Doll Man versus a Box of Candy, Part 3

 When last we left Doll Man he was hesitant to attack a foe who was crippled.

The one-legged man, however, was un-hesistant to attack a foe who was six-inches tall and mentally divergent.

One-Leg is the same man who, upon first perceiving Doll Man as a threat, said "Seize the impetuous little insect!", so we already know he has the stuff of true villainy. Sure enough, he immediately crafts an ironic death for Doll Man with a snide comment that no one can hear.

Oh, yeah; that's the stuff. It's the gratuitous "little" that really does it.

While his two-legged cronies lie around, knocked unconscious by Doll Man, One-Leg just ties a rock to the box and throws it off a pier.

How deliciously dismissive; "Well, that was fun! Who's for Chinese?"

I bet he whistled as he walked away.

Of course, as Easily Escaped Deathtraps go, a wet cardboard box isn't particularly threatening to a six-inch man with the strength of a six-foot man.

Eye-witness Peter the Pufferfish wasn't able to convince Aquaman that this actually happened; "Look, Pete, I know you must have seen something, but, landsmen aren't that tiny and they simply don't come in chocolate boxes. I think you're spending too much time in San Francisco Bay."

Personally, I'd imagine re-enlarging oneself would be a pretty automatic reflex in getting to the surface faster.  Is Doll Man's chemically-altered brain able to resist such reflexes? Or maybe his full-size strength is able to propel his lightweight form to the surface with the speed of a bullet? In my experience, human beings are not designed to be propelled through the water at bullet-speed, so that would seem to be a problem in itself. For some reason, I have no trouble understanding The Atom, but The Doll Man leaves me continually perplexed.

Is Doll Man still buoyant at that size? Does it make a difference...?

So, now, Doll Man is TICKED.  

"Oh, no, you di-in't!

NOW we are going to see Doll Man dole out some vengeful butt-whippings!

So, is that suit perfectly dry or completely soaked? Show your work.

He's been holding back with these saboteurs, giving them warnings and love-taps and the chance to reconsider their actions, like he's the Wonder Woman of Escher City.  But NOW?! No more Mister Nice Doll.

"Hullo, Letterman General? I just wanted to make sure you have enough hospital beds for the passel of pummeled saboteurs I'm planning on sending your way!"

That's the wind up, and here's the pitch, HERE IT COMES!

... whut?

He... finally just calls the authorities?

"Caught by one tiny man trapped in a wet candy box at the bottom of the ocean, according to eyewitness Mr. P. Pufferfish of San Francisco Bay, now being treated at the Letterman General mental trauma ward."

"Mine yer own business, flatfoot, I'm admiring myself."

It... it WAS a cop. Several cops.  Doll Man just called the cops, who apprehended the saboteurs (and somehow convicted them with zero evidence of wrongdoing other than a wet candy box).  All Doll Man did was get his *** kicked by a cripple and thrown into the ocean and then took credit. 

Oh, well; that's our Doll Man!

Doll Man versus a Box of Candy, Part 2

When we last left Doll Man, he had surreptitiously ensconced himself inside the bomb that the saboteurs planned to use to destroy the S.S. Viceroy, for some unspecified reason.  Why destroy the Viceroy, rather than some other ship? Who knows; maybe it picked the wrong piece of candy?

Are ships that unguarded? If so, it's a wonder they don't blow up more frequently.

Once the saboteur, has planted the bomb, Doll Man simply gets out of it and throws in the drink, where it does nothing because I guess Doll Man deactivated it or bombs don't like water.

So Green Suit Saboteur has to return to the office of Mr. Gruber (who's going to be "sore as all get-out") to "face the music".

Just realize that any bugs that hit Doll Man's face while he's riding along jauntily on the car's front bumper would be the size of his head.

Turns out that music is super-Locrian and green-suit's lifespan is about to be seriously diminished.

Guess who's sore as all get-out NOW.

If what Gruber says is true and "you know the penalty" then Green Suit, who voluntarily went back to get killed, is too dumb to be a saboteur.  Or alive, for that matter.

How that dead body hasn't slid off that tilted stage into the orchestra pit, I have no idea.

The saboteurs are part of larger operation, which goes a long way to explaining Doll Man's Simple Plan (tm); he's trying to catch all of them, I guess. But there's really no sense given why Doll Man would know that.  The intelligence of someone who can create a shrinking potion is beyond my ken.  

As is the intelligence of someone who would actually drink it.

In order to foil the next scheme, Doll Main trails the remaining saboteur (Mr. Blue Suit) through the dizzying Escherian nightmare that is Doll Man's city.  Let's just call it Escher City, why don't we?

Is Doll Man following the saboteur
OR
is the saboteur following Doll Man?
YOU CAN'T DECIDE NOW, CAN YOU!?!?!

Then he clobbers the saboteur in a dark alley;

Since Doll Man is clearly striking FROM the brightly-lit street, the point of the dark alley escapes me.  Perhaps Doll Man is a chiaroscuro fan.

uses a callbox to direct the police to the saboteurs' office (which he could have done to begin with);

We know that Ray Palmer's voice as Atom sounds normal because comic book physics.  But chemically-shrunken Doll Man probably sounds like a mouse in a Disney film.

but then the chemicals hit his brain and Doll Man, having reached his quota of sanity for the day, takes the box of chocolates and decides to FLY IT TO THE WEST COAST.  

No, I don't know where the suit comes from either.

No, really.

Every super-criminal in '60s Gotham City covets that post office as a hideout.

So Doll Man FLIES the package out to the severely distorted post office in San Francisco (designed by an Escher City architect, it seems). Then, after the P.O. is closed, he HIDES HIMSELF IN THE CHOCOLATE BOX.

HOW DOES HE DO THIS?! It's unconceivable.
Also; imagine spending all night inside a box of candy.

The West Coast Attenders, under the leadership of Long John Silver, pick up the package and the tiny man it contains.

"WHO TH'?" amuses me more than it should.

Chaos ensues.

"Seize the presumptuous little insect!" would immediately qualify this guy for the Doll Man Rogues Gallery, if they'd bothered to give him a name.

Doll Man has little trouble dispatching the three stooges, but his hesitance to wallop a cripple is his undoing.

Famous last thoughts before getting your head squished by a crutch.

*SWAT*!!! The Golden Age really deserved more sound effectx.

What is to become of The Doll Man now...?!?!

Doll Man versus a Box of Candy, Part 1

Doll Man and his sidekick, Death, hide themselves in a box of candy!  This story has no proper title so we get to pick our own: I'm leaning toward "Bon Bon Voyage" or "A Box of Bomb Bombs!"

Maybe it's not Death.  Maybe (the) Doll Man is just throwing one of his 'flesh-optional' parties.

Doll Man's gal pal received an unsolicited parcel: a box of CHOCOLATES!

"It could be a BOMB! Let's stand way back here against the wall, just in case!"

If the mailman made a mistake, as Martha asserts below, the package must have the correct address on it, and it would be a simple matter to take it there or hand it back to the mailman the next day.  But Golden Age stories are not premised on simple matters.  And so...

Being the crazy person who drank an untested shrink formula that strains the brain, Doll Man starts EATING the chocolate, even though the chocolates belong to someone else AND could actually be BOMBS. You'd think he'd know that, living in a comic book as he does.

Actually, Martha, if you were he, you obviously WOULD eat it.

Of course, opening (and eating) a package not addressed to you is a federal crime, but that's not the kind of thing that stops a man who regularly finds any excuse to shrink to six inches and run around in his underwear and pick on people 1728 times his size.

Naturally because this is Doll Man,  the very piece of candy he so daintily begins to consume in multiple bites turns out to contain a sabotage plot.

"I'd better investigate!" 
Doll Man is kind of guy who says, "But I digress...!"

So, I ask you to think about how you safely and undetectably insert a sabotage plot inside a bon bon, which, unlike a fortune cookie, is full of messy goo.  Don't tell me; just think about it. THEN think about WHY you would do that; no pressure, since there is no answer.

As Gal Pal Martha steadies herself against the idiosyncratic perspective of the room, Doll Man ponders an uncharacteristically sane approach, from which she quickly dissuades him through the persuasive power of transquartomuralism.

One of the challenges of Doll Man stories is that you can never tell whether Doll Man is changing size or its just the idiosyncratic perspective.

Like any Golden Age hero, Doll Man is eager to horribly complicate the situation with a simple plan.

"You can start by helping me escape this Ames Room, which is causing the illusion that I'm 8-10 foot tall."

Doll Man's simple plan has Martha return the apparently unopened box of candy to the world's loneliest Post Office, which is the normal decent thing they should have done in the first place.

In Doll Man's city, forced perspective = foreshadowing.

I'm not really sure how the "Post Office" works, because, like you, I live in the future, where we use teleportation and 3D printing instead.  I guess the package has no return address, but the P.O. keeps records that say "Mr. Roberts, 555-1323; box of edible sabotage plans, contact if undeliverable"?  Sure, Golden Age, why not?

Oh, wait, did Mr. Roberts send the package or was he its intended recipient?  "I better investigate!"  

Here's where this simple plan gets complicated.  Mr. Roberts brings the candy back to a Mr. Gruber's office, which is, apparently, in the Ukiyo-e building for exporters of Japanese perspective, where everyone within must cling to furniture to keep from being hurtled off-panel by sudden shifts in viewpoint.

Has the yellow-suited man been poisoned with Doll Man's shrinking pill? Why is he standing on a banker's box?  Is the blue-suited man actually that much taller or is he a victim of forced perspective?  Why does he order everyone else to take a piece of candy but then winds up getting the sabotage piece himself? All the really good mysteries in Doll Man stories remain unexplored.

So,  it seems the box of candy isn't a means for conveying crime plans, so much as a means for deciding who does the crime. Suddenly the Octo-Alphabet Board and the Planetary Chance Machine don't seem so stupid, do they?

Yeah; no, they still do.

Next time you play a boardgame, don't roll to see who goes first. Wouldn't it be more exciting to pull out a Whitman's Sampler and say, "The first-player token is in ONE of these chocolates; start eating."

But I digress! As the yellow-suited man continues to shrink and the brown-suited man eats all the rest of the chocolate (because crime is a high-calorie undertaking), they discover the amazing figure of The Doll Man hidden in the box of candy (which I have to assume had some airholes punched in it).

I think the Square-Cube Law means that Doll Man only weights about 2 ounces so Adolf has a very finely calibrated sense of what chocolate boxes weigh.

And that's when the Doll Man–style whupping begins.

For a guy who stands on banker's boxes in order to come up to the shoulders of his colleagues, yellow-suit has a lot of stones to sass a guy who's lifting a table the relative size of a White Castle.

So, after they are all unconscious, Doll Man does the sensible thing and, having incapacitated the would-be saboteurs, calls the authorities.

LOL, you didn't fall for that, did you? This is the Golden Age; this is The Doll Man, whose brain is chemically unbalanced! Naturally, while he has the opportunity, he does the least sane thing and crawls INSIDE THEIR BOMB.

"Hm. A tiny man with super-strength jumped out of a box of chocolates and pummeled us senseless. But now he's gone so, I'm going to pretend there was an earthquake and just proceed as planned!"

After all, what could possibly go wrong...?

Disturbingly Parallel

I've never done psychotropic drugs, but I did watch a lot of Gumby as a child, which I suspect is a fairly similar experience.  

Oops; wrong picture; but close enough.

The similarities between the Martian Manhunter and Gumby -- both of whom debuted in 1955, by the way -- have been noted before, mostly famously in Justice League America #38 :

That was also the issue where Despero killed Steel and then killed Gypsy's parents and propped their bodies up in the living room for her to find. 
But no one remembers that part.

 

If you aren't familiar with Gumby, well, he's a green shapeshifter with red eyes who can phase through objects,  whose powers are pretty much limited only by his imagination, and whose adventures manage to be both mundane and surreal. Sound familiar?

Also not a big fan of fire.

Sometimes I've wondered whether Gumby could be a source for MM stories. Gumby's "foes" include:

the Blockheads (G & J), 

the Mocking Monkey, 

rampaging robots, 

an evil sentient glob of dough, 

and Dr. Zveegee, 

all of whom really sound like they'd fit right with foes of the Alien Atlas.   But it wasn't until today that I realized that both Gumby and MM had pet dachshunds:

That one's Gumby's.

You can tell there are no dogs on Mars. Or SPCA in Apex City.

But this is the real eye-opener for me:

Zook

Pokey

They both have orange, tag-a-long, semi-pointless, pet-cum-sidekicks.