A cartoonist, in 1940 Messick created the comic strip “Brenda Starr, Reporter”, which she drew and wrote for 43 years. At the time, it was rare for a comic to have a strong, female, working character; Messick modeled the smart Starr character after herself, but it was a long road to respect.
“Throughout her life, [Messick] met a lot of resistance from men,” says Trina Robbins, author of A Century of Women Cartoonists. “Even in the early 1960s, [male interviewers] played her up as a dizzy dame instead of this brilliant comics creator. Brenda had a better image than Lois Lane, who was always being rescued by Superman. Brenda Starr always solved her own problems and got herself out of fixes.”
Still, her syndicate was not exactly a friend of the strip: if Messick included cleavage on Brenda, their editor would erase it. During its heyday, the comic was in 250 newspapers, but in 1983 her syndicate pressured her to retire, replacing her with other artists because she didn’t have ownership of her own creation. The strip continues, but now is only run in about 20 papers.
She received better treatment from others: the U.S. Postal Service issued a “Brenda Starr” stamp in 1995, and the National Cartoonists Society gave her its lifetime achievement award in 1997. Messick died April 5 after suffering several strokes. She was 98.