Episode 4 - Before There Was Superman: Doctor Occult

Simon Carver

You’re tuned to KDCR, New York—Distinguished Comics Radio. I’m Simon Carver, and tonight we’re gonna start in the shadows before that big red‑and‑blue fellow ever leapt a tall building.

Robert Reed

And I’m Robert Reed, sitting here thinking about capes and ghosts instead of baseball box scores. We’re not talking Superman first tonight, folks. We’re talking the guy who, I’d say, warmed up the drawing hand—Doctor Occult.

Simon Carver

Right. Picture it’s 1935, a few rough years before Action Comics number one. Middle of the Depression—Cleveland, New York, a lot of places in between. Breadlines, cheap coffee, men in rumpled coats looking for work. And into that you’ve got these skinny kids, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, holed up in Cleveland, devouring pulp magazines and science‑fiction stories.

Robert Reed

Yeah, Jerry’s putting out that little sci‑fi fan magazine of his, dreaming up “super‑men” on a typewriter, Joe’s drawing on scrap paper ’cause money’s tight. Meanwhile out here in New York, Malcolm Wheeler‑Nicholson—former Army man, bit of a firebrand—is making what looks like a crazy bet.

Simon Carver

He starts a company, National Allied Publications, and instead of just reprinting newspaper strips like everybody else, he puts out a book called New Fun: The Big Comic Magazine. All‑original stories. Adventure, humor, mystery, all of it made just for that ten‑cent pamphlet. That’s a big roll of the dice in ’35.

Robert Reed

And it doesn’t stop there. New Fun grows, changes shape, turns into More Fun Comics. Same idea: “all original—mystery, thrills, adventure!” splashed right on those covers. That’s the cradle, right there, where a lot of what we now call DC Comics gets born.

Simon Carver

And one of the first babies in that cradle is our man tonight: Doctor Occult. He shows up in New Fun number six, October ’35. Created by those same two fellows who’ll give us Superman—Siegel and Shuster—but instead of a circus strongman in bright tights, you get this gaunt, serious “ghost detective.”

Robert Reed

Yeah, no S‑shield on his chest. He’s in a trench coat and fedora, looks more like a private eye who took a wrong turn into a haunted house. The strip’s even billed “Doctor Occult, the Ghost Detective.” Eerie shadows, graveyards, glowing symbols—the whole thing feels like a radio mystery show crossed with a seance.

Simon Carver

What I love is imagining Jerry and Joe at that point. Two young men in Cleveland sending pages east to Wheeler‑Nicholson’s office, trying things out. “What if our hero solved crimes, but the clues were ghosts and curses instead of fingerprints?” You can almost hear them testing their voices, panel by panel.

Robert Reed

And remember, this is still years before Action Comics number one in ’38. Superman exists on their typewriter by ’33, sure, but nobody in New York wants to buy him yet. So in New Fun and then More Fun, these guys are, I’d say, sandboxing—trying different flavors. A magician sleuth first, then later that caped fella we all know.

Simon Carver

Exactly. Same cities, same hard times. Out on the street you’ve got folks selling apples, veterans in soup kitchens. Up in cheap walk‑up apartments you’ve got Siegel hammering at a story where a man with special powers doesn’t just scare crooks—he scares ghosts. It’s the same impulse, though: take this jittery, unfair world and imagine somebody who can cut through the fog.

Robert Reed

So tonight we’re gonna walk down those foggy alleys first. Before the bright spotlight of 1938 Metropolis, we’re heading back to ’35—into New Fun and More Fun, where Doctor Occult is catching the midnight cab while the rest of the world sleeps.

Robert Reed

Alright, let’s pull the office door open. First thing you see in those early strips: Doctor Occult himself. Tall, clean‑cut, trench coat, tie knotted just so, fedora shadowing his eyes. Looks like he should be on the Chicago police payroll, not chasing ghouls.

Simon Carver

And right under the logo it’ll say “The Ghost Detective” or “The Mystic Detective.” That billing tells you the trick. He’s not Sherlock Holmes deducing cigar ash; he’s the guy the cops call when the corpse gets up and walks around the morgue.

Robert Reed

Those first cases in New Fun and More Fun, they’ve got that pure pulp flavor. A midnight cab ride out to a creepy mansion. Cemetery panels with full moons hanging over crooked tombstones. Police sergeants whispering, “Doc, we think it’s a vampire, but we can’t print that in the papers.”

Simon Carver

You get a lot of that rhythm: Occult at his desk, pipesmoke curling, a worried client across from him. Then smash cut to the two of them standing in a graveyard, the Doc holding up this little disk—the Mystic Symbol of the Seven. It’s his badge from a secret order, his magic passkey.

Robert Reed

Yeah, that symbol’s fantastic. It glows, throws force fields, breaks spells—sorta the jack‑knife of mystic hardware. And usually, right when it lights up, your villain shows his real face: bat‑winged vampire, or a werewolf lunging in through a window, or a cult leader with weird eyes trying to hypnotize everybody in the room.

Simon Carver

There’s one run where he’s clearly up against a werewolf—big shadow against the moon, then this poor soul mid‑change, torn between man and beast. Another set of pages has “Vampire Venom” right there as the case title, and you’ve got Doc and a nervous uniformed cop tailing a cloaked figure through a cemetery. It’s like Universal horror by way of a newspaper strip.

Robert Reed

And then there are those cult stories. Secret orders, sinister leaders in hoods, victims lying on altars. Occult and the cops bust in, there’s a swirl of smoke, the Mystic Symbol flares, and the bad guy suddenly looks a whole lot less tough when he’s facing something older and stranger than his own racket.

Simon Carver

We should mention Rose Psychic, too. She’s this partner and fellow mystic who shows up as an equal, not just a damsel. Sometimes she’s the one who phones him with a lead, sometimes she’s standing shoulder‑to‑shoulder in the danger, reading the same weird runes. In later stories the lore says the two of them are even fused by magic, but even early on you feel that bond.

Robert Reed

The mood across all of it is wild. Half detective show—you’ve got police headquarters, mugshots, Doc grilling suspects. Half seance—floating spirits, glowing eyes, that Symbol of the Seven cutting through the dark. You can tell Siegel loves those crime pulps, and Shuster’s already learning how to stage a punch or a desperate chase, just with more fog machines turned on.

Simon Carver

What jumps out to me reading them now is the cadence of the captions. They’ve got that same breathless voice we later hear in Superman: “With unbelievable speed—” “In a flash—” “No mortal man could withstand—” Only here the thing you’re not supposed to withstand is a curse, or a hypnotic command, or some ghostly claw reaching from the wall.

Robert Reed

And the ethics are already there in miniature. Doctor Occult doesn’t just blast away. He wants to free the possessed victim, break the spell, expose the fraud behind the miracle. It’s that same Siegel and Shuster instinct: power is for protecting the innocent, not cashing in.

Simon Carver

They’re rough in spots—panels crowded with text, solutions that come a little too fast—but when you read a string of them you can hear the rehearsal. These two young men are learning how to build atmosphere, how to end a page on a cliff‑hanger, how to make you turn from “Vampire Venom” to “Werewolf!” to “The Master of Zombies” without putting the book down.

Robert Reed

Yeah, if Superman is the big parade down Main Street, Doctor Occult is the rehearsal in the basement, with the lights low and the wind rattling the windows. Same band, different tune.

Simon Carver

Now here’s where it gets really interesting. If you follow Doctor Occult all the way through those More Fun issues, you start to see something… familiar creeping in around the edges.

Robert Reed

You mean the cape. One day he’s a trench‑coat shamus, next thing you know he’s in what looks a whole lot like a superhero outfit—tight shirt, trunks, boots, and that flowing red cape.

Simon Carver

Exactly. Suddenly the “ghost detective” is flying. Not just drifting like a spirit—really soaring, arms out, cape whipping behind him, bold pose right in the foreground. You can hold those panels up next to early Superman art and squint and think, “Yeah, that’s the same hand figuring out its favorite shapes.”

Robert Reed

There are even scenes where he’s swooping over armies or strange landscapes, fighting robed villains in some far‑off mystic realm. It’s like Siegel and Shuster are stretching. They started with back‑alleys and graveyards, now they’re testing what it feels like when a man with powers stops being just a private eye and becomes a symbol.

Simon Carver

What changes isn’t just the wardrobe, it’s the scale. Early Doctor Occult is about one haunted house, one cursed man, one cult. A secret order called “The Seven,” this private law behind the scenes. Once he’s got that cape, the stakes feel bigger—battles between forces of good and evil, whole groups of people saved at once.

Robert Reed

Compare that with Superman a couple years later. In Action Comics you’ve got no secret society handing him orders. He’s right out in public: “champion of the oppressed,” the book calls him. No Mystic Symbol, just that S on his chest and his own conscience telling him who needs a good shaking.

Simon Carver

So with Doctor Occult, justice is kind of hidden. Mystical law. If you break the rules of the spirit world, this quiet man in a coat—or later, in a cape—shows up and sets the scales right. With Superman, justice is on the front page. Crooked politicians, dangerous mines, war profiteers; he’s dragging them into the spotlight for everybody to see.

Robert Reed

It’s like Siegel and Shuster move their hero from the back room to the rooftop. First they learn how to scare you—a glowing symbol in the dark, a whisper about vampires. Then they learn how to inspire you—a man in bright colors catching a car or a crashing plane where the whole city can watch.

Simon Carver

And yet, those old Doctor Occult pages still matter. They’re where two young creators from Cleveland tried on ideas: secret identities, capes, flying figures, powers used to protect folks who can’t protect themselves. You can see them asking, “How big can we make this? How bright can we turn the light?”

Robert Reed

Without that ghost detective, we might not get the Superman we know—the one standing up for regular joes, the way I like it, plain and simple. Doctor Occult is the rehearsal in a spooky theater; Superman’s the opening night on Broadway.

Simon Carver

So next time you see that S‑shield on a newsstand, remember there was once a smaller symbol—a little disk of the Seven—glowing in a much darker world. Same writers, same artist, learning how to bring a hero out of the shadows and into the sunlight. Please send your letters to distinguished comics radio @ gmail.com

Robert Reed

We’ll keep following that path in future broadcasts—Digging into More Fun Comics, Adventure Comics, all the places these characters grow up. Simon, you bring the graveyards, I’ll bring the capes.

Simon Carver

Deal. For Distinguished Comics Radio, this is Simon Carver in New York, signing off and thanking you for keeping us company in the dark.

Robert Reed

And this is Robert Reed in Chicago, saying good night, folks—keep your lamps lit, your comics dry, and your heroes close at hand.