All young illustrator Dalia Messick wanted was to create a famous comic strip.
She tried for the first time after graduating from high school in the mid-1920s, with no luck. She moved to Chicago to study at the Art Institute of Chicago, then took a job designing greeting cards and tried again. This time, she changed her name to ‘Dale,’ thinking a news syndicate would be more inclined to publish a man than a woman, but even that didn’t help.
In 1940 she tried one more time, with a comic strip featuring a bombshell Rita Hayworth look-alike named after a famous debutante. Brenda Starr, Girl Bandit was rejected — but an assistant to Joseph Medill Patterson, head of the Chicago Tribune-New York News syndicate to which Dale had submitted her strip, found the sample drawings and suggested Dale make Brenda Starr a newspaper reporter instead.
Brenda Starr, Reporter was born.
Set in Chicago, Brenda Starr featured a glamorous, adventurous and intrepid reporter with a nose for news that had her traveling the world to expose criminal and political malfeasance for The Flash. She also found love, first with the mysterious Basil St. John, of the eye patch and black orchid serum, and last with the handsome Russian ballet dancer Mikhail Goodenuf, who defected to the United States but was actually — gasp! — a secret agent.
There were of course other romances, and lots of adventure, during Brenda Starr’s 71-year run.
The strip debuted on June 30, 1940 in a comic book supplement to the Sunday Chicago Tribune. It was popular, eventually moving to the Sunday paper and finally becoming a daily strip in 1945. In its heyday during the 1950s, Brenda Starr appeared in a total of 250 newspapers; on Jan. 2, 2011, the day of the final strip, it was carried by 65 newspapers, 36 of them international.
Throughout its run, Brenda Starr was written and illustrated exclusively by women. Dale wrote and illustrated the strip for 40 years, then turned the illustration over to Ramona Fradon in 1980. She continued to script the comic until she retired in 1982, after which Linda Sutter took over writing responsibilities. Dale died in 2005.
Mary Schmich, now a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Chicago Tribune, began scripting Brenda Starr in 1985, and continued to do so until the comic strip ended in 2011. She worked with Fradon until her retirement in 1995, and then teamed up with illustrator June Brigman.
Pesky Miller, cub reporter. Muggs Walters, editor of The Flash. Abretha Breeze, stout cousin from Indiana. Hank O’Hair, androgynous city editor. Wanda Fonda, talk show host and Basil’s second wife. Starr Twinkle St. John, Brenda and Basil’s daughter.
These were the characters Dale created, and they existed in a contemporary, romantic world. She drew Brenda in the latest hairstyles and fashions, upping the va-va-voom factor to the point where illustrators for the news syndicate would secretly erase a few lines to hide cleavage, for example, before the day’s strip appeared in the newspaper.
Schmich introduced several new characters, including gossip columnist Gabby Van Slander and Chicago’s charismatic new mayor, Sterling Golden; she also flew Brenda around the world, with adventures in India, Paris and Belize. All the while, Brenda remained glamorous, sexy and really good at her job.
And the assistant who back in 1940 rescued Dale’s first pages from Joseph Patterson’s office? Her name was Mollie Slott, and she would become vice president of the news syndicate after Patterson, her boss, retired.
Girl power, all around.