Book Review: The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G. edited by Tom Heintjes

reviewed by David Beard, Professor of Rhetoric, University of Minnesota Duluth

Tom Heintjes (ed.) The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G. Bull Moose Publishing, 2024. $24.99 (Paperback). Available at

https://www.lulu.com/shop/tom-heintjes/the-complete-betty-brown-phg/paperback/product-zm82g7d.html

The field of comics studies stands on the same foundations, now, as other academic disciplines: scholarly rigor and, where possible, objectivity. To study comics really isn’t all that different from studying art, literature, film, mass communication, or other domains of human creative or literate activity.

And yet, there are differences, deep within our disciplinary DNA. For example, where connoisseurship, in art history, is built upon institutional records and practices in museums, in comics studies, the early connoisseurship was engaged by fans, eager to track down the artists on their favorite, unsigned strips. Biographical criticism of comics art often began, in some cases, in interviews conducted at conventions or by fanzines. Beneath the foundation of work in comics studies, in other words, is a layer of sediment created by passion.

The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G., by Tom Heintjes, is an example of such a passion project. (So, too, is Heintjes excellent Hogan’s Alley magazine, which celebrates (and sometimes excavates) the medium in interesting ways. See the website at <https://www.hoganmag.com/>

Betty Brown holds a Ph.G., a now-obsolete pharmacy degree which enables her to be both pharmacist and small businesswoman.¹ The pharmacy profession has changed a lot since the trade publication Drug Topics ran these strips, during the Depression and through the second World War (1934-1948). Betty Brown’s life (dispensing medication, working as the town’s unofficial healthcare provider, while also running a small business faced with cutthroat competitors) is filled with challenges, humor and some larger-than life, almost movie-serial style adventure.

Assembled in part as a passion project during the pandemic lockdown, The Complete Betty Brown appears to be an unlikely subject for a collection. While publishers have collected a lot of comic strips since the paperback’s creation (and more recently in the Library of American Comics series, and, less respectfully, in the quirky anthologies assembled by Yoe Books), no one was clamoring for Betty Brown. It took the Heintjes’ passion to demonstrate that we should have wanted this work. The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G. completes a picture of the work of its creators, it completes a picture of the medium of comics, and it completes a picture of one of the most important areas of healthcare, itself often overlooked. I mean “Completing the picture” in the sense of:

Completing the picture of the work of its creators, Zack Mosley and Boody Rogers

The creators are some of the most popular in golden-age comica history. Zack Mosley was a comic strip artist best known for the aviation adventures in The Adventures of Smilin' Jack, which ran in 300 newspapers at its height and was a transmedia phenomenon (starring in comic strips, books, radio, and movie serials). Betty Brown gives us a small window into an artist establishing his craft, alongside his early career colleague, Boody Rogers. (Rogers was the subject of a collection by Fantagraphics in 2009, Craig Yoe’s Boody: The Bizarre Comics of Boody Rogers, and a section of The Comics Journal in 2006.) As such, this work fills gaps in their biography.

Mosley worked on early Buck Rogers, and that should give a sense of the art style – the figures are built of undulating lines, curves, and swooshes. Built to live entirely in black and white, the strips use wells of black ink to pull the eye forward and back, left to right, in a way that makes the strips a joy to read – and an important part of our understanding of the developing style of their creators.

Completing the picture of the medium of comics

Our picture of comics, as a medium, tends to drift in two directions – the mass medium, aimed at broad audiences, printed in hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of copies, distributed across vast geographies, and the art comic, aimed at a more intimate audience. The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G. served a different need.

Printed in Drug Topics, Betty Brown was read only by pharmacists and related professionals inside a pharmacy practice. The series, then, looks like its mass media counterparts, and bears superficial genre markers (oscillating between an empowered woman and a damsel in distress), but fundamentally, the strip was there to echo and to reinforce the ideas the trade magazine wanted to advance. When Betty discusses the best location for her pharmacy, she is parroting the points that Drug Topics makes about proper location for retail pharmacy.

At the same time as it is a marketing and education tool, the strip attempts to generate pathos and excitement and even a few cliffhangers, matching the energy of its mass media contemporaries. The compromises Mosley and Rogers made resulted in an unusual example of the medium, worth a look by any historian of comics.

Completing the picture of pharmacy in the Modern era

Finally, this volume should appeal to historians of medicine and perhaps even graphic medicine. Neither of these two fields focus on pharmacy, which is ostensibly one of the most intriguing professions in modern health care in the United States.

Retail pharmacists are among the only health care professionals who can be accessed without any insurance, anytime. In communities where poverty is high and underinsurance rates are higher, the pharmacist is a first responder, in many ways. The series of strips in 1942, in which Betty Brown helps take care of residents of her small town after a fire, reflects this – pharmacists are healers. (This is even more true today, when pharmacists hold not the antiquated Ph.G. but a Pharm.D. degree.)

And yet, retail pharmacists are also the most invisible in popular culture. While medical dramas are a staple of television and have been a staple of comics (from Ben Casey to the Night Nurse), the pharmacist does their work unseen. Betty Brown fills that gap. As Robert A. Buerki noted in his essay in Pharmacy in History,

Drawing its inspiration from the pages of Drug Topics, radio soap operas, and the pervasive fascination with sensational crime in the 1930s, Betty Brown, Ph.G. presents an unusual, even unique picture of the practice of pharmacy in America during the mid- 1930s and early 1940s.

Tom Heintjes has offered the community of scholars in comics studies, in graphic medicine, and in the history of medicine a gift of immeasurable value. I recommend this book for library purchase for scholarly purposes.²

^[1] “The Graduate of Pharmacy (Ph.G.)” was superseded by the Bachelor of Pharmacy degree (B.Pharm.) in the early part of the 20th century.  The B.Pharm. was itself superseded by the R.Ph. (Registered Pharmacist), which has been more or less superseded by the Pharm. D., though some pharmacists still practice with the R.Ph.

^[2] There are, as Heintjes notes, problematic representations of women and of people of color in this text which limit its usefulness to scholarly purposes. I could not give this book to a friend as a good read, but I could offer it to a researcher as an important source. And that is the spirit within which I offer it to readers of IJOCA.

 Citations

Buerki, Robert A. "The Saga of Betty Brown, Ph. G." Pharmacy in history 30.3 (1988): 163-167.