Episode 12: Doll Man: Tiny Hero, Big Stakes

Simon Carver

Welcome to the show, friends -- this is Distinguished Comics Radio, episode number 12, and it is January 10, 1941. I am Simon Carver, speaking to you from London for the first time, which still feels mighty peculiar, and back in the booth keeping the home fires and the microphone levels steady is Robert Reed.

Robert Reed

That's me, parked stateside and minding the fort at KDCR. Simon, pal, last time we did this show without you for the first time because you were somewhere out on the Atlantic, bobbing around between continents like a cork in Lake Michigan.

Simon Carver

Yes -- and I resent how accurate that sounds. What our listeners heard as one missing week was, for me, a full muddle of train platforms, steamship corridors, blackout curtains, and then London. My day job has me here covering the air war. And I should say -- because numbers matter -- when you live in a city that expects sirens after dark, every ordinary block suddenly looks provisional.

Robert Reed

Sirens after dark. That's the phrase right there. Folks, Simon's not kidding. The papers are full of it, and the radio even more. President Roosevelt just gave that Four Freedoms speech on January 6 -- freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. Four straight cards on the table. Black and white. I like that.

Simon Carver

Freedom from fear is the one that hangs in the air over here. You walk a London street and you feel how small a person is under a wide sky. Which is a curious bridge, I know, to today's comic -- but that is exactly what we are talking about: a hero reduced to inches, trying to matter in a dangerous world.

Robert Reed

And brother, what a doozy for our first trip outside the National and DC stable. First time on this program we're doing a Quality Comics feature. Quality's the outfit Everett M. "Busy" Arnold started back in 1937 in New York, and by 1939 they were pushing brand-new material in books like Smash Comics. They're one of the big outfits of this Golden Age boom, even if the name on the cover's sometimes a little slipperier than a greased wrench.

Simon Carver

Busy Arnold is a wonderful name for a comics publisher. It sounds less like a businessman than a man forever running to catch a train with a portfolio under his arm. And through that Quality line comes our subject: Doll Man, from Feature Comics, issues 27 through 39, though the feature itself starts a bit earlier with a 1939 cover date. Today we're really centering on 27 to 36, with number 36 as our close look.

Robert Reed

Before we even get to the stories, I gotta say it plain: Doll Man is not a great name. It sounds like a toy in a department store window. Or a ventriloquist act. "Step right up and see the mysterious Doll Man!" I keep expecting the fella to throw his voice.

Simon Carver

Yes! Or some poor master of ceremonies saying, "And now, the miraculous little gentleman in the tuxedo." Instead we get Darrell Dane -- lawyer, investigator, man of science by association -- who can shrink himself down to about six inches by secret formula and then go into action in trunks, boots, and cape.

Robert Reed

And no MASK. That's the part that burns my toast. Superman at least changes the outfit enough that everybody in Metropolis forgets how eyeballs work. Doll Man? It's Darrell Dane's same face, same hair, same jaw, just smaller. That's not a disguise. That's a bookkeeping error.

Simon Carver

Your objection is very Chicago and very fair. How does one preserve a secret identity by becoming oneself at a reduced scale? If anything, he becomes more distinctive. Yet there is something wonderfully shameless about it. The strip says, in effect, "Accept the premise and keep up."

Robert Reed

And I will accept it, because once the little guy starts socking crooks in the chin, it works. That's the funny part. In a world where everything feels bigger -- bombers, speeches, oceans, headlines -- here's a hero who gets smaller and somehow takes up MORE room on the page. That's a neat trick.

Simon Carver

That's our hook today. A tiny hero in a big bad world, from a publisher that's not National, drawn with far more elegance than a name like Doll Man really deserves.

Robert Reed

So let's get into the run. Broadly speaking, from Feature Comics 27 through 35, the formula is this: Darrell Dane gets word of some racket, murder, theft, or strange plot; he uses Professor Roberts' shrinking discovery; becomes Doll Man; and then turns the crooks' size advantage into a punch line. That's the engine.

Simon Carver

And the notable thing is how briskly it moves. These are not dawdling stories. By the first page you're usually at the office, or the laboratory, or the crime scene, and by page two somebody has already made the mistake of underestimating a six-inch man in a cape. The strip understands that its premise is already odd enough -- it needn't loaf.

Robert Reed

Issue 27, for instance -- and I'm grabbing that number because it's where our chunk starts -- gives you the whole pitch right away. Dane's tied into the Professor Roberts business, the secret formula's the key, and the trouble gets personal in a hurry. Then 28 and 29 start seasoning the stew: more gang business, more traps, more scenes where little size means sneaking through places a full-sized gumshoe couldn't touch.

Simon Carver

Issue 29 is where I really felt the strip relaxing into itself. Not because the premise changes -- it doesn't much -- but because the storytellers stop apologizing for it. There are sequences with movement through city spaces, through interiors, through the social world around crime, and you feel the creators deciding: this is not merely a shrinking novelty, this is a crime-adventure strip with a wonderful scale gimmick.

Robert Reed

Right, and they don't just lean on "small man punches ankle." Though you do get some of that, thank goodness. You also get disguise bits, sneaking bits, courtroom or respectable-office scenes, and those little cliffhangers at the bottoms of pages. Simple cliffhangers, sure -- a shot rings out, a trapdoor opens, a crook spots him, a machine starts up -- but simple like a good left jab. They keep the pages humming.

Simon Carver

Let me try to explain back what I think makes it work. It's not sophistication in plot, exactly. It's variation in scale. One page Darrell is talking in a room with ordinary men, the next he is dodging through floorboards or crawling behind furniture, the next he's crashing a social scene or interrupting a criminal conference. So the same premise keeps changing shape.

Robert Reed

That's it. Variation in scale -- good phrase. And the art sells it. The page design in these issues is sturdy. Clean rectangles most of the time, sometimes a diagonal panel when they wanna goose the motion, but never a mess. You always know where the eye goes next. Some comics right now, no names, read like somebody dropped a typewriter into an ink bottle. Not this one.

Simon Carver

No, and I particularly like that the strip often trusts the drawing. There's text, certainly, as there always is in these books, but not that dreadful habit some features have where the caption repeats exactly what your eyes can already see. If a man is leaping through a window, I do not require a box telling me "Our hero leaps through the window!" Doll Man is frequently better behaved than that.

Robert Reed

Amen. If the picture shows a train, don't hand me a note saying it's a train. That's like a waiter telling you the soup is wet. Around 30 through 35, the strip gets more confident about that. The action reads clear. The crooks are broad but understandable. Darrell's girl, Martha, and Professor Roberts help keep it from becoming twelve pages of a tiny bachelor shadowboxing gangsters.

Simon Carver

Martha matters more than she first appears to. Her presence gives Darrell a normal-sized emotional world to return to. Otherwise he'd risk becoming a laboratory trick in tights. And Professor Roberts, by being the scientific hinge of the whole business, keeps the magic pseudo-rational. We are told this is formula, discovery, experiment -- not pure fantasy.

Robert Reed

And here's another little thing I like: sometimes the stories put him in respectable spaces. Museums, offices, homes, court-adjacent rooms, fancy crooks, not just dockside mugs every time. That helps. Makes the strip feel like crime adventure rather than circus attraction. Then when he DOES have to crawl through a pipe or ride a car axle or duck a hand the size of a ham, it lands better.

Simon Carver

Issue 31 and after, especially, begin to feel like the premise is clicking into place. You get the sense of a machine well-oiled: setup, reduction, infiltration, absurd but precise combat, then a last-page turn. And through it all, the reading experience is remarkably unconfused. For a comic about altered size, clarity is the triumph.

Robert Reed

Clarity is the triumph -- write that on the wall. Because if I can't tell where the little fella is in relation to the lamp, the pistol, the window sill, the chair leg, the whole strip falls apart like a two-dollar bike chain.

Simon Carver

All right, number 36. September on the cover, ten cents, and to my eye this is where the feature looks especially sharp. The cover already gives you the promise: Doll Man springing from a train car while a full-sized man tumbles outward, key in hand. That is the entire sales pitch in one image -- scale, motion, clarity.

Robert Reed

That's a peach of a cover. And inside, the first page gets right down to brass tacks. Dead bodies, air ducts, a police puzzle, Darrell Dane brought in because Professor Roberts knows the unseen murderer may force Darrell to unmask himself as Doll Man. That's stakes on page one, see? Not just "a robbery occurred." It's bodies and a secret identity on the line.

Simon Carver

And then the layouts. This is the thing. The page rhythm is unusually good. You get a strong opening panel, then narrow slices, then diagonals used not as decoration but as propulsion. When Kreeper -- the villain of the piece -- slips through a secret panel or leads them through tunnels and laboratory passages, the page seems to tilt with him. Not literally every panel, but just enough that your eye feels hustled forward.

Robert Reed

Kreeper. That's a good crook name. I won't forget Kreeper. And the reactor moment for me is that air-bomb panel -- the one where Darrell dashes to the huge electric air bomb. Huge ELECTRIC air bomb! You can read the whole geography of the room in one gulp: the machine, the prisoner in the round inset, the route he has to take. That's cartooning, pal.

Simon Carver

Exactly. "Huge electric air bomb" is a phrase only a comic could say with a straight face, and the art earns it. The staging keeps the absurdity buoyant instead of ridiculous. Then there's the marvelous sequence with the whirling fan and the oil man near its blades -- Doll Man being drawn perilously close, climbing over mechanisms, dropping through pipes, then surfacing elsewhere. Every beat is spatially intelligible.

Robert Reed

That fan sequence is the sort of thing that'd turn to mush in weaker hands. Here, I know where the blades are, where Doll Man is, what the risk is. Same with the tank of filter water -- he gets dunked, and you don't need three captions and a road map. The pictures do the heavy lifting like a good union crew.

Simon Carver

And after that, the issue keeps changing tempo. One moment it's sneaking through vents and secret panels. Next it's a direct encounter: Kreeper sees him, tries to bargain, tries to use science and stolen brains -- a delightfully lurid phrase, stolen brains -- and then matters collapse into pursuit, ax blows, a blast, smoke, mountain passages, fire. It is breathless in exactly the right way.

Robert Reed

Stolen BRAINS. See, that's the bit I'm taking home. You tell me "stolen brains" and "Kreeper" in one issue and I'm awake already. But here's what I admire: even when the comic goes hog-wild, it doesn't get word-drunk. Some strips would pour captions over every panel like gravy on mashed potatoes. This one says, "Look at the action." It trusts you.

Simon Carver

That's the confidence I wanted to underline. Visual confidence. The absence of heavy captioning means the pacing belongs to the panels. A door swings open, a hand lunges, a figure vanishes into grating, a room erupts in smoke -- and because nobody is redundantly narrating what I can see, it feels faster. More cinematic, if I may use a somewhat new-fashioned term.

Robert Reed

Cinematic in 1941, huh? Mister Murrow's hallway is rubbing off on you. But I know what you mean. It cuts clean. Like film spliced right. Also, number 36 balances suspense with comedy. Not joke-comedy exactly, but that built-in absurdity where a giant thug reaches for the tiny hero and gets beaned in the knuckles, or can't quite process what he's looking at. The strip never forgets that being small is funny AND dangerous.

Simon Carver

And that double feeling -- funny and dangerous -- is the secret of the feature. If Doll Man were only comic, he'd be a novelty act. If he were only grim, the premise would become self-serious and brittle. Number 36 threads that needle. There is menace, there are bodies, there is treachery, but also the sheer oddity of a six-inch man turning a deathtrap into a climbing frame.

Robert Reed

By the time you hit the last stretch -- fires, escapes, the rescue, the return to normal clothes -- you've had a whole meal. And again, because the story doesn't stop to explain the drawing back to you, it feels modern. That's maybe the wildest compliment I can pay it.

Simon Carver

Modern is exactly the word that kept occurring to me. Not modern in ideas, perhaps, but in the discipline of the pictures.

Robert Reed

So who do we tip our cap to? First up, Will Eisner. Born in Brooklyn in 1917, came up poor, got his art legs at DeWitt Clinton High School and then a year at the Art Students League, and by the mid-1930s he's already in the comics racket. Bob Kane nudged him toward selling cartoons to Wow, What A Magazine!, and before long he's partnered with Jerry Iger in the Eisner & Iger shop.

Simon Carver

That shop is the key piece. Eisner & Iger was one of those early comic-book packagers -- almost like a factory crossed with a studio -- supplying complete material to publishers who needed pages fast. Quality used them. Fox used them. Fiction House used them. Eisner later said that in 1939 he and Iger split $25,000 between them, which is a staggering figure to hear attached to boys this young.

Robert Reed

Twenty-five THOUSAND in 1939. I'm never going to forget that number. That's not soda-fountain money. That's "I got rich before 22," as Eisner himself liked to brag. And one reason he could do that is because he knew talent when it walked in the door.

Simon Carver

Which brings us to Lou Fine. Born in New York City in 1914, from a Jewish family, trained seriously -- Grand Central Art School, Pratt Institute -- and came into Eisner & Iger in 1938. Fine has suffered polio in his left leg, but on the drawing board he is astonishingly assured. Eisner later called him "the epitome of the honest draftsman," which is such a revealing compliment. Honest. Direct. No fakery.

Robert Reed

Honest draftsmanship. That's a bull's-eye. Fine's the visual touchstone here. He works all over Quality -- Black Condor, The Ray, Doll Man -- and folks in the business rave about him. Joe Simon calls him his favorite artist, and said Jack Kirby loves him too. When other greats point at one guy, you pay attention.

Simon Carver

And Quality gave that sort of art a handsome home. Founded by Busy Arnold in 1937, tied to syndicates early, then shifting toward more original material -- Smash Comics number 1 in August 1939 is the landmark there. The line becomes known for books that simply look better than much of the field, an atmosphere of polished Golden Age adventure.

Robert Reed

Which helps explain Doll Man. The gimmick gets him in the door, sure. Tiny man! Big crooks! But the reason we remember him -- or oughta -- is not the gimmick alone. It's that the pages are composed so well you believe the gimmick had to happen in comics. This hero makes sense as drawings. You can stage him under a chair, on a telephone, in a train car, under a whale's jaw --

Simon Carver

[interrupts, amused] Under a whale's jaw is from the later stretch, yes -- 37 to 39 -- and I'm glad you mentioned it because those issues continue the lesson. After our deep dive issue, the feature doesn't collapse. It broadens. Number 37 sends him into an early American or Puritan-flavored adventure, while 38 and 39 carry on with more visual bravado, odd settings, and vigorous action. The run keeps proving it has legs.

Robert Reed

And that means we're not just praising one hot hand in number 36. We're talking about a feature that found its stride. So here's the question, Simon: is Doll Man memorable because he's six inches high, or because Eisner's shop, Quality's system, and Lou Fine's kind of draftsmanship make six inches feel like the EXACT right size for a hero?

Simon Carver

I think it's the second one. Plenty of comics can offer a pitch. Only some can make the pitch feel inevitable. Doll Man, at his best, reads as though the page itself wanted a tiny hero moving through a giant world. That's not mere novelty. That's form meeting idea.

Robert Reed

That's your New York library-award side talking, but doggone it, you're right. All right, folks, next week's reading assignment is our standard broadcast again: Batman 1940, part 1. Send your letters, complaints, arguments about masks, or theories on tiny secret identities to distinguishedcomicsradio@gmail.com.

Simon Carver

From London, where the blackout curtains are drawn and the comic books are still bright in the mind, I'm Simon Carver.

Robert Reed

And from the home booth, I'm Robert Reed. This has been Distinguished Comics Radio on KDCR -- keep your courage up, keep your eyes on the funny pages, and we'll meet you next week.