Dale Messick

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Dalia "Dale" Messick (April 11, 1906 – April 5, 2005) was the first woman syndicated comic strip artist in the United States. She was best known as the creator of Brenda Starr, which at its peak in the 1950s ran in 250 newspapers.

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[edit] Biography

Dale Messick was born on April 11, 1906 in South Bend, Indiana to a seamstress and commercial artist. She had an interest in writing and drawing since childhood. She studied briefly at the Ray Commercial Art School in Chicago but left to begin a career as a professional artist.

She began working for a Chicago greeting card company and was successful but quit when her boss lowered her pay during the Great Depression. She moved to New York City and found work at another greeting card company at a higher salary, and began assembling a portfolio of comic strips after work.

Messick was not the first female comic strip creator; Nel Brinkley, Gladys Parker, and Edwina Dumm had all achieved success in the field. But there was still a bias against women and Messick decided to change her first name to Dale to help get her work seen by editors. She produced a number of ideas for strips with titles such as Weegee, Mimi the Mermaid, Peg and Pudy, the Struglettes, and Streamline Babies, none of which were picked up for publication.

[edit] Brenda Starr

Messick created the character of Brenda Starr in 1940, naming it after a debutante from the 1930s and basing her appearance on Rita Hayworth. Messick wanted to produce a strip with a female protagonist; she decided a career as a reporter would allow her character to travel and have adventures, adventures more glamorous than those actually experienced by most reporters. She later commented on this in a 1986 article about her in the San Francisco Chronicle:

I used to get letters from girl reporters saying that their lives were nowhere near as exciting as Brenda's. I told them that if I made Brenda's life like theirs, nobody would read it.

Her break came when she came to the attention of another woman, Mollie Slott, who worked as a "girl Friday" (à la His Girl Friday) for New York Daily News publisher (and syndicate head) Joseph Medill Patterson. Patterson, reputedly biased against women cartoonists, wouldn't sign her up for daily publication in the News, but he accepted Brenda Starr, Reporter for syndication as a Sunday comic, and it made its debut on June 30, 1940. It was quickly a success; its mixture of adventure and romance was popular with both male and female readers.

Messick went on to create a number of other comic strips but none achieved the success of Brenda Starr. The only other strip which she worked on which is generally remembered was Perry Mason which she illustrated.

Messick retired from producing Brenda Starr in 1980. Ramona Fradon (artist) and Linda Sutter (writer) took over the strip from 1980 to 1985. June Brigman (artist) and Mary Schmich (writer) have done the strip from 1985 to the present. Messick wasn't impressed with her successors' versions of Starr, according to a 1998 quote in the Sonoma County Independent:

Now it doesn't look like Brenda at all. She looks more like she works at a bank. No glamour, no curves, no fashion — but it's still going pretty good.

Following her retirement from Brenda Starr, she moved to Oakmont, California to be near her daughter and grandchildren. She continued to work and created a new strip, Granny Glamour, which ran in Oakmont Gardens Magazine, a local weekly magazine. It ended after she had a stroke in 1998 and couldn't draw any more.

[edit] Recognition

In 1995, Brenda Starr was one of twenty comic strips honored by a series of United States postage stamps; Messick was the only living creator.

She received the National Cartoonists Society's Story Comic Book Award for 1975 and their Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997 for her work on Brenda Starr.

[edit] External links and sources

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