The De-Evolution of Nellie the Nurse: Part IV of VI

As the 1950s gets under way, Nellie the Nurse artwork is provided by Howie Post. Howie's young women are all boobs and butts, reduced to those components of womanhood which are of most interest to males. Nellie is advertised across the top of the cover as 'America's Red-Headed Riot'. Along with her accentuated female bodily features, Nellie is not much of a thinker. She's a dumb red-headed provider of visual stimulation for the opposite sex. Stan Lee has obviously pushed the title over into straight gag humor. It not longer seems to qualify as good girl art because it's too cartoony, although the mammary glands and hourglass figure are still there, even the odd lingerie panel. Doesn't have the same effect as, for example, Bill Ward's Torchy, though.

I wonder if Nellie wears one of those bras with the stiff, cone-shaped cups to give her that bust line, or if she's just naturally endowed with such prominent female attributes. I guess we'll never know. Again, there's no longer much to do with the work of nurses or hospitals in the book. It was eventually canceled with the October 1952 issue, to be resurrected in 1957 for one issue with art by none other than Bill Everett. In the next post in this blog series we'll take a look at how Bill interpreted Nellie, before going on to her final demise at Dell. With Howie Post's degenerative female figures I see a parallel with the devaluation of women after World War II, with their enforced departure from the jobs they had held during the war and their return home to suburban domestic bliss. The de-evolution of Nellie the Nurse, with nurses always at this time being the prominent example of the career woman, is the decline of woman's status following the war, the reassertion of male dominance and the re-establishment of full patriarchy in society. Nellie gets dumber and dumber as the series progresses, and more and more reduced to breasts, buttocks, thighs, tiny waist, and a pretty face.

On the topic of good girl art, if Howie Post's Nellie fails to retain sufficient criteria to qualify as GGA, there were certainly good examples in earlier issues of the title, as we've already seen. Many were 52 page comics, containing other Timely career girl humor features, such as Tessie the Typist, and here, Hedy DeVine.

Plenty of lingerie panels in that one, and along with Stan Lee's Hedy as an example of how women stereotypically behave, we've got a nice picture of what women were supposedly about in the 1940s and early 50s.

The De-Evolution of Nellie the Nurse: Part III of VI

Nellie the Nurse 17 from February 1949 is one of several from the earlier part of the series that portrays Nellie as rather dumb, due to her feminine preoccupations with things such as looks and, here, romance, blinding her to the reality of what is actually transpiring. Nellie is accidentally depicted as a blond on this cover, although in earlier stories she is usually the stereotypical red-head nurse. In this issue's stories she is a brunette, perhaps having dyed her hair. Inside this book we're continuing to see the mild good girl art that we looked at in Part II of this series of posts about Nellie, with Nellie's figure becoming more pronouncedly hour-glass in shape, and her uniform starting to hug her hips as well as her breasts.

Here's another story from the same issue. Nellie's face is drawn with simple, flowing lines, and she's given big doe eyes with long lashes, a cute button nose, nicely curved lips with dark lipstick, and eyebrows of a perfect shape and color to accentuate those eyes.

By January 1950, at least on the cover of issue 22, Nellie has acquired that exaggerated hourglass body shape with very full, firm breasts, a waspy waist, well-rounded hips, full but not over-large thighs that draw into her knees with her tight skirt, and then nicely rounded calves and dainty feet. Just the kind of figure that female readers will need to buy all those girdles, uplifting bras, and weight removing or putting on pills and devices to attain. The cover of 22 is good-girl art in full swing. Nellie's surprised that Mr. O'Malley is running a fever, failing to notice that he's drooling uncontrollably simply from being in close proximity to her body with it's accentuated secondary sexual characteristics. Good girls follow all the fashion trends because they want to look beautiful, not realizing that they also look really sexy to the male onlooker. O'Malley's physiology is  awakened profoundly here by the visual stimulus provided by Nellie's shapely form.

Inside 22, however, we're seeing Nellie further reduced to the simplest of components. She's starting to act really dumb. Although she's still a brunette on the cover, she's returned to being a red-head in the stories. As we'll see from the next post in this blog series, once Howie Post takes over the feature, Nellie's remaining tenure in the original comic book series portrays her as a dumb, sexy red-head. Even in this issue, the feature has become an extended slapstick gag strip with minimal backgrounds and a very basic, undeveloped plot line. Does anyone actually do any work at this hospital, or do the staff just hang around socializing all day?

Next, then, we'll take a look at Howie Post's Nellie, and discuss her continuing decline in terms of the patriarchal society's changing attitude towards the place of women in the post-WWII period.

The De-Evolution of Nellie the Nurse: Part II of VI

This June 1948 issue, Nellie the Nurse 13, has a cover in keeping with what constitutes good girl art. She's jumping into the arms of Snazzy, not aware of what a turn on this is for him. At the same time her clothing shows her body contours in a way that will automatically get the dopamine flowing in a heterosexual male onlooker's brain. These are thick books and contain other strips besides Nellie. There are several Nellie stories and I've just included the first two in the book here. Notice that, in comparison to Nellie 2 from Part I of this series of posts, the figures are simpler, more stylized. The art in these two stories attempts to break free of the standard format (as did that in issue 2 to some extent) by having figures and other graphic elements extend beyond the confines of their frame, or the frame itself is angled, or in some cases adjacent frames form the frame. The nurse uniforms are now a little tighter than they were in issue 2, emphasizing the breasts. Romance is more prominent.

Both stories here feature Nellie's rival, Pam, whose plans to snag Nellie's admirers away from her inevitably end in embarrassing failure. Despite the hospital setting, care of patients and doing their job seems to take a back seat to the social component in the lives of these nurses.

Next we'll look at a couple of slightly later issues and see how this style morphs into one with much simpler figures, minimally detailed or absent backgrounds, and even less reference to the actual work of nurses.