Lettercolumn Classics: Cat Scratches

Welcome back to another installment of Lettercolumn Classics, our semi-irregular look at some of the more interesting and offbeat lettercolumns in comic history. Last time out, you may recall, we explored the strange debate in the pages of Sgt. Fury about the treatment of German soldiers in Marvel comics (check it out here). Today we take a look at another hot button issue: women in comics.

Or, specifically, women in comics in 1972. That's when new Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas came up with one of the riskiest, most innovative and most progressive initiatives in comics: a whole mini-line of comics featuring female characters and written and drawn by female creators with the idea of both expanding the role of women in the industry and drawing in girls and women who may not otherwise be reading comic books.

Sounds familiar? Yes, nearly 40 years later, the industry is still wrestling with these same issues -- check out the massive drag out internet fight in the comment section of this article, for instance -- so you can only imagine how groundbreaking this concept was back in 1972 when Thomas and Marvel unveiled Shanna the She-Devil, Night Nurse and The Cat to a skeptical fan community. Just how likely Shanna (a female Tarzan knockoff) and Night Nurse (essentially a soap opera, as I've discussed before) were to succeed is questionable, but if any of the titles had a fighting chance of making it, it was The Cat, which featured a classic Marvel-style origin of a woman named Greer Nelson who comes into possession of a costume that gives her superpowers. This was seemingly right in the wheelhouse for most superhero fans, except, of course for the fact that the main character wasn't a Spider-man type nerdy loner but instead a self-possessed, modern woman.

So how did the readers react? The lettercolumn tells the tale. Let's just say that not everyone was excited to embrace the idea of equality is the world of superheroes. Case in point, this typical exchange courtesy of The Cat #3:





And this was hardly the only letter expressing these feelings; here's another example from The Cat #4:






Of course, not everyone was unhappy with the idea of a liberated female superhero, but proving just how sticky the issue is, even supporters of the idea wrote in with complaints. And the reason should be no surprise to anyone: they were complaining about the unrealistic depiction of The Cat's body. Sound familiar?






The upshot of all this controversy? Well, unfortunately for Marvel and champions of comic book equality, it didn't translate into sales. Instead, all three titles in the female creator line were canceled after four issues. Shanna ended up becoming a supporting character in Ka-Zar, Night Nurse vanished into obscurity for decades and Greer Nelson, of course, was reborn as Tigra the Were-Woman, with the only negative side-effect being the fact that her character was completely re-written and has shifted to become the high-profile sex-kitten in all of comics. Not exactly what the creators of The Cat had in mind.

Lest you get the idea that all the letters were negative (they were actually split about 50-50), we'll leave you with this positive bit of commentary from a 15-year old boy who couldn't possibly have realized how ironic his words would later appear given his own adult self's less than stellar reputation when it comes to dealing with women in comics:





Tune in next time for another... Lettercolumn Classic!

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Lettercolumn Classics: Tell It to Fury

Hey folks, welcome to the first edition of another semi-regular feature, Lettercolumn Classics. You may recall that yesterday, I announced my quest to earn the coveted title of Fearless Front Facer. I haven't yet heard back from Marvel, but our friends over at Comics Should Be Good were kind enough to give us a shout out, so hopefully Marvel will take notice soon and I'll have an update. In the meantime, through a quirk of fate, the thread on CBR about my quest has included some talk about old timey lettercolumns, which is a handy coincidence considering I was actually working on this new lettercolumn feature when I came up with the idea for my quest.



It's no surprise people are talking about lettercolumns, though, because while the advent of the Internet has mostly signaled the end of the printed lettercolumn (though a few upright souls such as Kurt Busiek and Astro City continue to fight the good fight), for any comics reader of a certain age, the lettercolumn is a source of excitement and nostalgia. Indeed, once upon a time, the lettercolumn was actually the backbone of the hobby, as budding comic book fans would get addresses of other enthusiasts and trade back issues and ideas via snail mail, a practice that eventually formed the comics fan community as we know it.

Beyond the importance lettercolumns have as the foundation of comic collecting, though, they also serve as both a permanent historical record of what readers at the time thought of the comics and as an occasional source of amusement. Not bad for a feature that began simply to satisfy postal regulations. Back in the day, you see, comics had to include at least two all-text pages in order to qualify for the special shipping rate offered by the post office. In long ago days, that requirement was satisfied by prose short stories, until someone had the brilliant thought that simply publishing letters to the editor would be faster and cheaper.

The result? Classic lettercolumns like "Sock It to Shellhead", "Let's Rap with Cap" and "Let's Level with Daredevil" were born. Okay, so the late 60's were weird even in the world of lettercolumns, but it's no exaggeration to say that they served not just as a means of fan expression but also as an important launching point for the careers of many pros. Busiek himself first came to Marvel's attention through his letters, for example, while Mark Evanier's letter to Stan Lee suggesting ceremonial titles for fans ended up published in Stan's Soapbox and led to the classic blurb, "Know Ye These, The Hallowed Ranks of Marveldom" that ran throughout the company line and inspired my quest for the F.F.F. honorific. And sometimes romance even bloomed; future Elfquest creators Wendy and Richard Pini, for example, first met through the Silver Surfer lettercolumn.

Lettercolumn Classics, then, will be taking a look at some of the letters, great and not-so-great, that have graced the pages of comic books over the past 60 years or so, presenting slices of life from a bygone age. Today we kick off our feature with a look at a couple letters from one of the more interesting lettercolumns of the day, Sgt. Fury.

Though all of Marvel's titles in the 60's were known for having comparatively more progressive exchanges between the readers and the editors than their competitors, Sgt. Fury in particular was a lightning rod for controversial letters, which on some levels is to be expected considering our nation's involvement in the Vietnam War began (and eventually ended) during the title's long run. But before that there was another, much more surprising controversy that raged for years within the lettercolumn of Sgt. Fury as readers continually wrote in to complain about the treatment of Germans in the comic.

That's right. Hard as it is to believe now, in the early-to-mid 60's, a significant portion of the fan base was upset at the fact that German soldiers were being depicted as the bad guys in a World War II comic! Specifically, many of these letters were defending the average German soldier as compared to the Nazis. These letters would typically go along these lines: all Germans weren't Nazis; therefore it's wrong to depict them all as evil; and even worse to show them as being incompetent; so Marvel should show some good German soldiers just doing their duty defending their homeland.

Of course, to modern sensibilities (such as mine) this is kind of boggling considering most of the "defending" was taking place on occupied land taken by German aggression. Yet, though Stan in particular often shot these ideas down with some vigor in the lettercolumn (often using a variation of the line "If the Germans want to publish a war mag where they are the good guys they can, but as long as we're publishing them, the Americans will be the good guys"), Marvel was sensitive enough to the fan viewpoint that Roy Thomas eventually introduced Eric Koenig, a good German soldier who, rebelling against the Nazis that had taken political control of his home, defected to the Allied side and joined the Howling Commandos (and later SHIELD). Here's a typical example of one of these letters and Stan's response:



The most amazing episode of this heated debate, though, came after Koenig's debut (and ironically in the same issue, #35, where Koenig defected to join the Howlers). In the lettercolumn of that issue, another voice weighed in on the debate, but this time from a unique perspective. Because this writer, you see, happened to actually be a former S. S. officer!

Here's the letter and Marvel's response:







While Marvel sidestepped this landmine, other readers were eager to take up the argument, and in Sgt. Fury #40 Marvel published the following letter from another reader, which we suspect was selected because it probably came closest to Marvel's own thoughts on the matter. It also happened to express those ideas in a particularly eloquent manner:




For all intents and purposes, the introduction of Koenig and this spirited exchange in the lettercolumn spelled the end of the debate over Marvel's characterization of German troops during World War II. Of course, the times being what they were, this was in part because by this point America's involvement in Vietnam had become significant and the letters increasingly turned to focus on Vietnam instead.

But while there are plenty of interesting letters about Vietnam not just in Sgt. Fury but in all war comics of the time -- indeed, I suspect someone could write an interesting book about the topic and how changing attitudes towards war comics shaped the industry and eventually led to war comics almost disappearing entirely as a genre -- those letters will have to be the subject of a future episode of Lettercolumn Classics.


Next Time: From a literal war to a culture war, we shift gears, as the next installment of Lettercolumn Classics takes a look at The Cat and how readers responded to Marvel's version of Women's Lib. Be there!

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Ode to a Night Nurse

Night Nurse. If you're a long time comics reader, the mere mention of those words likely brings a small smile to your face. For decades, likely since the moment Marvel published the first issue back in 1972, Night Nurse has been a running joke among fans, synonymous with lame or ridiculous comics. Want to snark on some hapless new title that came out? Give it the ultimate insult: it's worse than Night Nurse. Yes, for years Night Nurse has been the joke of the industry, which would be fine if it weren't for this terrible, astonishing secret: Night Nurse was actually very, very good.

Now, we know what you're thinking: wha? Vault, have you gone crazy? Are you off your meds? Did you fall out of bed and hit your head on a stack of Essential Defenders? At the risk of being shot by an Elf with a Gun, the answer is no, we have not gone crazy. Not only was Night Nurse a good comic, in many ways it was ahead of its time. So today we're going to take a look at the series and examine why it failed and why it has such a bad reputation among fans.

Those two questions, as it happens, have the same answer, but in order to understand Night Nurse first we need to explain just what the series was. Running for four issues before being canceled, Night Nurse followed the lives of three inner city nurses (Linda Carter being the "main" character) as they tried to save lives while also getting tangled up occasional crimes and romantic boondoggles. In the first issue, for instance (and in the interest of full disclosure, the only issue I've personally had the chance to read so far), we meet the three girls while they are in nursing school and follow them as they first put aside differences to become friends and then deal with a bomber trying to blow up the hospital for political reasons, all while Linda is mulling over a marriage proposal to the man of her dreams that would also require her to give up nursing.

Legend (and wikipedia) has it that Stan Lee came up with the name and concept for the book as part of an initiative to draw female readers into comics. Along with Night Nurse, he also put forward ideas for The Cat and Shanna the She-Devil. Roy Thomas, the new editor in chief at Marvel, then took this one step further by hiring women writers (and in the case of The Cat, artists) for all three titles, figuring that this would give the comics a better chance at reaching those elusive girl readers.

Unfortunately, all three comics flopped and were canceled almost instantly. So what went wrong? It's hard to say for sure, but quality doesn't seem to have been a problem, as the first issue of Night Nurse is features compelling and surprisingly complex characters and plotlines from writer Jean Thomas (Roy's wife at the time) as well as sharp artwork from veteran penciller Win Mortimer. No, what I believe caused the series to fail is the same thing that led it to becoming a bit of an industry joke for the past three decades: marketing.

It's important to remember (but easy to forget) that Marvel at this time was not just publishing superhero comics, or fantasy or horror; even though you could scour the Bullpen Bulletins for the era until your face turned blue without ever finding any mention of it, Marvel was also still publishing multiple romance titles, including My Love and Our Love Story. But even though these comics were produced by the Marvel Bullpen and featured writing and art from all the classic Marvel creators, they existed almost as an entirely different line of comics. Just as a regular Marvel comic would never mention these romance titles, so too would the romance titles never acknowledge the existence of the superhero line.

It can be inferred from this that there wasn't a lot of crossover in terms of the reading audiences between the two lines of comics (or at least, Marvel did not think there was). And this is where I think Marvel made a misstep with Night Nurse: rather than advertising and hyping it within the line of romance comics where the title's most likely fan base existed, instead they pitched it to their regular, superhero and fantasy loving Marvel Zombies.

Night Nurse, they promised, "sounds like just another romance mag, however well-written and drawn; but take it from us, fried -- this one is realistic, exciting -- and different!" And while it was written by a woman, it was "aimed at neither guys nor at als, but at true lovers of comix literature everywhere!" Fans were assured that if they tried it, they would like it.

Now, Marvel fans are notoriously loyal, which was even more the case at that time, when Marvel had roared out of obscurity over the course of the previous decade to become the biggest publisher in comics. So when Stan and Roy told them something was good, well, chances are they believed it. And the comic is good. But what it isn't is anything that would be recognizable to a fan of Avengers or Conan or Tomb of Dracula. So instead of catching on and bringing in a new wave of new female readers, the title instead became the punch line for decades of jokes by the typical male superhero fans who were duped into buying it.

Had the title instead been pitched to the romance readers, there's no telling whether or not it would have succeeded, of course; but I think it's fair to say that it would have had a better chance of at least picking up a smaller but steadier group of readers that might have sustained it for at least as long as the other romance titles lasted. As it is, though, the series lasted only four issues (as did The Cat, which is a whole different story), which when you factor in the lead time it takes to produce comics, means it was probably canceled as soon as the sales figures for the first couple of issues had come in.

Of course, there are other factors as well, the main one being that Roy was exactly right one one count: Night Nurse was "different". Indeed, if you read romance comics of the time, you'll see that it was very different even from romance comics, which tended to be anthologies rather than full issues or ongoing stories, and which generally followed a formula (even at marvel) with girl losing guy, hand wringing and then girl getting guy back (or a new guy) at the end. Night Nurse totally destroyed that cliche and, in my opinion, was actually way ahead of its time in terms of the stories it was trying to tell. Night Nurse #1 doesn't, in fact, resemble a comic at all, but rather is closer to a TV medical drama or soap opera than anything else. The kind of plots going on in the first issue -- romance mixed in with gritty scenes in the big city hospital, all topped by the bomb threat and shootout in the hospital basement -- could easily have been taken right out of an episode of ER or St. Elsewhere. Advertising mistakes aside, then, it may simply be that Night Nurse was too atypical and forward thinking to succeed anyway.

Of course, if it was ahead of its time you would think that eventually people would discover that the jokes were unwarranted and the title was, in fact, pretty darn cool. And in the last few years, that's exactly what has happened. As collectors and fans have discovered Night Nurse, prices on the relatively rare back issues have skyrocketed; a check on ebay earlier this week showed even average VG copies going for $35 or more. Some of this rediscovery has to also be attributed to Brian Michael Bendis, who reintroduced Night Nurse to the modern comics audience a few years ago, bringing Linda Carter back as a physician who attends to injured superheroes; she even enjoyed a minor role in Civil War when she joined Captain America's resistance team and patched up their wounds against government orders.

Still, it's a shame that Night Nurse didn't last longer and a bigger shame that for years fans would bag on the title without most of them having ever even seen an issue, much less read it. One way that Marvel could help rectify this would be to put out a trade reprinting the four issues so that everyone would have a chance to read these otherwise difficult to find cult classics. It would also be interesting to hear what the creators of the series thought about the comic and the reputation it has had over the years. So if you're listening, Marvel, here's your chance to right a wrong and do us all a favor at the same time by bringing a little night Night Nurse into everyone's life.


Footnote: One last note I wanted to mention is the "controversy" over whether or not the Linda Carter in Night Nurse is the same character from the pre-Marvel title Linda Carter, Student Nurse. Even the wikipedia entry for Night Nurse claims that there is no definitive connected between the two and I have seen people argue that they must be different characters. This argument seems to be based entirely on the fact that the original Linda carter was a brunette while the one in Night Nurse is a blonde. Firstly, this is ridiculous on the face of it; I mean, who ever heard of a woman dyeing her hair, right? Secondly, the connection is implicit in the opening to Night Nurse #1, which reads in part "Linda Carter, Student Nurse must make the most difficult decision of her life" (bold text in the original). The idea that Roy Thomas, who edited this comic and was the most notorious continuity fanwank in the world, would do this unintentionally is preposterous. Thirdly, in the Bullpen Bulletins for this month, when announcing the new titles, the series is actually referred to as Linda Carter, Night Nurse, a clear callback to the original series. And lastly, as if that all weren't enough, in the new appearances of the character (which Bendis has specifically stated in New Avengers #34 is the same Linda Carter from Night Nurse), Linda has been drawn with her original black hair. This show that, regardless of what her true hair color is, she does occasionally chance it one way or the other.

In conclusion, then, of probably the dumbest argument I've ever participated in, it's painfully obvious that Linda Carter from Night Nurse is the same character as Linda Carter, Student Nurse. Hopefully that ends whatever question you had about that. And just as a side-note, the other claim to fame that Linda Carter, Student Nurse has? Well, back when Marvel could only publish a limited number of titles due to their distribution deal, whenever they put out a new comic they had to cancel an old one. The new title Student Nurse was canceled to make room for? Amazing Spider-man.

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