In one of Betty Brown, Ph.G.’s most harrowing 1935 continuities, the plucky blond pharmacist faces down a gang of ruthless narcotics peddlers who are forcing her at gunpoint to fill their forged prescriptions. If she refuses their demands, they’ll throw a vial of acid into the face of Dimples, the adorable abandoned baby left on her doorstep. Undeterred, Betty manages to infiltrate the gang by pretending to be a mob moll with romantic designs on Diamond, the lead thug. Then, she tips off a team of G-men who show up, disguised, to her staged wedding to Diamond as her bridesmaids in drag.

As a certain two-way wrist radio wearing comic strip hero of the era might have exclaimed, “Ye Gods!”

Sadly, for American newspaper readers at the time, these action-splashed adventures didn’t play out on the comics pages of the Chicago Tribune or the New York Daily News. Instead, they riveted the readers of Drug Topics, a weekly industry publication for pharmacists and druggists.

Gorgeously drawn and plotted by Smilin’ Jack creator Zack Mosley and later by future Sparky Watts creator Boody Rogers (both working under the pseudonym Cliff Terrell), the strip, which ran from 1934 to 1948, is every bit as engrossing as Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy and as zany as Al Capp’s Lil Abner.

But it’s likely the strip would have remained lost forever in dusty old bound volumes of Drug Topics stored in North Carolina if Atlanta’s eagle-eyed Hogan’s Alley publisher Tom Heintjes hadn’t spotted Rogers’ instantly identifiable drawings in an excerpt from Betty Brown posted online. The cartoon arts magazine editor and comics historian then began digging.

Blessedly for comics lovers, Heintjes has now lovingly preserved, edited and annotated the entire run of the ground-breaking strip in the beautiful new book “The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G.: Her Full Story, 1934-1948” (Hogan’s Alley, $24.99).

In drug stores across America in 1934, Betty Brown quietly broke ground, becoming the first pharmacist and the first degreed female professional in comics (at the time, Ph.G. was short for Graduate of Pharmacy). The result is also quite likely the only comics collection to ever be jointly classified on book shelves as “Pharmacy/Comic Art/Women’s Studies.” Accordingly, Heintjes, who also wrote the volume’s introduction, has dedicated his six-year labor of love to his mom, a famously fastidious housekeeper “who never threw out my comic books.”  Meanwhile, Heintjes’ backstory of how he rescued and recovered the long-lost Betty from the clutches of 90-year-old decaying drug journals is nearly as harrowing as anything the comic strip heroine endured in the age of the New Deal’s National Recovery Administration and gangsters wielding tommy guns.

Before he introduces the adventures of Betty Brown, Ph.G. to comics fans at this weekend’s DragonCon in downtown Atlanta, Tom Heintjes spoke with Eldredge ATL about his own adventures bringing Betty Brown, Ph.G. back to life for a new generation of fans. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Eldredge: As the publisher of Hogan’s Alley we rely on you as our comic arts authority. Until you started writing about and posting about this, I had never heard of Betty Brown, Ph.G. How did you learn about this very niche comic strip?

Heintjes: As part of my social media efforts, I’m always on the lookout for oddball cartooning facts or a piece of history I can bring attention to. I was looking online at a magazine titled Drug Topics and they were discussing their earlier years and showed one panel of a comic strip named Betty Brown, Ph.G. by an artist named Cliff Terrell. Two things immediately struck me. One, I’d never heard of a cartoonist named Cliff Terrell and two, that panel was unmistakably drawn by Boody Rogers, who has such a unique style. I was intrigued so I called Drug Topics. Then I started digging around and located someone with a full archive [of Drug Topics issues]. I could not believe what I was seeing.

Eldredge: One of the best things about this project for a lot of us comics readers is we’re being introduced to Betty Brown, Ph.G. through this collection you’ve published. What was it about Betty that was important for you as a comics historian?

Heintjes: Betty Brown was the first female professional in comics. There were other women with jobs. When women entered the work force they tended to be stenographers and that was then represented in the comics, including strips like Tillie the Toiler. But Betty had an advanced degree, she was a licensed pharmacist. Sure, Brenda Starr was a reporter but as we both know, you don’t need a special license for that. Betty was the first woman in comics to have an advanced college degree and to work in her profession. It was a harbinger of how women would be depicted later on but this was running in a single publication in 1934. In that sense, she really moved the needle.

Eldredge: The strip started out in 1934 as Bob Steele, Ph.G., and was drawn by a guy named Grant Powers and it was kind of a gag strip, right?

Heintjes: Yes, and then a creative change was introduced and Zack Mosley took over the strip and Betty was introduced. Let’s say she staged a bloodless coup and Bob Steele was written out and Betty took over and it became Betty Brown, Ph.G. in August of 1934. Now, in 1933, Mosley had introduced what was originally a weekly strip called On The Wing that later became Smilin’ Jack. That strip became a phenomenon, a big hit that spun off into comic books and movies. Zack Mosley became a cartooning star and his [newspaper] syndicate did not want him signing his name to anything that wasn’t Smilin’ Jack. He was a hot property. So they forced him to come up with the pseudonym Cliff Terrell. That byline stayed on the strip until it ended in 1948.

Eldredge: So how did Boody Rogers get involved in this pharmacist comic strip?

Heintjes: At some point in 1934, Smilin’ Jack became a daily strip and Zack Mosley’s work load multiplied by seven. He had a longtime friend and assistant named Boody Rogers, who eventually segued into the primary creator of the Betty Brown strip but he was still signing it as Cliff Terrell. He never got to sign his name on the strip, which is a shame.

Eldredge: Could you elaborate a bit on finding the Drug Topics archives? With a comic strip like Dick Tracy, it was sent out to hundreds of newspapers by the Chicago Tribune-New York Daily News syndicate on sheets containing a week’s worth of strips. But Betty Brown, Ph.G. was published by a single publication. What were the archives like? These strips are in beautiful condition.

Heintjes: (laughing) You’re very kind. What I had to work with were thick hardcover bound volumes of the [Drug Topics] journal that were about two inches thick. There were six months to a volume. The pages were fragile and yellowed. You couldn’t just plop them onto a scanner. I set up a tripod with a digital camera and shot each strip. In 2018 and 2019, I made several trips to North Carolina to do this work. There were hundreds of strips to photograph. Then in 2020, the world shut down. So I sat and one by one, panel by panel, word balloon by word balloon, obsessively in Photoshop restored these strips from the photographs I had taken. I’m not a professional restoration guy but I taught myself things, asked friends for tips and watched YouTube videos.

Eldredge: That’s astonishing. These look so pristine, like something a newspaper syndicate would archive and store in acid-free boxes somewhere.

Heintjes: People have asked, “Wow, you got syndicate proofs?!” And I tell them, “There was no syndicate and there were no proofs.” Thank God for Photoshop and the time I had on my hands during the pandemic. I struggle with insomnia anyway so I’d get up in the wee hours and restore some Betty Brown.

Eldredge: This was quite the labor of love securing, restoring and now publishing this first-ever complete collection of Betty Brown, Ph.G. comic strips. What motivated you to undertake this project?

Heintjes: I was a big fan of Zack Mosley. He’s a terrific cartoonist whose work holds up really well today. And I’m a huge fan of Boody Rogers. He’s such a gifted unique cartoonist and I love his work. To find this large body of work by two well-known cartoonists at the peak of their powers that had been unseen for decades was incredible. I couldn’t believe this work was sitting there waiting to be found. It needed to be seen. I hoped that others would feel the same way. I shopped the project around and everybody passed so it became a Hogan’s Alley book. I think people passed on it because of the Ragtime character.

Eldredge: So let’s talk about Ragtime, Betty’s clerk and the strip’s sole Black character.

Heintjes: Ragtime was my sole misgiving about tackling this project. He’s a terribly dated artifact of the era. It was a comic trope not just in Betty Brown but in a lot of other strips. It’s embarrassing and it’s appalling.

Eldredge: At the same time you had to balance the negativity of the Ragtime character with rescuing a strip that was trailblazing for women in comics.

Heintjes: Right. Did the good outweigh the bad? I argued that it did. There was too much good work there. Despite Ragtime, which is offensive to modern eyes, there was too much good stuff there worth saving. I always apologize for the character but he was loyal, smart and funny. He was resourceful and a great friend to Betty. But he’s also a terrible stereotype.

Eldredge: But to your point, there are countless times in these continuities where he gets Betty out of a jam.

Heintjes: Yeah, he outsmarts everyone and saves the day. He’s a great character but visually, he’s completely offensive. You look at him and recoil but what he did in the strip as a character complemented Betty.

Eldredge: For anyone who thinks a comic strip about a pharmacist is going to be dull, Betty Brown is dealing with drug racketeers pointing guns at her forcing her to fill their prescriptions, G-men, drug peddlers, counterfeiters, there’s plots about poisoning people and mobsters rubbing people out. This isn’t boring stuff, is it?

Heintjes: I was going to mention the mobsters who want her to pay protection money or they’re going to throw acid at her! It was an incredible array of devices. Zack Mosley loved dramatic continuities like that, the cliffhangers, the violence, criminals and gunplay and all of that. When he was more directly involved in the strip, it leaned heavily in that direction. But Boody Rogers, on the other hand, was much more into the screwball comedy. When he takes over, you see a hillbilly family being introduced and a soda jerk so tall you never see his head in the strip. That’s what Boody Rogers exceled at.

Eldredge: And of course, every great comic strip needs a great villain like Abner Kutter, Betty’s business rival across the street who’s out to destroy her. I love that he starts off a bit like Mr. Potter in “It’s a Wonderful Life” but then he starts moving in on his son’s fiancé and then rebuffed, he frames her for a stick-up. He might be the 1930s definition of toxic masculinity.

Heintjes: (laughs) Yes! He was the Michael Myers of retail competitors. He just never, ever stops. If he had a top hat and a moustache, he’d be twirling it. He was the archetype of the ruthless competitor who could not abide a woman competitor. To be bested by a woman was just intolerable to him. He constantly got humiliated, he constantly got his comeuppance but he never gave up. In retail terms, his very name implies price wars and cutting prices. He was the antithesis of playing by the rules. He’s a great arch enemy.

Eldredge: Betty Brown, Ph.G. is a terrific feminist for this time period. She goes into the lab to analyze counterfeit drugs in one continuity and we also discover she’s got a hell of a haymaker. And when she punches someone, there’s that terrific “Socko!” sound effect.

Heintjes: Yes, and they fall forward which I always found a funny visual. But yes, Betty was very self-reliant in a time when the cliché was the damsel in distress and waiting for a man to cut her ropes and free her from the train tracks. Betty rolled up her sleeves, figured out what was wrong with the medicines that weren’t working and she punched a guy in the face if she had to. Without coming out and using the term feminist at the time, Betty was a self-reliant feminist businesswoman in a time when that was largely male-dominated, especially in the comics.

Eldredge: What I love best about this collection is that thanks to you, we’re getting exposed to this material for the first time. Unless you were a pharmacist or a drug store owner in the 1930s or ‘40s, folks never got to read these strips. Reading these for the first time, I kept thinking this could have done well in mainstream newspapers.

Heintjes: I agree. Of course, this spoke to a pharmacist readership but there’s a lot there for a general interest audience as well. Drug Topics’ readership was male-dominated because most pharmacists at the time were men. And I’m sure Zack Mosley created this female character to attract the male gaze. But there are a lot of general interest themes in Betty Brown that hold up well today. It’s still engrossing. I’m gratified to present this work that nobody knew about by creators that a lot of people care about. And to show this chapter of their career that was heretofore unknown. That makes me very happy.

 “The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G.: Her Full Story, 1934-1948” (Hogan’s Alley, $24.99) is out now and available for purchase via the Hogan’s Alley website (in hardback or paperback) and Betty’s own book website. Tom Heintjes will also be selling copies of “The Complete Betty Brown, Ph.G.” and issues of Hogan’s Alley at DragonCon’s Artists Alley Friday, Aug. 30 to Monday, Sept. 2 on the fourth floor of AmericasMart at Booth 315.

Richard L. Eldredge

Richard L. Eldredge is the founder and editor in chief of Eldredge ATL. As a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Atlanta magazine, he has covered Atlanta since 1990.