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 later incorporated the same song into "Madama Butterfly" as the introduction to "Yamadori, ancor le pene". The characters' names in the play are not Japanese names, but rather (in many cases) English baby-talk or simply dismissive exclamations. For instance, a pretty young thing is named "Pitti-Sing"; the beautiful heroine is named "Yum-Yum"; the pompous officials are "Pooh-Bah" and "Pish-Tush"; the hero is called "Nanki-Poo", baby-talk for "handkerchief". The headsman's name, "Ko-Ko", is similar to that of the scheming Ko-Ko-Ri-Ko in "Ba-ta-clan" by Jacques Offenbach. The Japanese were ambivalent toward "The Mikado" for many years. Some Japanese critics saw the depiction