escaping locomotive, in hopes of neutralizing the formula into becoming a valuable antitoxin using the fictional chemical "hypersulmide",
Got all that?
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| If not, here it all is again. |
Boy, I love the Golden Age, but sometimes trying to take in the ultra-condensed exposition and plotting is like chugging a thermos of double espresso.
Dane casually turns over the wheel of this car, doing 80, to an elderly man in the passenger's seat, while jumping for a moving locomotive.
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| Because Doll Man is insane. |
How does Dane turn into Doll Man, you wonder? Originally, it was a gas. Then it was a pill. By this point, for narrative convenience and through power internalization, it is apparently through sheer force of will.
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| Even The Atom uses a size-changing belt (controlled through his gloves). Doll Man does not have the time or patience (or sanity) for such things. |
Some credit here; the shift into Doll Man mode, through inexplicable, is not gratuitous. A locomotive offers too little purchase for an ordinary man trying to climb aboard, but there's plenty of room for Doll Man.
Doll Man tries to handle the hot rod of the rainbow train.
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| I bet he says that to all the trains. |
I apologize. It's tacky of me to impose gay interpretations on innocent Golden Age panels!
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| But these panels don't count, 'cuz that's just SMUT talk there. |
Phew! Glad that bit of homoeroticism is over!
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| For us, if not the engineer. |
Doll Man brakes the train:
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| Hot: the little guy calling the big guy "boss". |
For some stupid reason, he crawls through the coal car.
Oh. Here's the stupid reason:
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| For a blackface joke. Stay classy, Doll Man. |
Sigh. I'll forgive a lot of a guy whose hands are as big as his face, but a line must be drawn somewhere.
Fortunately, Doll Man's Al Jolson phase lasts only one panel.
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| Where does that suit come from? The Dane-osphere, I suppose. |
Can Darrell recover from this embarrassing incident enough to regain the stolen formula? Tune in tomorrow (unless you choose to boycott Doll Man, of course).
10 comments:
The Golden Age, where even Speed Saunders-like rapidfire storytelling takes a break for a few panels of racism for the sake of racism.
- HJF1
Dr. Roberts is clearly possessed of superlative driving skills and is capable of taking a roadster airborne while speeding down a narrow road bordered by a raised railroad track and huge boulders. That's practically Fast & Furious material. Well, I assume so having never actually watched one of the installments of that franchise.
Dr. Roberts is a badass. Given his scientific expertise and his appearance, I suspect he may be related to philanthropist/aviator/surgeon Sonny Blandish.
I never say this except for, like, Fort Thunder adjacent comics but I realllly like the coloring here.
“Coal Porter.”
"I realllly like the coloring here." There's certainly a LOT of it for you. Also, for nubilophiles, there are SO MANY CLOUDS. The artist really likes clouds.
Off topic, I apologize, but I got to thinking about what makes for a good arch-nemesis. I say a good arch-nemesis has three traits:
1) Their abilities make it difficult for the hero to counter them, usually because the thing they do is of a different nature than the hero's.
2) They are thematically in opposition to the hero: if the hero stands for something, the arch-nemesis should stand for something that runs counter.
3) They have a vision that, if fulfilled, would make things very bad.
Lex Luthor checks all these boxes: tech and businesses and schemes are tough to punch; he's all about greed and cynicism; his vision is a world that is more technologically advanced but with very little room for humanity.
The Joker likewise checks boxes: his madness is tough for a detective to process; he is all about random unpreventable sorrow; and his vision is a Gotham where insanity prevails and nobody is safe.
The Reverse Flash (Eobard Thawne) checks NONE of these boxes: his powers are the same as Barry's; he's just a jerk who hates the Flash; his vision is replacing the Flash.
Sinestro's even worse: same powers as Hal; he is a thematic null; he wants to control stuff and maybe hatefuck Hal.
Checkbox #2 makes things interesting, because if you don't know what your hero stands for - if you don't have a feel as to why it matters to them to put on a unitard - you can't build a nemesis. Like, I don't have a feel for Barry Allen, so I don't know what matters to him. Maybe someone else does, but I don't. With that in mind, I can't even begin to sketch out an appropriate arch-nemesis.
- HJF1
Speaking of coloring, why is Doll Man emerging from the coal naked? His blue onesie seems to have vanished in the coal. I assume he had to return to his Darrel Dane identity because that makes a suit magically appear?
The colorist spends a LOT of time on the clouds and much less on maintaining Dane's costume continuity.
I haven’t read very many Doll Man stories. But there’s one that’s re-printed in a 100-Page Super-Spectacular that is so zany that I immediately became a Doll Man aficionado. It’s how he got his dog!
I think it’s a Great Dane. It’s a stray, and some tough guys are taking about using it for target practice. Darrell overhears them and beats them up and saves the dog.
But the dog is in bad shape, so he experiments on it, hoping it will survive. He revitalizes the dog and starts riding around on it when he fights crime.
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