Frank M. Young | May 7, 2025
There is much to unpack in this one-shot comic book. Three themes inform Party Line Comics, a collection of public-service pieces commissioned by The Wisconsin Telephone Company at the start of the 1950s. Drawn by Dik Browne, future stalwart of Madison Avenue ad agencies like Johnstone & Cushing, artist of the long-running Boys’ Life comic-strip The Tracy Twins and part of the Connecticut newspaper cartoonist community via his two successful strips, Hi and Lois and Hagar the Horrible. Browne was gifted with an appealing and versatile style.
His was an earthier variant on the mid-century modern mien of Roy Doty, whose long-running Wordless Workshop strip informed generations of Popular Science readers. Browne absorbed some of the simplified approach of Mort Walker when they joined forces to create Hi and Lois; the two were simpatico, tho’ Browne preferred more detail in his approach. The Tracy Twins shows him doing his kind of comics — stylized, eye-catching but with cross-hatching and other illustrative devices alien to the Walker approach, which rivaled Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy in its formalized bigfoot vibe.
That is our first point of interest. The second and third require some social history set-up to millennial and younger readers (done in an uncredited introduction piece) and demonstrate a social America that is just about gone. Few homes retain landline phones, so the concept of the shared telephone line — a communications device with no privacy or reliability — might sound like something from a steampunk novel.
I grew up in a North Florida home with a heavy, imposing black telephone rented from our local Bell Telephone office. It was hard-wired into the wall; no extension cords or jacks yet existed. If you wished to make or take a call, you did it in one place, standing, as the cords didn’t expand. At age three, my most reliable amusement was the careful pick-up of the phone’s murder-weapon-worthy receiver to hear neighborhood teenage girls gossip about their crushes on members of The Beatles and to complain about the idiocy of high school life. Among my earliest memories are my silent witness to their hormonal displays of attraction, vows of fealty to international celebrities and humorous takedowns of long-dead biology instructors. My inevitable giggles gave away the game, and their resultant outrage was the real payoff. Good times!
This is the world of Life’s That Way…, the series of one-page public service comics drawn by Browne in his iconic manner. Imagine a less loutish and cynical version of They’ll Do It Every Time!, Jimmy Hatlo’s 1929 King Features Syndicate panel, which outlived him by generations; it ended a long run in 2008, by which time American social behavior had altered beyond recognition.
In these one-page scenarios, a person (or persons) commit some sort of telephonic faux-pas: they leave the receiver “off the hook”; gab incessantly while important calls try to reach them; or delay answering the phone until the caller hangs up in disgust. Emergencies cause one member of a party line to interrupt small talk with a real-life crisis. These user errors end with egg on someone’s face, via a burst of embarrassment lines, flying beads of sweet or a reddening of the cheeks to indicate embarrassment. Since there’s only so many ways to misuse a standard telephone, scenarios recur in this series of strips. The stakes are often low in these simple storylines: dates are thwarted, appointments skewed, and unwelcome surprises dropped on those who spend too long on the line.
This brings up the third thread in these strips: how American social behavior has changed in the seven decades since these strips ran in Midwestern newspapers. Average folks of 1950 were much more cautious in their actions — what other people thought mattered much more. Civility was the standard, not the exception. Extremes in emotion, volume or insistence were frowned upon. Thus, people feared social embarrassment and went out of their way to avoid it.
These impulses have been surgically removed from the behavior of the masses; we have a convicted felon and rapist in charge of our country. Though intended as a series of not-so-subtle pointers re: the dos and don’ts of telecommunication, Life’s That Way…now reads as a poignant capsule of a time when what the other person said, did or thought had greater consequences, and made Americans part of a tacit agreement to comply with good behavior. (This doesn’t mean people weren’t raving jerks; they just seldom had their outbursts in public. Behind closed doors, terrible behavior occurred around the clock. We’re human beings. We do such things.)
Browne’s artwork has a timeless pop elegance. His early work reminds of Bill Williams, an artist of similar skill and grace who never broke into the mainstream of newspaper comics. He did a long-running comic strip for Boys’ Life, “Pee-Wee Harris,” and collaborated with comic books’ greatest writer of the 20th century, John Stanley; he also did commercial art and gag cartoons in an era when a hard-working cartoonist could have a successful career and social status.
The compositions of these panels are often head shots or two-shots, but Browne’s vocabulary of body language and facial expression never fails him; for their brief existence, these John and Jane Q. Publics become relatable figures, their good intentions thwarted by thoughtlessness and their hubris rewarded with public shaming. These strips bring home the point that new technology is always challenged by mankind’s behavior patterns. Then and now, we’re an easily distracted species, and careless actions implode on us. Cue the sitcom laugh-track!
A trait long-gone from comics — unpunctuated sentences — is a constant in the strips It’s disconcerting to read the utterances of the characters This paragraph might give you a sense of how dialogue is handled in these charming but slightly judgmental comic strips
Party-Line Comics is a time capsule of democracy in comical mis-action. People being people is always comedy gold, and in Browne’s deft, elegance pen strokes, their inapt experiences transcend the tsk-tsk tone of the narratives (which, I presume, were written by someone at The Wisconsin Telephone Company). About Comics seems devoted to cataloguing these obscure, forgotten by-ways of comics-as-social-engineering, and I’m curious to see their other excavations.
English (US) · 