 | Myra North, Special NurseOriginal Medium: Newspaper comics Distributed by: Newspaper Enterprise Association First Appeared: 1936 Creators: Ray Thompson (writer) and Charles Coll (artist) image: © NEA. |
From the title, a reader might expect Myra North, Special Nurse, to consist of soap opera-style adventures, not the hair-raising kind. But note the second part of the title — anyone who expected Myra to lead the life of a typical nurse simply didn't realize how special a one she was. The people Myra met in her day-to-day life included doctors, patients and hypochondriacs, of course — but they also included spies, lunatics and criminal masterminds.
Myra's adventures in the daily newspapers began Monday, February 10, 1936. The artist was Charles Coll, who worked in newspaper cartooning but wasn't known for any other continuing feature. The writer was Ray Thompson, who had ghosted Somebody's Stenog for A.E. Howard, and who would go on to create The Fleer Dubble-Bubble Kids (that gum producer's answer to Bazooka Joe). It was distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Association, syndicator of Alley Oop, Out Our Way and more.
Myra sometimes went through the motions of a reasonably normal life, performing normal nursely duties and keeping company with her normal boyfriend, Jack Lane. But it was continually being interrupted by murderous patients, colleagues performing illicit experiments, stuff like that. She also went looking for trouble on occasion, traveling the world in pursuit of world conquerors and other super villains. Her true calling was no more medical than that of the slightly later Dr. Bobbs, also a medical person who had non-medical adventures.
At first, the strip looked reasonably well-received. A Sunday version was added December 6 of the same year, and a Big Little Book came out in 1938. But even this modest success was short-lived.
The daily Myra North ended March 25, 1939, and the Sunday on August 31, 1941. Thompson and Coll were both with her from beginning to end.
— DDM
