Doll Man

Doll Man (Darrel Dane) is a fictional superhero from the Golden Age of Comics, originally published by Quality Comics and currently part of the DC Comics universe of characters. Doll Man was created by comics legend Will Eisner and first appeared in Feature Comics #27, the December, 1939 cover date of which makes Doll Man one of the earliest costumed comic book heroes.

Doll Man, "The World's Mightiest Mite," was really research chemist Darrel Dane, who invented a formula that enabled him to shrink to the height of six inches while retaining the full strength of his normal size. He was probably the first example of a shrinking superhero, and also one of the few that was unable to change to a height inbetween his minimum and maximum sizes (though artists would never keep his scale visually consistant). His first adventure was to save his fiancee, Martha Roberts, from a criminal attack; he subsequently decided to fight crime and adopted a red and blue costume sewn by Martha. Years later, somehow Martha's wish to be able to join him in his small size came true, and now possessing the same power as Doll Man, she became his partner as Doll Girl in Doll Man #37.

Doll Man was the lead feature of the anthology series Feature Comics through #139 (October, 1949), with Eisner writing the early stories under the pen name "William Erwin Maxwell", and art contributed first by Lou Fine, and later by Reed Crandall. Doll Man's own self-titled series ran from 1941 until 1953, for forty-seven issues. The covers of both titles frequently portrayed Doll Man tied in ropes or other bindings, in situations ranging from being tied crucifixion-style to a running sink faucet, to being hogtied to the trigger and barrel of a handgun. The persistence of this male bondage motif in Doll Man comics is unusual, as comic books have historically tended to portray women rather than men in positions of vulnerability and submission. After the cancellation of Doll Man, original stories involving the character were not published again for two decades.

After Quality Comics went out of business in 1956, DC acquired their superhero characters. Doll Man and several other former Quality properties were re-launched in Justice League of America #107 (October, 1973) as the Freedom Fighters. As was done with many other characters DC had acquired from other publishers or that were holdovers from Golden Age titles, the Freedom Fighters were located on a parallel world, one called "Earth-X" where Nazi Germany won World War II. The team were featured in their own series for fifteen issues (1976-1978), in which the team temporarily left Earth-X for "Earth-1" (where most DC titles were set). Doll Man was an occasional guest star of All-Star Squadron, a superhero team title that was set on "Earth-2", the locale for DC's WWII-era superheroes, at a time prior to when he and the other Freedom Fighters were supposed to have left for Earth-X. Doll Man then appeared with the rest of DC's entire cast of superheroes in Crisis on Infinite Earths, a story that was intended to eliminate the similarly confusing histories that had DC had attached to its characters by retroactively merging the various parallel worlds into one. This erased Doll Man's Earth-X days, and merged the character's All-Star Squadron and Freedom Fighter histories so that he was primarily a member of the Squadron, of which the Freedom Fighters were merely a splinter group.

Doll Man has subsequently been little used by DC, though a newer version of Doll Man and Doll Girl, about whom little has been revealed, briefly appeared in Teen Titans. DC has another unrelated character called Doll Man, a non-powered criminal who has encountered the current Batgirl.

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Dollman was also the name of a low-budget science fiction film that was released in 1991, with a comic book adaptation by Malibu Comics. The film was about a doll-sized alien in pursuit of a similarly-sized criminal.