Mikado (comics) pattern, and the Question tracked him down. Their conversation touched Dr. Spaulding deeply, and he injected himself with a poison intended for the Question. By the time the Question had recovered from the Mikado's opiate injection, the Mikado had disappeared completely. He has not appeared since then. The Mikado's name was taken from that of the Gilbert & Sullivan opera of the same name, and his chant is a line of a song sung by The Mikado, the Emperor of Japan, in Act II. The name of his alter ego was taken from the Groucho Marx character, Captain Spaulding. Marx
The Mikado with their one-act piece "Trial by Jury" (1875), played at the Savoy while Carte and their audiences awaited their next work. Gilbert eventually found a place for his "lozenge plot" in "The Mountebanks", written with Alfred Cellier in 1892. In 1914, Cellier and Bridgeman first recorded the familiar story of how Gilbert found his inspiration: The story is an appealing one, but it is largely fictional. Gilbert was interviewed twice about his inspiration for "The Mikado". In both interviews the sword was mentioned, and in one of them he said it was the inspiration for the opera, although he never