Number 1987: “It’s that binkety blank little Doll Man again!”

I have shown a lot of Doll Man stories over the years, 17 by my count, including this one. There were several artists who worked on Doll Man over the years. I see the same challenges for any artist where the size of the character against the normal size of objects has to be consistent. The art on this particular early entry to the Doll Man series is by Reed Crandall, but how much of the art I don’t know. Some of the poses are obvious Crandall, some aren’t. I wonder if someone else inked him, and/or if other artists pitched in and helped with some of the pencils. Something I do know about Crandall is that many of his superhero poses ended up in the swipe files of other artists. He was just that good.

Doll Man, who is Darrel Dane when he is full-sized, has a girlfriend named Martha. Later on in the series Martha became Doll Girl, but in the early days she was a typical superhero girlfriend who couldn’t tell her everyday boyfriend was really super. (And he took pains not to include her in the secret.) In this entry Martha gets to kick some butt, and like many other girlfriends of heroes, gets tied up. Truthfully, I was so busy looking at each panel for Crandall poses I missed most of the story. It probably doesn’t matter that much, does it? The most surprising thing to me about the story itself is told in this spoiler alert. If I were you and didn’t want to know, I would skip the next paragraph and go right to the story.

[SPOILER ALERT]: At the end of this story Doll Man, in his miniature form, has to steer a car out of danger and tells the bad guys, "I have a driver's license!" I assume he got his driver’s license as Darrel Dane, rather than as his diminutive alter ego. He would have some explaining to do for any cop who pulled him over as Doll Man. But...wait. On page 7 we see that Doll Man can instantly become Darrel Dane, so when in peril while driving down a narrow mountain road, why not just transform to his larger self? Ah, there’s no dangerous fun in that![END SPOILER]

From Feature Comics #56 (1942):

Posted in: Pappy Comics