There’s an app for that!

One of my first posts here (dear god, back in 2017?) was about how having old comics available in trade paperback affected my reading choices and therefore my shopping choices. When I could read 500 pages of Ghost Rider or Green Lantern for the cost of less than a 100 pages of current comics, it wasn’t a contest. The same is true of the DC and Marvel apps. While I got them primarily to help with Rereading the Silver Age, now that I have them on my phone inevitably I read unrelated stuff. Some of it is current (e.g., Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty), more of it old but separate from my rereading project.

A while back, for instance, I reflected I’d never read the Beast’s series in Amazing Adventures and promptly did so. More recently — well, this trail of impulses is more tangled so bear with me.

Recently I visited a local comic shop’s small branch in the nearby mall. I couldn’t find much I wanted to buy — the interesting TPBs were ones I already had — so I settled on Doctor Strange: The Oath by Brian K. Vaughn and Marcos Martin. With Wong dying of a brain tumor, Stephen obtains a magical cure from another dimension only to have a mystery adversary steal it. Wong and Stephen set out to recover the potion with the help of Night Nurse, a mysterious doctor (she quips that “Night General Practitioner” doesn’t really trip off the tongue) who helps patch up injured superheroes.

I’d been curious about Night Nurse when I originally read the series but hadn’t learned much about her. Now, of course, there’s much more comics information available online — plus I have the app. I read her two initial appearances in the Bendis run of Daredevil. They didn’t tell me anything I didn’t learn from The Oath, though she’s drawn considerably heavier in Daredevil. At one point she tells Ben Urich that given everything superheroes have done for regular New Yorkers, she became Night Nurse to help them in turn.

Online research revealed it’s fan canon that she personally benefited from a superhero’s help (in the 15 years since The Oath that may have become comics canon too, though I couldn’t find any evidence). Fan canon also identifies Night Nurse as Linda Carter, the central character of Marvel’s short-lived Bronze Age series Night Nurse —— and identifies that Carter, in turn, with Marvel’s earlier character Linda Carter, Student Nurse. Courtesy of the app, I was able to get a look at both.

Linda Carter, Student Nurse was a nine-issue series (she also crossed over to Patsy Walker) of which two issues are on the app (I’m guessing because of the Night Nurse connection). They’re familiar stories in the Patsy Walker mode. Linda accepts her boyfriend’s old frat pin, then flirts with another man (don’t worry, there’s a good reason). A gold-digging nurse flirts with a wealthy Indian rajah but backs out of marrying him when she learns she’d be one of a harem. Linda and a roommate go apartment-hunting but discover their grouchy landlady is the best they can do. While a lot of the action takes place in the hospital, little would have changed if the setting had been a big office, college or a military base.

Night Nurse is a lot better. It’s three woman core cast are Linda; child of privilege Christine Palmer for whom having a career is an act of rebellion; and black Georgia Jenkins who plans to use her nursing skills to help her people. Written by Jean Thomas (yes, Roy’s first wife) and drawn by J. Winslow Mortimer, it takes the medical setting seriously and recognizes nurses are skilled professionals, not something I could ever say about Jane Foster in Thor.

In #1, for instance, Linda gets a serious love interest but ends up having to choose between him or her career. She chooses nursing. The second issue involves Christine working for a legendary surgeon who’s romancing her to boot. Unfortunately he’s an alcoholic stealing drugs from the hospital to support himself when drink finally makes it impossible to do his job. It surprised me to have the series deal with that kind of medical burnout — in the early 1970s even TV shows favored the saintly healer type of doctor.

Not that the series didn’t have plenty of “danger, drama and death,” in the words of the covers. In #3 the nurses have to deal with a hit on a mob boss who’s under their care.

In #4 Christine, shaken by the events of #2, becomes caregiver to a bitter paraplegic in a spooky old coastal mansion. While he doesn’t want her around it looks like her beauty and compassion can thaw his dour heart. But can she figure out the secret the family’s keeping or why the abandoned local lighthouse sometimes sends its beam into the night?

It turns out everything has one solution. The lighthouse is a signal to drug dealers to deliver their supply, which the guy in the wheelchair distributes throughout the area. He’s not hostile to Christine because he’s a bitter cripple stereotype, he’s hostile for fear she’ll uncover his racket. Oh, and he’s faking his disability and been able to walk all along! Twists like that are why I always suspect the guy in the wheelchair in murder mysteries. The switch to Gothic suspense shows Night Nurse could be flexible with its format but it didn’t help: the series died after #4.

While I assume Linda Carter’s name was a hat tip to the earlier series, there’s nothing in Night Nurse to suggest she’s the same person — indeed, Linda 1 having begun her training a decade earlier would seem to argue against it. Neither book suggests their characters exist in the MU, though as Linda Carter I met Patsy, she definitely does. One fan theory is that it works if we assume Linda Carter of Night Nurse transferred to another hospital and lived through the stories of Linda Carter, Student Nurse before graduating at the end of Night Nurse #1. I don’t buy it, but Lord knows I’ve seen worse retcons.

That’s a half-dozen issues I wouldn’t have read if not for the app (I doubt I’d ever have picked up the Night Nurse TPB). I’m quite sure they won’t be the last.

#SFWApro. Art by Gil Kane (t), Martin and Mortimer