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"The Man Who Wanted the World": A mysterious man takes a ride in Doiby Dickles' taxi until a swank Park Avenue club. When he leaves the vehicle, he ask Doiby to wait for one hour. He identifies himself as "D. Dickles", what enrages Doiby. The man intimidates Doiby and comes out. Bandits assaults

Green Lantern #10 is an issue of the series Green Lantern (Volume 1) with a cover date of December, 1943.

Synopsis for "The Man Who Wanted the World"

A mysterious man takes a ride in Doiby Dickles' taxi until a swank[1] Park Avenue club. When he leaves the vehicle, he ask Doiby to wait for one hour. He identifies himself as "D. Dickles", what enrages Doiby. The man intimidates Doiby and comes out. Bandits assaults the taxi and Doiby fight them, then he flee in his cab. He looks for Green Lantern. When the duo leaves Alan Scott's apartment, the bandits are waiting for them in the entrance. Green Lantern easily defeats the thugs using his power ring to melt their guns and throw thrash cans in their heads.

Green Lantern and Doiby enter the Park Avenue club looking for the mysterious man. The man identifies himself as Vandal Savage and explains that everything was a plan to attract GL's attention. Vandal wants that GL locates a man named Alan Scott. In the next day, Alan Scott (Green Lantern's civil identity) visits the Wall Street offices of Savage; Savage begins to question him: - "Is it true that you have safe deposit box #13 in the Wheat Exchange Bank?" - "Yes. - "Anything of great value in it?" - "No... A few trinkets... a few shares of stock... That's all. Why?" Vandal explains that he want to buy the vault box (with everything inside) just because he is a superstitious man (the box allegedly would bring him "luck"). Alan refuses.

At night, Green Lantern and Doiby stalks the Wheat Exchange Bank, and fights bandits that had bribed the bank night watch in order to steal the vault box. Being scared by Doiby, one of the bandits drops a leather bag which contains nitroglycerin, causing a explosion that collapses the wooden ceiling on Green Lantern's head - wood, his mortal enemy! When the duo recovers their consciousness, the box #13 is gone. When Alan Scott returns to his apartment, the place is ransacked. The contents of the box (which, behind the scenes, was previously withdrawn by Alan) is missing.

The following morning, Alan and Doiby speed to Stock Exchange Building. Savage's henchmen try to hold them, but they are successive in overwhelm them in a fight. Savage comes and separates each group. Savage return the stolen stocks to Alan Scott, claiming that his men met the real thieves in the last night who stole the stock and he is very glad in return it (obviously, Savage is lying). Soon Alan Scott hears that Vandal Savage has become chairman of Consolidated Steel through becoming its main stockholder, which was what he needed the stocks from Alan's deposit box for. Scott and Dickles go undercover at the steel plant to see what Savage is up to, and find some of minions about to blow it up. The heroes bang some heads but when the villains dump a crucible out that threatens to engulf the heroic pair, GL's reluctant to unleash his ring in case he destroys machinery vital to the war effort.

It's Vandal Savage himself who shows up and saves them, but when he's ushering the heroes to a car he suddenly bops them unconscious with a wooden club, somehow knowing about the one weakness to Green Lantern's protective powers. When they regain consciousness, Savage reveals that's not the only thing he knows. Namely that Green Lantern is really Alan Scott, discovered through "the mere application of symbolic logic to the 6th degree". Since he knows the truth of Green Lantern's identity, Savage shares the truth of his own: he's actually over a million years old, a caveman given immortality by the emissions of a strange meteorite. He was a driving force in many great conquests throughout human history, and intends to make sure America loses the war so that a powerful dictatorship will exist that he can take part in. He planned for GL and Doiby to do everything they did, and leaves them threatening to expose the hero's true identity if they make a move against him. GL worries about standing up to Vandal Savage, truly their most formidable foe.

Things get even more worrying when a newsflash comes over Alan's desk that because of how he thwarted saboteurs at the Consolidated Steel plant, Vandal Savage has been named "war labor chief of the entire country"! Alan and Doiby travel post haste to Washington to stop Savage from being instated, and when they find themselves sharing a cab with the immortal warlord, he promises to destroy them for not heeding his warning. An assassin tries to kill Doiby, and it's then that GL figures out how to stop Savage: he stole Doiby's identity to get a job in the war industry, since as a man born a million years ago he wouldn't have legitimate birth records (despite Vandal Savage constantly going by his nom de guerre throughout the issue and not "Charles Dickles"). GL presents proof that his partner is the real Dickles before the committee about to swear Vandal Savage into his new position. When threatened with the revelation of his identity, Green Lantern's willing to sacrifice his crimefighting career if it means bringing down a terrorist whose spree spans human history. When Savage realizes he could literally spend millions of years in prison with all the atrocities GL could pin on him, he backs down and flees in a plane. The duo pursue Vandal Savage to his hideout inside a mountain, and when he pulls a tommy gun on them, Green Lantern uses his ring to drill through the floor under Savage's feet, seemingly sending Vandal Savage plummeting to his doom, and ending his millennia-long criminal career at last.

Appearing in "The Man Who Wanted the World"

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Synopsis for Hop Harrigan: "Tank Turns Trader"


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Synopsis for "Doiby Dickles' Dismal Discovery"

Some media moguls are worried about their "ace news commentator" (Alan Scott) demanding double his salary when his contract comes up for renewal shortly. One of them, Quean, convinces his fellows to head off this threat to their budget by offering a phony competitor for the position so the current man will stay on with no great increase to his fee. The "dupe" they pick is the unsophisticated cabbie they find hailing potential passengers outside the building, none other than Doiby Dickles himself. He's excited by the offer of stardom and all the lavish gifts they pour on him, but when Green Lantern charges through their office in pursuit of some thugs, Quean remonstrates Doiby for joining in the fight. He can't be a news announcer if he goes around getting into brawls with common criminals.

Green Lantern visits that night to collect his sidekick to help look into the matter of important radio parts being stolen and used to make illegal radio sets. Doiby turns the hero down with his new station in life not permitting beating up lowlifes anymore. Doiby has a dream where Green Lantern gets into trouble he can't escape from because he was betrayed by his loyal sidekick, which shakes Doiby's conviction. He goes to ask Quean what to do, and overhears that he's nothing but a patsy to Quean and his confederates. Some hoods come after Doiby to keep him from getting any ideas, but while driving past Alan's apartment, Doiby starts sending an SOS by blinking the tail lights of his cab. Realizing his friend's in trouble, Alan powers up his ring and speeds down. Quean turns out to have been the mastermind behind the radio apparatus smuggling ring, and with that troublemaker gone, Alan Scott's promoted to his position. For his valiant efforts in uncovering the plot, Alan suggests Doiby go on the air as the assistant to a ventriloquist act...that is, as the dummy.

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Notes

Trivia

  • This is the first appearance of Vandal Savage. Vandal will become one of the most prolific recurring villains in the DC Universe. He appears next in All-Star Comics #37.
    • Savage has been known to lie or exaggerate about his past. Here he claims to have been Cheops, Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan. While the latter two are possible, well-established Hawkman backstory shows that Savage was definitely not Cheops.
    • Vandal Savage claims to be 1 million years old, but this boast would be retconned later, to make him only 50,000 years old, thus native to the Paleolithic Age.
  • Beginning with this issue (?), wood is depicted as the only weakness of Green Lantern. Before that, any nonmetallic objects could hurt the hero, not only wood.
  • In this story, Green Lantern seems to live in Manhattan. In previous stories, his base of operations was Capitol City, while in later stories, it was Gotham City.


See Also

Recommended Reading

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Links and References

  1. The dated expression swank (referring to the Park Avenue club) means fashionably elegant. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/swank
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