Can we all agree that in the pantheon of super-powers, super-shrinkage is the absolute worst?

More useless than the ability to control a skateboard with your mind. (R.I.P., X-Statix’s El Guapo.)

Lousier than the ability to spew slugs. (Hello, X-Men’s Maggott.)

Super-powers, intrinsic to their nature, are supposed to give you an edge in the unending battle of good vs. evil.

Super-shrinkage makes you susceptible to perils the average person takes for granted: the family cat, an open grate, a stray spider.

Then there’s the not-so-small matter of getting around. When you are teeny, a walk across the room can seem like crossing the Atlantic.

Why would anyone choose to be super-small? How can anyone be effective as a crime-fighter?

It might be the greatest fantasy in comics, even greater than the idea that the Legion’s Duo Damsel would have to settle for Bouncing Boy.

Yet it remains popular.

Before Ant-Man, before the Atom, there was … the Doll Man!

Introduced in Quality Comics’ “Feature Comics,” No. 27, Dec. 1939, researcher Darrel Dane developed a formula that allowed him to shrink to six inches tall but retain all his adult-sized strength.

And after discovering this questionable ability, he decided he should naturally fight crime.

And then there was the name he chose for himself: Doll Man!

What, was Little Miss Fancy Lad already taken?

Is there a less heroic name than Doll Man? A name less likely to strike fear in the hearts of evildoers?

Criminals probably wanted him dead because the alternative, being locked up and forced to admit they’d been captured by some shrimp with the name of Doll Man meant facing bouts of hysterical laughter from their fellow inmates and worse.

His costume was equally unimpressive – elfin red boots, a red cape, blue tunic and shorts. Like a lot of Quality heroes, Doll Man eschewed big boy pants. He got around town either through the use of a seemingly toy plane or by riding the backs of various animals, including a dog, an eagle and, in one story, a penguin.

But good things do come in small packages. The art work by Lou Fine and later, Reed Crandall is lush and exciting, even today. His credited creator, William Ervin Maxwell, was actually Will Eisner, best known for creating the Spirit. Eisner’s stories have the mighty mite facing a rogues gallery of scoundrels worthy of a B-rate Dick Tracy.

It’s fascinating to watch these creators figure how to break a story in this, the early days of the comics medium. In one early outing, Doll Man faces off against a ring of saboteurs and is almost drowned in a candy-box coffin.

He escapes and calls the police on his foes, satisfied he’s brought the fiends to justice.

It’s one way to wrap a story in nine pages.

Doll Man was courageous and steadfast, determined to stop every lawbreaker, no matter their size or their number.

Quality’s first genuine super-hero actually had a good run. The mighty mite headlined “Feature Comics” for a decade and starred in his own title from 1941 to 1953.

He’s also noteworthy for another reason: Doll Man was the star of several bondage covers over the years, facing oblivion from, say, a clothes iron or a running bathroom sink faucet.

Like I said, it’s dangerous being small.

When Quality crashed in the mid-1950s, DC bought the rights to the characters.

Doll Man, along with several other Quality heroes, returned to action finally in 1973 as the Freedom Fighters, when the Justice League and the Justice Society, in one of their annual team-ups that were so much fun, discovered their planet, Earth-X, still ruled by Nazis.

The Freedom Fighters were so popular, they headlined their own series, from 1976 to 1978. The stories aren’t especially noteworthy, except for one that featured Batwoman coming out of retirement and meeting her successor, Barbara Gordon’s Batgirl. (The Batman comics never got around to depicting this, a serious whiff.)

Much more recently, “Freedom Fighters: Rise of a Nation,” from writer Robert Vendetti, found the Fighters losing to the Nazis. Doll Man was dead as the story opened. In his place, Doll Girl fought for vengeance. It’s a great read, and I highly recommend it.

I’ve been on a Quality kick recently, enjoying runs of such heroes as the Human Bomb and the Black Condor. You can download digital copies of many classic stories from Amazon. These Golden Age stories have a charm unlike anything else. I’m going through them as if they were a bottomless bowl of nachos.

For a small man, Doll Man has a long reach.