Time for a review requested by one of my Patreon sponsors, as Michael wants me to review the first issue of Night Nurse.
Surely such a minor character won’t have a convoluted publishing evolution, right?
Right?
Night Nurse #1 (1972)
by Jean Thomas & Win Mortimer
Writer Jean Thomas was, at the time, married to Roy Thomas.
Despite the name, this might or might not be the same Night Nurse that sometimes pops up in recent Marvel… more on that at the end of the review.
There are actually THREE nurses in this book, although the blonde is supposedly the main characters since she’s in the logo.
Assuming you don’t know the answer, make your bet right now which of the three is going to be the modern character:
1) The blonde one, Linda Carter
2) The redhead, Christine Palmer
3) The black one, Georgia Jenkins
Actually, things are so complicated that even if you THINK you know the answer, you might pick up the wrong one regardless.
I could not find any information whatsoever whether Jean Thomas had any level of medical knowledge. In case any of my readers has studied medicine, please let me know if any of the scenes are realistic enough.
I’m particularly interested to know if nurses are present during an autopsy and if they actually do handle acid.
The extent of my knowledge about nurses comes entirely from medical dramas (and I’m a very casual watcher of those, at best)… but even I know that nurses actually do A TON of stuff.
Still, would they seriously be studying ALL OF THIS right away? Given the context, it can’t be more than the first week!
The comic is attempting to place some tension between the girls, but we are just TOLD that they are constantly bickering… we BARELY get to see any of that.
What we DO get to see throughout the issue is Dazzler levels of fanservice.
Underwear shots: 3
Suddenly the hospital is flooded by patients because of a huge fire! Are we going to have some tension?
Nope! Just Linda being homesick. For a second I wondered if she had lost her little brother, which would make for some drama… but the story isn’t that interesting.
I don’t want to sound heartless, but it’s a little hard to sympathize with the girl leaving her post to cry about missing home when there’s a hospital full of burn victims AND crying children!!!
We kept the tension between the girls for a whole 6 pages.
Even less, considering the first page is a teaser with just the blonde.
How are we going to fill the rest of the pages?
Underwear shots: 4
We’ve had a huge fire that filled the hospital with patients. Surely, SURELY the story is going to take the opportunity to use that as a source of drama, right?
It’s not like they would move to the most generic illness they could cover.
This is just going to be a romance comic with everything medical in the background, isn’t it?
Underwear shots: 5
Yep. You can basically swap nursing with any other job and this is nearly indistinguishable from most romance comics I’ve seen.
Well… there IS something you don’t typically see in earlier series.
Underwear shots: 6
For a moment I was worried we were just going into a boring “both girls are dating the same guy” scenario.
Now I’m REALLY grateful that’s not the case!!!
So when your daughter told you that she wanted to go to nursing school, you thought that she meant doing ONLY that without then working as a nurse?
Sounds legit.
I’m convinced that the ONLY reason that Night Nurse will be associated with superheroes is that the uniform of the time really does look like it includes a cape.
Okay the fire didn’t manage to provide any drama, will we have better luck with a blackout AND a riot?
I found the social commentary to be unfocused. The hospital is explicitly right next to a poor neighborhood… it’s a plot point that the hospital is a short walk from Georgia’s home… there is no indication that this is supposed to be a “rich man’s hospital”, or even a “white man’s hospital”.
But the riot starts because people are angry that the hospital still has lights during the blackout?
Sure riots don’t NEED a thematic reason to start, but in fiction they should have one.
Georgia finds her brother working at the hospital without her knowledge AND lurking around with a suspicious guy holding bags.
The reason why her brother is here is to BLOW UP THE HOSPITAL’S GENERATOR in protest for the blackout.
I’m sorry, it was a brown-out up to this point.
Given the context, I initially thought that the word was meant as a nickname for a blackout affecting a black neighborhood. I’m learning only now that it’s a real term, a blackout during the day.
Asking to native English speakers, is this a commonly used term or would you also have been confused?
Okay if I get this right, this is how things would have played out if the plan had worked:
1) the authorities (WHO???) deactivate the hospital’s generator
2) the hospital remains without power
3) your neighborhood gets its power back
4) for some reason nobody blames you for anyone dying at the hospital
5) for some reason the hospital’s generator is not turned on again the second you leave
Yeah I can see how you thought this might have worked out for everybody.
This could potentially provide some drama. What will take precedence, helping the hospital or the poor neighborhood? Will this convince the authorities to invest more into the infrastructure?
Or we could say one of the saboteurs is a scumbag doing this for money, yeah that works too I guess.
I would say that this is where the plan goes bad, but the plan STARTED bad.
Guys, we only have THREE PAGES LEFT, will this actually go ANYWHERE!?
NOPE! The cops show up to arrest the crazy guy, and Georgia’s brother is fine.
Will at least the romance subplot be interesting in the slightest?
How have you not lost all hope in this story yet?
And that was… uhm… well that was 20 pages.
Historical significance: 0 / ER
As mentioned there IS a Night Nurse, but… we’ll talk about it soon.
Silver Age-ness: 0 / Scrubs
What I wouldn’t give for SOME nonsense to show up.
Does it stand the test of time? 0 / House
Getting out of the way first: this is WAY outside of my genre and I’m definitely not the target audience. But this one was just… so… boring!!!Th
e artwork is perfectly serviceable, but the story doesn’t manage to squeeze any amount of drama or characterization from any source available.
Underwear shots: 6
How close is this to the modern character? Which one?
“Night Nurse” only lasted four issues, ending Marvel’s attempt to resurrect romance comics.
The series certainly had an uphill battle in the comics landscape of 1972.
Night Nurse was an attempt to create a comics book for the same audience of young girls who read such book series as Cherry Ames, Sue Barton, and Nancy Drew. Maybe the comic-book format just didn’t appeal to that group. It may also have been difficult to distribute or display: too serious to be with romance comics but not male-action oriented enough to be with superhero comics, so, regrettably, low sales led to cancellation.
JEAN THOMAS
Before moving to the modern Night Nurse, one thing to clarify: this is NOT the first Linda Carter in Marvel comics.
A different one, a brunette this one, starred in the 9 issues of “Student Nurse” from 1961 to 1962.
I am SO glad that Michael agreed to a review of Night Nurse instead of Student Nurse, because if I had to review this one I would also need to go to the hospital.
For narcolepsy.
With that out of the way, let’s return to the initial question… which of the following is the modern Night Nurse?
1) The blonde one, Linda Carter
2) The brunette, Linda Carter
3) The redhead, Christine Palmer
4) The black one, Georgia Jenkins
You probably guessed it’s not D, and in fact Georgia doesn’t show up anywhere beyond these 4 issues.
But in 2004, on Daredevil vol2 #58, we’re introduced to a secret clinic that heals superheroes… with the help of a nurse with a familiar codename.
This would be expanded both on Daredevil and especially on Doctor Strange, with Night Nurse playing a major role in 2006’s “Doctor Strange: The Oath”.
I highly recommend this series for any Doctor Strange fan; keep in mind that this establishes a romance between him and Night Nurse.
Their relationship is not limited to that series…
…and she later gets with Hawkeye for a bit.
Since the concept of a nurse for superheroes is too good to waste, Night Nurse continued to make appearances in other books over the years.
She even proved popular enough to be in several video games: “LEGO Marvel’s Avengers” in 2006, “Marvel Battle Lines” in 2018 and “Marvel Duel” in 2020.
So the modern Night Nurse is Linda Carter… but which one?
Is the original brunette from 1961 the same character from 1972, just dying her hair blonde for a bit? Hard to tell… although Marvel does us no favors by depicting her as a blonde in a reprint of the original series (which also added some modern stories where she’s a brunette).
At this point you might be thinking: wait, what about the redhead? The name “Christine Palmer” sounds familiar?
She re-appears in the 2004 Nightcrawler miniseries. Notably, this is just SIX MONTHS after Night Nurse showed up on Daredevil.
That miniseries was written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who uses Christine again in the awkwardly named (and terribly written) “4” series… where she shows up in issue 28 for a quick cameo.
Overall, Christine Palmer has ONLY 17 total appearances: the 4 issues of Night Nurse, 12 issues of Nightcrawler, and “4 #28”.
The reason why the name might be familiar is that it was borrowed by the Marvel Cinematic Universe for Doctor Strange’s love interest, sort of mixing Night Nurse and Christine into the same character (in the comics, Christine never meets Strange).
Characters sure can take the wildest journeys between years and adaptations.
First, to answer a few of your questions:
1) My wife is a nurse, and much of what was depicted is not at all how student nurses are trained, at least it wasn’t in the 1990s. when she was in college. Nursing school is focused on patient care, not on medical diagnosis (though there is “nursing diagnosis”, focusing not on the patients’ actual underlying cause, but on the symptoms and how to handle them) or curatives (such as might be devised by freeform chemistry), and autopsies are completely irrelevant.
2) A brownout is not simply a blackout during the day, but is a condition of low power as opposed to no power, which would be a blackout. A typical brownout might happen during a summer heatwave when everyone wants to run their air conditioners on the highest, but there’s simply not enough power being generated to support that.
Secondly, as far as the MCU goes, it seems like the role of Night Nurse in the MCU (the Netflix part of it, which despite some fans acting like it’s up in the air seems to me to be unquestionably MCU canon) has been combined with the character of Claire Temple, who in the comics was a doctor and a love interest of Luke Cage.
The brown-out plot is baffling. The hospital’s generator allows it to disconnect from the public grid, relieving the stress leading to a brown-out. Blowing up the generator forces the hospital to drain the public grid, leading to a blackout. Blowing up a source of electricity to protest a lack of electricity is beyond dumb.
It would have made more sense if they tried to steal the generator, so their homes could disconnect from the overloaded grid while the hospital lost electricity. Still dumb, because generators are extremely loud and therefore easily traceable, but not nearly as dumb as blowing it up.
Something I just noticed – Linda is crying in the logo. Possibly the only time ever for a Marvel logo?
This should’ve been a medical drama series, with some romance thrown in.
They didn’t even know what to do with it, instead!
A brown out is when the grid is overloaded in such a way to cause the voltage to drop lower than it should. Instead if an incandescent bulb glowing a bright yellow it would glow a dim brownish hence the name.. it’s is extremely bad for motors to try to run in under voltage conditions as it can burn them out
“Asking to native English speakers, is this a commonly used term or would you also have been confused?”
And to your direct question, yes, it’s pretty common. It was particularly so in the 70s, when New York power problems were making national news. I remember the citywide blackout in 1977 disrupted some national broadcasts at the time, as the transmitters were in NYC. But we heard about brownouts a lot around that time.
We’re hearing about them (and actual blackouts) again now in areas with a weak electrical grid, like Texas, and climate change/heatwaves put strain on the systems (as noted above).