I bought a Marvel comic last week.

I can't remember the last time I did that. Years, possibly even decades ago. I guess that's typical behaviour of all apostates- a conscious rejection of all you once loved. Plus, I'm not that interested in superheroes and that seems to be mostly what they do these days (though I haven't been paying enough attention to know if that's all they do).

But when I saw a copy of Night Nurse on the stands I picked it up. Not because of Siya Oum's cover which features Daredevil, Iron Fist and Power Man (though it took me a while to realise that) and is rather too stylistically sketchy to be that interesting, but because I had some vague memory of the title from my decaying Marvel knowledge.

One of three comics launched in 1972 to attract women readers to the Marvel universe (along with The Cat and Shanna the She Devil) you couldn't say it met the objective. In his official history of Marvel Comics, published in 1991, the author Les Daniels devotes one solitary sentence to Night Nurse. One sentence. That probably sums up the comic's standing in Marvel history. A small cul de sac which, after all, only lasted for four issues before disappearing.

It had no fan favourite writers or artists involved (it was written by Jean Thomas, the wife of then Marvel editor-in-chief Roy Thomas and drawn by veteran Superman artist Winslow Mortimer). It didn't benefit from superhero crossovers. And, really, the only reason we're seeing it now is because Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev drafted the character out of obscurity to nurse a severely wounded Matt Murdock in their ongoing The Murdock Papers sequence in the Daredevil comic.

So why did I buy it? A faint nostalgia for seventies Marvel non-superhero comics (a time when the company were publishing horror comics, kung fu comics, and sword and sorcery comics), I guess. A nostalgia, too, for reading my sister's comics. And a sociological interest in how comics tried to talk to girls and women at the time.

I've been dipping into Trina Robbins's book From Girls to Grrlz, her history of "girl comics". Robbins is dismissive of this era in mainstream romance comics, comparing them disparagingly with the alternative comics beginning to emerge in the early 1970s.

Writing about the attempts by romance comics to deal with feminism and the counterculture, Robbins points out that "no matter how well-drawn, read as though they were written by clueless forty-five-year-old men - which they were."

Night Nurse, though, was written by a woman. And what is interesting about it is that, unlike many of those comics written by the 45-year-old men (which tended to see the women involved put their boyfriends or marriage before their career), career and duty are put ahead of love and romance.

Night Nurse is, in fact, the story of three nurses at Metro General in New York: middle-class Linda Carter, rich kid Christine Palmer and ghetto child Georgia Jenkins. All three have their own issues and problems but they are also devoted to their profession (even when it contradicts their politics or beliefs).

The stories, to be honest, are all soapy melodrama - full of predictably attractive doctors and life-and-death operation, but also riots and mobsters. The three nurses are often in tears. In fact the character ident in the title legend on the cover of every issue (which looks like it was drawn by George Tuska; that Marvel knowledge still goes deep) shows Linda with tears in her eyes.

There's even surprising concessions to the male gaze, as the nurses stand around at various points in their underwear (of course I could be just projecting my own male gaze here). And yet it remains very readable.

That's partly down to the fact that it's of its time. It's aware of women's lib and even black power. The politics of power cuts is brought up in the first issue. One black character says of them: "Why is our part of town always gets 'browned out', like they call it. How come we're always the ones left in the dark? Why not Park Avenue for a change?"

But I think it's fair to say the comics also work because they give the three women agency. Nursing, of course, has always been one of the professions where women can be active in a narrative. And that is the case here. True, when the mobster walks the halls of Metro General it's the handsome doctor who ultimately tackles him. But Linda Carter is shown as standing up to him. She even gets to hold the gun at one point. (Let's not worry that that rather negates her obligation to caring. This is comics.)

Listen, I can't claim there is anything special about these comics. The most obvious description would be solid. But Solid is okay. It's interesting when you compare it with the Bendis-Maleev Daredevil comic that accompanies it in this one-off reprint. The latter is far more sophisticated technically in both art and writing but, frankly, is far less interesting.

I accept that's partly down to the fact that we're seeing only one chapter of a longer story and, as already stated, I'm not very interested in superheroes. But the narrative is dull. Lots of people confront other people. There's nothing else to it. And Night Nurse here is effectively given nothing to do. The women given agency here are Elektra and Black Widow and the language they talk in is violence.

The original Night Nurse is 40 years older now, but seems to me much more progressive.

These days Marvel has been feminising some of its heroes, most notably Ms Marvel (to much acclaim) and, notoriously, Thor.

Is it worth asking, though, if nursing is ultimately a more heroic occupation than superheroism?