#quality comics

As you can imagine, this makes googling anything basically impossible. Especially after the super hero themed slurpee cups the chain does off and on.

Can you tell me anything about him? I remember reading he left a calling card that was a mirror, but with bars painted on it so it looked like the viewer was in jail, but that’s all I can recall.

Folks let me tell you you are NOT prepared for how batshit this story STARTS. Like, I promise you. However insane or absurd you think things happened in the Golden Age. Or however dumb you think you've heard people's hair brained schemes. You aint seen NOTHIN' yet. I am about to tell you perhaps the WILDEST shaggy dog story in the entire superhero canon.

So take a seat and read on.

(An image from a STAGE PLAY made about this man. a CONTEMPORARY STATE PLAY)

Daniel Dyce was a successful lawyer in the city of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Known for taking on hopeless causes based mostly on his own personal sense of empathy. That's how he wound up making friends with recently convicted lifetime inmate at the newly built maximum security Westmoor Prison Jacob Horn.

Now, from the newspapers I was able to dig up, Horn was about as classical a scoundrel as you could get. Do you know how much grand larceny you have to do to get a LIFE SENTENCE without a SINGLE murder on your record? It's a lot! But Jacob Horn was also known as a rather charismatic man and so he convinced Dyce to take his case. A case that was lost pretty resoundingly because it was about Horn's 17th strike at that point but still Dyce did his best.

Horn then made Dyce an offer, because the two men coincidentally looked very similar. Horn asked Dyce to PRETEND TO BE HIM while Horn temporarily ESCAPED PRISON to be present at the birth of his son. Swearing that he would return and take his rightful place in jail.

DYCE AGREED TO THIS. HE AGREED TO TAKE THE PLACE OF A LIFETIME SERVER AT A MAXIMUM SECURITY PENITENTIARY. FOR A CRIME THE CRIMINAL *DID* COMMIT. BECAUSE HE FELT SORRY FOR HIM.

So Dyce sets this stupid, STUPID plan into motion using his lawyer privileges to change clothes with Horn while they were having a private discussion (SUPER illegal, btw, even if this had gone to PLAN it was still a BAD PLAN). And Horn rushes off to the hospital to see the birth of his son. And then, god almighty above or something curses Fort Wayne with the worst rainstorm it had seen in the 20th century to that point. So the ragged criminal on foot blunders out into the road with less than 0 visibility and gets creamed by a truck IN THE HOSPITAL PARKING LOT.

The body that looks like lawyer Daniel Dyce, wearing Daniel Dyce's clothes and carrying Daniel Dyce's ID is identified as Daniel Dyce. So now the REAL Dyce is stuck in maximum security lock up and decides to DIG A TUNNEL ALLOWING HIM TO ESCAPE AT ANY TIME. But instead of using that to say, clear his name, or escape, or ANYTHING. He decides to use this tunnel to become a mystery man about it! Foiling crimes in and around the prison while returning to his cell (#711, natch) for morning roll call.

He kept this up for TWO. YEARS. The only other mystery man he EVER interacted with was Uncle Sam up until the point where he caught a bullet in the prison yard. His name was only cleared because the prison obviously did a blood test on the freshly lain out corpse and that blew the latch open on this whole sordid tale. Which means that if he had found some way to make that happen TWO YEARS BEFORE he could have done LITERALLY anything else with his life.

Let it never be said that the mystery man generation was not ABSURD

Doll Man #47, October 1953. Reed Crandall (?) cover pencils & inks.

Doll Man

Today in 1941, Plastic Man debuted in Police Comics #1!