Tales From the Archive: The Explosive Saga of DOC TOLTEC!

This isn't a published story. In fact, I wrote it as character background for a roleplaying campaign Brian Rogers was putting together. Brian was trying to create a superhero campaign with the feel of a real-world "all-stars superteam" comic book like JLA or The Mighty Avengers. These teams differ from groups like The Fantastic Four or the X-Men in that they are made up of heroes who have their own comic books, and thus each hero has his own roster of villains, sidekicks, and alliances.

Usually I'm a pretty lazy person, but every now and then someone will ask me to do something and the result is like the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I didn't just write up a page or so about the character, I wrote -- well, see for yourself.

Just to make the story even more complicated, the character Doc Toltec began as one of a group of GURPS superheroes based on Theosophy, which I wrote up in an article for Pyramid Online called "The Akashik Four!" I can't reprint that because it still belongs to Pyramid. If you like, you can assume that's the "real" Doc Toltec, and this article merely describes his appearances in comic books. Either way, he's one of Madame Blavatsky's Toltecs, not the real Mesoamerican people. Blavatsky's Toltecs lived in ancient Atlantis and had copper-colored skin as hard as bronze. My one-sentence summing-up of Doc Toltec is "one of the world's foremost scientific intellects, who stops crime and supernatural threats by punching them."

I have a suspicion that the author of this little history of comic books that never existed is the same person who wrote the article on King Kong in "Return to Skull Island."

To understand Doc Toltec, you need to know prehistory.  No, I don't mean all that weird Madam Blavatsky crap about Atlantis that makes up his backstory.  I mean the comics that came before him. 
    Back in 1939, Hy-G-Nex Sanitary Products Co. of Chicago introduced a free comic book called NURSE.  Issues 1-7 were distributed only with shipments of hospital supplies and thus are now extremely rare.  It was written by Dr. Frederick Cole and drawn by a 17-year-old prodigy -- the legendary Marty Wiseman. Each issue included a one-page story dramatizing a piece of obscure medical lore -- a tradition which continued for the life of the comic.
    With Issue 8 (Feb 1940) NURSE began newstand and direct-mail distribution and changes title to TRUE NURSE STORIES.  Instead of stand-alone stories, it now chronicled the ongoing saga of Nurse Betty Anderson and her on-again, off-again romance with handsome surgeon Dr. Raymond Robinson against the backdrop of Chicago's East Side General Hospital.
    In 1941 Dr. Cole was jailed for fraud when his medical license turns out to be bogus.  Marty Wiseman took over both writing and drawing with Issue 26 (June '41).  Wiseman quickly realized that the higher-ups at Hy-G-Nex never bothered to read the comic, so he went utterly wild.
    The plots got much more exciting.  Medical drama gave way to wartime adventure as Betty and Dr. Robinson foiled Japanese saboteurs, spies, fifth columnists, black marketeers, and secret plots to invade America.  The villainous playboy Ralph Crabtree, who had previously done nothing more than try to seduce Nurse Betty, was revealed as a war profiteer and then as a Nazi spymaster.
    The artwork got more exciting, too -- Wiseman began to indulge his taste for cheesecake.  Nurse Betty was forever getting caught and tied up by villains, usually tearing her dress to shreds in the process.  Even back in the relative safety of East Side General she spent at least a page of each issue changing her uniform and putting on or taking off stockings.
    With Issue 35 (March '42) title changed to ARMY NURSE ADVENTURES as Nurse Betty (and Dr. Robinson) went into uniform.  Or, in Betty's case, mostly out of uniform.  She got caught and tied up in a variety of exotic locations as the medical duo found themselves confronting reanimated corpses, Nazi vampires, giant robots, lost cities, werewolves, fungus-men, sadistic Japanese mad scientists, and all manner of perils.  Poor Ralph Crabtree lost his fortune, his respectability, and finally his hand, becoming the Nazi supervillain Der Griffe (the Claw).
    Then, in Issue 49 (May '43) Wiseman sent Nurse Betty and Dr. Robinson back in time ten thousand years to foil a plot by, yes, Ralph Crabtree/Der Griffe to conquer ancient Atlantis.  Betty got to wear an ancient Atlantean brass bikini slave girl outfit for a change, but still got tied up.  In the course of their adventure the two befriended an ancient Atlantean super-genius called Rlaveg Askac -- better known to later readers as DOC TOLTEC himself!
    Despite his popularity, the Doc had to wait another year before entering the comics scene full-time.  Wiseman lost his draft deferment in 1944 and handed off the comic to the team of Daniel and Levi (Lou) Rosenblum.  They knew a good thing when they saw it, and wasted no time in killing off Dr. Robinson and bringing Doc Toltec to the modern world for good via a "Time Portal" in issue 60 (June '44).
    Doc Toltec and Betty fought more dress-tearing, bondage-obsessed foes for the remainder of the war.  They returned to East Side General as the title changed with Issue 79 (January '46) to STARTLING NURSE ADVENTURES.  Cashing in on the postwar boom in horror and crime comics, the Rosenblums alternated storylines.  Half the time Betty and Doc fought Chicago crooks with a thing for tying Betty up, and the other half of the stories involved weird supernatural menaces intent on tying Betty up. 
    Many fans regard this period as the true high point of the comic.  Dan Rosenblum had been a newspaper reporter and his crime stories had a gritty authenticity on a par with Raymond Chandler.  Meanwhile, his fantastic horror scripts were amazing Gothic nightmares out of Poe or Lovecraft.  Poor Ralph Crabtree returned, now completely deformed and utterly bonkers, lurking in a network of hidden tunnels beneath Chicago and plotting to claim Betty as his bride.  
    The greatest single Doc Toltec story of the STARTLING NURSE ADVENTURES era was the special double-sized 80-page issue 117 in March of 1949.  Doc had to team up with his old enemy "Johnny Deuce" when Deuce's sister Sylvia was snatched by the rival Orlok mob.  Doc and Johnny traced Sylvia through a combination of superscientific deduction and gangster streetwise savvy, through a labyrinth of tenements and basements straight out of Piranesi's "Carceri" etchings, only to find her body drained of blood as both the characters and the reader are stunned to discover that the Orlok gang are all vampires! The last thirty pages of the story are a brutal, scary, and thrilling rampage of revenge as Doc and Johnny Deuce slaughter an entire vampire Mafia before battling "Red Eyes" Orlok himself atop East Side General Hospital just at dawn.  Johnny Deuce even managed a heroic death, saving Nurse Betty from the vampire's "poison-dipped claws" at the cost of getting a fatal dose himself. 
    The rise of the Comics Code brought all that to an abrupt halt.  In 1954 the title changed to TRUE NURSE ADVENTURES and the focus shifted away from realistic crime and horror to superhero action.  With nobody to tear off her dress and tie her up, poor Nurse Betty began to fade into the background as Doc Toltec became a super-scientific detective.  The monsters Doc investigated now all turned out to be fakes of the Scooby-Doo variety, plots by Communists or mad scientists.
    Doc finally got top billing in August of 1956, when the title changed yet again to TRUE NURSE ADVENTURES STARRING DOC TOLTEC.  The "True Nurse Adventures" part was in tiny type crammed up into the top of the cover while the familiar golden logo blazed below.  Doc remained on the staff of East Side General, but you wonder how he ever had time to practice medicine.  With the coming of the Space Age, the focus shifted again to exploration as Doc (and Betty) visited Venus, the age of the dinosaurs, a lost world of Vikings (!) under Siberia, ancient Lemuria, the hidden kingdom of the Deros under Tibet, a pocket dimension inhabited by reptile-men, and various other garden spots.  Doc acquired an ancient Atlantean flying saucer and finally got around to fixing the Time Portal which brought him to the 20th Century back in 1944.
    There were still villains to fight, including various ex-Nazis with supernatural powers, Japanese holdouts, and superpowered villains like the Squid-Men From Space, the Masked Inca, Doctor Von Blood, or the Communist duo Hammer and Sickle.  Even good old Ralph Crabtree put in an appearance, now sporting a hooded cloak over his old Nazi getup and renamed the Iron Claw. 
    A low spot of sorts came in issues 327-330 (Sept.-Dec. '66) when writer Johnny Borucci decided to copy the format of a successful new TV show that season -- no, not Star Trek, I'm talking about The Monkees.  Doc and Betty formed a pop band with Betty on bass, the obnoxiously "groovy" young intern "Itchy" Fingers on drums and the startlingly bland Afro-wearing Dr. Jonathan Jackson on keyboard.  Doc, of course, was lead vocal and guitar.  There was a plot about crooked concert promoters and it wouldn't have been so bad, except that Borucci decided to include pages and pages of the band performing his original lyrics.  Even the best pop-song words sound kind of stupid in cold print, but Borucci's were more than ordinarily lame.  You can sing them to the tune of "Yellow Rose of Texas," and occasionally Doc Toltec fans will perform them at filksinging sessions or karaoke bars.  Here's a sample:

The East Side of Chicago
Was shining in the sun,
When Iron Claw's gorillas
Came waving their gas-guns.

(The other three chime in with an "Oh, yeah!")

I fought them to a standstill
And Iron Claw fell flat.
The East Side of Chicago
Is where my baby's at.
   
    Unsurprisingly, letters from readers prompted Borucci to drop his knock-off of a knock-off.  The controversial "psychedelic" issue 335 (May '67) led to Borucci's departure after moral guardians complained that the story's "expedition to a higher state of consciousness" using a "mystic herb" seemed like an attempt to promote drug use.
    A personality clash between artist Bob LaRoche and new writer Fred Gruber led to LaRoche's retirement after issue 349 (July '68).  The next four issues were drawn by various uncredited artists, and after issue 353 the comic folded as HyGnX sold its comics line to Universal Comics.
    UC tried to revive Doc Toltec four times over the next fifteen years.  First they gave him his own title, DOC TOLTEC, in 1974, but the writer (Sam Kozinsky) had no idea what to do with the character.  Poor Nurse Betty only showed up a couple of times, but never even lost so much as a button off her uniform.  That one folded with Issue 6.
    They tried again in 1977 with the mercifully short-lived DOC TOLTEC AND DISCOMAN.  That lasted only two issues, thank God.  The third attempt, in 1979, send Doc into space with a trio of teenagers as DOC TOLTEC AND THE STAR FIGHTERS.  That lasted four issues, and is fondly remembered by a few hard-core Doc Toltec fans.
    His true rebirth came in 1986, when British writer Chris Pryce talked UC into letting him write a Doc Toltec comic.  The four-issue limited series DOC TOLTEC: MAN OUT OF TIME was a tremendous success, eventually published in book form as a graphic novel.  Pryce understood the heart of the Doc Toltec mythos, and sent him back to his roots fighting a zombie invasion and Nazi gorillas in the corridors of East Side General.  Nurse Betty even got to be badass, strangling a gorilla with her manacles and blasting zombies with a sawed-off shotgun.
    The success of MAN OUT OF TIME led to the revival of the DOC TOLTEC monthly comic, first written by Pryce and then ably taken over by Mark Harris.  Doc also turns up in other UC titles, and is a member of the company's flagship superteam.  He got a cartoon in 1990 which for some reason gave him a hideous Speedy Gonzalez accent and turned Nurse Betty into a wisecracking teenager.  It lasted a couple of seasons in syndication.