Feature Comics #61 (1942)

At a convention in the Hall of the Institute of Science, Yvette De Mortire, at the podium in a slinky evening gown, irradiates a roomful of distinguished scientists, including Dr. Roberts, with her "hydrocatharsis ray," which puts a sodium-pentothol-style whammy on them all; the scientists all start blabbing their important secret science ideas, while DeMortire's squad of male secretaries, dressed in hotel bellboy uniforms, circulate among them and write down everything they hear (much of which isn't even in complete sentences). Then they leave. The brain-scrambled scientists wander randomly; it takes a full day to get them all rounded up; Dr. Roberts finds his way home, staggers in, says nothing and passes out, from "exhaustion and probably amnesia," according to Darrel Dane. -- Yvette DeMortire is the only nonbrainscrambled attendee of the convention, hence the only suspect, so Darrel visits her apartment, changes size and clothing, and breaks in through the transom. Inside he finds a dead guy, with a dagger stuck in his back, who has written a message in his own blood: "secret swamp." In the nearby fireplace, charred but not burned, Doll Man finds a fragment of a map, marked "secret swamp." He also finds, and takes home, a heart-shaped locket containing photos of two teens: (younger Yvette and Stephan Bois). -- Meanwhile at a hidden lair in the secret swamp, mad science weapons are being tested and the four stenographers are typing night and day. One of them goes mad and declares his love for Yvette; she scornfully slaps him silly with one of her shoulder-length gloves and orders him back to work. Doll Man arrives, riding a bat, and uses a bent sapling to catapault himself into De Mortire's observatory, landing on the lens of her telescope as she observes the Moon. Acting on a psychological hunch, he places the locket portrait of the boy teen on the lens; Yvette's icy demeanor completely transforms and she gets all swoony over "Stephan," then faints. A hard-faced hag (Yvette's sister) rushes into the room, spots Doll Man and shoots at him with a revolver, then prepares to deal harshly with unconscious Yvette. Doll Man causes her to fall down a flight of stairs, but she recovers and tosses him into a can of rubber cement, but he wrenches himself out of it; she sics her squad of secretaries on him and he beats them all up. Then Yvette shows up, sobbing, having some sort of psychological breakdown, and the hag steps out of the fight and hustles Yvette into another room, and berates her: "Where are the brains I beat into you, Sister ??" Outside the room, Doll Man learns the backstory of Yvette and her late suitor Stephan from one of the stenographers; they team up, enter the room, and contrive to get the wicked sister's hair caught in the rolls of a printing press. The still-unnamed stenographer pitches some woo at Yvette, but first there's this problem of all these empty-headed scientists, but that very evening they are all reassembled at the Institute, and re-irradiated with the hydrocatharsis ray, which has retroactive powers when applied a second time. -- We never do find out who the dead guy in Yvette's apartment was or who killed him or why.