The redoubtable and risible Reptile of Steel appeared in filler cartoons across a half dozen DC titles from 1963 through the remainder of the decade.
Like DC’s Casey the Cop, Moolah the Mystic, Cap’s Hobby Hints, and Little Pete, Super Turtle was the creation of Henry Boltinoff, whose panel cartoons could be seen in Esquire and The Saturday Evening Post.
The strip’s gags ran to two themes: A) Super Turtle uses various unorthodox means to respond to an emergency and B) rescued citizens fail to give Super Turtle much respect. Much the same kind of thing happened to Captain Nice, a superhero played by William Daniels who appeared on an NBC sitcom during Super Turtle’s run.
The Turtle of Tomorrow also did a lot of super-digging, which is apparently a funny superpower, or so someone thought. Superman and Superboy both made cameo appearances in the strip.
A few of Super Turtle’s feats were species-specific, as when he rescued a fellow turtle from becoming soup on a restaurant menu.
In one of my favorites, he flew supplies to a man stranded on a desert island — turtle food. I have no idea why he didn’t fly the man home. Super Turtle had his own way of doing things.
Offhanded and corny as they were, these brief gags were seen by a lot of readers. For example, the required circulation notice on one of the pages below the Super Turtle cartoon noted that in 1962, DC’s Superboy title was selling an average of 605,000 issues a month.
Ty Templeton finally devised an origin for Super Turtle decades later (Silver Age 80-Page Giant 1, July 2000). It seems the residents of the doomed Planet Galapagon attempted to build spaceships to escape their fate and preserve turtlekind, but, being turtles and necessarily slow, got only one small ship completed. So it was that Tur-Tel, the infant son of the scientist Shh-Ell, was sent to Earth, where he lived in a pond of a kindly farm couple (after they had unsuccessfully tried to make soup out of the invulnerable reptile).
It’s interesting to recall that Super Turtle wasn’t even DC’s first super-powered anthropomorphic turtle. The Terrific Whatzit (a/k/a McSnurtle the Turtle) was a Chelonian version of the Flash who’d appeared in DC’s Funny Stuff 20 years earlier. Along with his super speed, the Whatzit acquired a ghost-like “automatic conscience” who refused to shut up until he went into action against evil.
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