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 period and cannot by any exercise of ingenuity be taken to be a slap on an existing institution." "The Mikado" "was never a story about Japan but about the failings of the British government". By setting the opera in a foreign land, Gilbert felt able to more sharply criticise British society and institutions. G. K. Chesterton compared the satire in the opera to that in Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels": "Gilbert pursued and persecuted the evils of modern England till they had literally not a leg to stand on, exactly as Swift did. ... I doubt if there is a single