Don-El and Darrel Dane were a pair of "Mighty Mites" and Superman lookalikes.
Don-El was the son of Nim-El, who was the twin brother of Zor-El, himself the father of Kal-El. So Don-El was the twin cousin of Superman, although he survived not in a space ship sent directly to Earth-One but rather as an inhabitant of the shrunken bottled city of Kandor. Years later, Superman battled and defeated Kandor's captor, Brainiac, and housed the city within his Fortress of Solitude.
Don-El as Captain of the Superman Emergency Squad, a team of Kandorians in miniature size who wore costumes of the famous Kryptonian and aided that caped crusader on occasion on their adopted Earth-One. In his first appearance, he adopted the alias of Super-Mite.
Darrel Dane was a chemist who decided to put to good use the shrinking formula that gave him various mental abilities and the power to shrink to 6 inches tall. Aided by his girlfriend Martha Roberts and her father, he became the crimefighter Doll Man.
Doll Man had numerous solo adventures and, while attending the All-Star Squadron's first official meeting, first met his lookalike Kal-L aka Superman, Eventually, Darrel became a member of the Freedom Fighters, leaving his native Earth-Two for a hero-less parallel planet known as Earth-X. Decades later, Kal-L and Darrel teamed up to help liberate that world.
Don-El briefly had a psychotic breakdown, where he believe himself to be the actual Superman rather that his minatured stand-in. His cousin Kal-El created a scenario that helped Don-El to face reality and restore his sanity. Darrel and the Freedom Fighters briefly visited their homeworld of Earth-Two, then tried living on Earth-One on several months, where they were framed for crimes they didn't commit including an allegation of murder that almost led to Doll Man's execution!
Both heroes possessed superhuman strength and immense durability, Don-El due to his nature as a Kryptonian living on Earth under that world's yellow sun. While Don-El has miniature allies in Kandor with his Squad, Darrel faced only miniaturized menaces such as a Japanese soldier and an island filled with shrunken human subjects. In fact, Doll Man had a six-foot tall recurring foe named Tom Thumb who, like Earth-One's Mouse Man that battled Wonder Woman, was but a tiny man with no superhuman powers. Thumb originated from Midget Town, where several humans were shrunken to 6 inch height by Doctor Vargo, which Dollman, Batman and Robin each visited.
Don-El shared a paternal great-grandfather with Kal-El in Var-El, a scientist who discovered the means to teleport from Krypton-One to Earth-One. While on his adopted world, Var-El battled alien invaders, then disappeared. Darrel had a famous crimefighting grandfather during that same period. Could he have been the Var-L of Krypton-Two? Might the Dane gene have had a trace of Kryptonian blood in the mix? Might he and Kal-L be cousins?
Don-El and his fellow Kandorians were restored to their normal height and moved to the extradimensional world of Rokyn, a world that occasionally resided in Earth-One's universe, but was usually in an adjacent universe. A Darrel and the Freedom Fighters returned to Earth-X, in order to assist in the rebuilding of that war-torn world. Since evidence points to the original Doll Man having returned to the mid 1940s of Earth-Two as he reunited with Martha, it seems likely that the Doll Man seen on Earth-X in the 1980s was the Danes' son Darrel Junior.Doll Man developing a strength enhancing ray in 1950, based off the Miraclo black light ray hypothesized by his fellow Freedom Fighters teammate Rex Tyler. Darrel used this ray on a stray dog he adopted named Elmo, which both healed him and give him super-canine strength. It also increased his intelligence, allowing him to understand human communication.
For the next several months, Elmo assisted Dane’s alter ego Doll Man. Eventually, the dog became acquainted with Darrel's fiancee Martha Roberts, and soon assisted her as well when she adopted the Doll Girl alter ego after gaining powers similar to her boyfriend's. From December 1950 until February 1952, Elmo faithfully followed his master into a wide array of adventures, helping the pair.
Eventually, Elmo retired from crimefighting, although Darrel and Martha carried on in their costumes crusade. Given the nature of Dane’s ray devise, the superhuman strength “of ten men” (like that which Hourman possessed after exposure to the Miraclo black light) would have amplified his already proportionally strong physique when he was a Mighty Mite towards the end of his costumed career.
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