Interview: Indiana's Dale Messick broke barriers for women cartoonists

The comic strip "Brenda Starr, Reporter" first appeared on newspaper pages in 1940. The strip's lead character, an adventurous and glamorous news reporter named Brenda Starr, stood out in the male dominated world of comic strip heroes.

So too did its creator, Dale Messick, born Dalia Messick in South Bend, Indiana in 1906.

The architecture and design historian Connie Zeigler researched Messick’s life for a new publication titled "Dale Messick and Brenda Starr, Breaking Barriers and Hitting Deadlines," part of the Commercial Article book series published by the Indianapolis design studio Commercial Artisan.

Zeigler grew up reading the Brenda Starr comic strip in the Indianapolis Star.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Connie Zeigler: Brenda Starr was a reporter who was hired to be the social reporter at her newspaper, and she didn't want that job. She wanted to do real news. and she ended up finally being able to do that through her own chutzpah.

They kept trying to put her back in her little box of just doing social news, but she kept getting big stories, and oftentimes she was part of the big story, and she would get kidnapped. She was kidnapped numerous times during her career.

Long: Zeigler says Messick began refining her story telling skills during her childhood in northern Indiana.

Zeigler: She was basically so smart, she was allowed to be let out of class, even in grade school, to go to other classes to weave stories for classes that she wasn't even attending. The teachers would call her to come and tell stories to their class.

Long: In her early 20s, Messick left Indiana to study art in Chicago. Eventually, she made her way to New York. Like her character Brenda Starr, Zeigler says Messick struggled to be taken seriously as a woman in the newspaper trade.

Zeigler: Dale was treated very much like, “What a cute thing she is. Isn't she doing a cute comic strip with a girl who's in trouble a lot.” By the way, Dale's real name was Dalia. The story that she told was that she couldn't get seen by editors with a woman's name, so she chose a gender neutral name to put on her comic strips. She believed that was how she ended up with her first published comic strip Brenda Starr.

Long: Brenda Starr was a hit with readers, running for 70 plus years in the comic strips. Brenda Starr has appeared on a U.S. postage stamp and inspired multiple television and film adaptations, including a 1986 production starring Brooke Shields. Zeigler says Brenda Starr's fame made it all the way to the White House.

Zeigler: When Brenda Starr finally got married, I think in 1976, she got a congratulatory letter from President Gerald Ford and his wife Betty. She was syndicated in over 200 newspapers nationally. It was really popular.

Long: While Brenda Starr, Reporter was among the most successful comic strips of its era, Zeigler says the series hasn't been celebrated as widely as male oriented comic strips like Dick Tracy.

Zeigler: The legacy has not been nearly as strong, just because, frankly, the topic was very female oriented, and there have not been a lot of females in comic work.

Yet, I also think that Brenda Starr gave a push to more than one generation of women to think, “Oh, isn't that interesting? Yeah, maybe I could do something different. Maybe I can overcome these obstacles,” which ironically, is exactly what Dale Messick was doing the whole time too.