(New Fun Comics 006, 1935) 

Doctor Occult debuts in the final two issues of New Fun Comics and then appears in More Fun Comics through to issue 033 in 1938. Much of his deal is summed up in this single page that is the entirety of that first appearance: a trenchcoat-clad supernatural detective with a mystic symbol that kind of looks like a hypno-coin and an assistant named Rose Psychic*, Doctor Occult is the very first DC Comics character who approaches the status of super-hero.

*I had a very good bit about how Rose Psychic and Clare Voyant – aka the Golden Age Black Widow – should have been merged in the Amalgam crossover to create the Golden Age version of whatever the Amalgam Black Widow was called, only to discover to my shock and horror that the Black Widow has no associated Amalgam character. I guess that 1997 was a real fallow period for Natasha Romanov, but what a thing to find out at 1030 AM!

Anyway, the character would have been called something like Ella S. Perception.

The early major development in Doctor Occult’s origin, the revelation that he is affiliated with a secret mystic organization called the Seven, actually takes place in a story that is published in Centaur Publications’ Comics Magazine 001 under the name “Dr Mystic, the Occult Detective” and then – thanks to the extremely flexible nature of early comic book publishing – continues as a Doctor Occult story in More Fun Comics 014. Occult is contacted by his old pal Zator in a weirdly aggro way that is very reminiscent of the way that 90s comics characters interacted (“the easiest way to contact you was to get your attention and have a really cool-looking and fun-to-illustrate fight!”), and then rushes off through the astral plane to help confront the menace of Koth.

We don’t actually learn too much about the Seven, other than that there are seven of them (plus Zator and Doctor Occult and retroactively Rose Psychic), that they are on the lookout for mystic threats and that their leader is a huge green guy with those really intense Joe Shuster eyes.

He only really uses it for this adventure (it’s specifically for Koth-fighting) but I always like to point out when a super-hero has an alternate outfit. Complete with magic sword!

UPDATE 1937