SHADOW COMICS "NIck Carter in...The Doctor Meets Death!"

Last week we showed a spoof of a medical show done as a police procedural!

This week, it's a murder mystery starring a then-popular multi-media detective involving an accused doctor!

(Note the banner across the bottom of pages #2 & 3, which faced each other in the comic, promoting the Nick Carter radio series!)

This never-reprinted story from S&S's Shadow Comics V8N9 (1948) was illustrated (and likely written) by Golden and Silver Age comic creator Bob Powell, 
Beginning in 1886, he appeared as a scientific adventurer, then a private detective in dime novels, pulp magazines, and comic books, until the early 1950s.

After being dormant for a decade, he was rebooted as a government assassin/secret agent known as KillMaster in a paperback series from the 1960s to the late 1990s.

From the 1930s to the 1950s, he starred in a long-running radio series, two movie serials. several dozen b-movies, and a tv movie/pilot.

(Trivia: Though he never had his own American comic book, Nick had several different series, featuring locally-produced stories in France Germany, and Italy!)

Nick's adopted son, Chick Carter also had a comic strip, radio show, and movie serial, but didn't continue after the 1950s.

MR ANTHONY'S LOVE CLINIC "If Only You'd Grow Up"

You think today's 18-30 crowd has problems "adulting"?

It ain't a new phenomenon, as this never-reprinted tale from Hillman's Mr Anthony's Love Clinic #1 (1949) proves!

You may well ask: "Who the hell is this Dr Phil wannabe?

To start with, he wasn't actually "John J Anthony".

His name was Lester Kroll.

He wasn't a doctor,...or even a licensed therapist!

In fact, he was a high school dropout!

But he had a great voice, so he became a radio disc jockey!
He suffered clinical depression and sought therapy...which gave him an idea.
Utilizing his sons' names (John and Anthony) he created the persona of "John J Anthony" and his show dropped the music format, creating what many historians consider the first interactive "talk radio" show!
If you're wondering why people accepted him without question as an authority on such things, he claimed he was the director of the Institute of Martial Relations on the campus of Vassar College...then a women-only university!
(So, no, the Institute didn't exist!)

His top-rated radio show became the basis for a licensed romance comic from Hillman in 1949.

But the show's name (Good Will Hour, later The John J Anthony Hour, wasn't dramatic enough!

So the comic was given the catchier title "Mr Anthony's Love Clinic"!

The comic seems to have been based on actual situations drawn from episodes of the radio show, but since so few of them survived to the present in any form, there's really no way of knowing!

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