Brenda Starr files her final story

Brenda Starr finally got to retire Jan. 2 after more than 70 years on the job. She was born June 30, 1940, full-grown, into a big-city newspaper office where she was an oddity: a female reporter.

Also gorgeous, a fiery redhead, as they say, with a glamorous if out-of-place wardrobe. Straight

away Brenda Starr demanded respect in a man’s world, insisting on hard-hitting news assignments.

Hers was a call to arms for women entering the work force. She became a cultural icon from the funny papers. A career woman with an important and adventurous job, Starr exposed the rich and famous, although she never entirely overcame a slightly ditzy streak.

The comic strip heroine was heralded as a “girl reporter,” but the term didn’t offend Mary Schmich back when Schmich actually was a girl, reading the comics pages.

“There was something thrilling about that,” she said.

Schmich is a longtime journalist in Chicago who had a side job for the past 25 years as the writer of the Brenda Starr comic strip. Her comment helps explain the devotion Starr earned from generations of women.

And men. Tom Henderson, a reporter and a self-described ardent Brenda Starr fan and feminist, wrote an essay several years ago after the death of Brenda Starr’s creator, Dale Messick. He called it, “Brenda Starr Made a Man Out of Me.”

Now, Brenda Starr is gone.

Schmich and June Brigman, the strip’s artist for the past 15 years, decided they had ventured as far as they could go with the globe-trotting newspaper reporter, and Tribune Media Services opted to end the strip’s 70-year run rather than find a new writer and illustrator.

No ace reporter to wear pearls and show a bit of cleavage in the newsroom of The Flash. No more hasty departures to Belize or London to track the big, improbable story.

No more rendezvous with eternal love interest Basil St. John, the Man of Mystery, although a boxed black orchid did arrive, mysteriously, from “BSJ” in the final strip. (You may recall that serum from the rare South American orchid kept him from going mad.)

Trina Robbins, a historian of women in comics, said Messick’s creation seven decades ago was groundbreaking. Female characters were typically wives or girlfriends of the star characters, not stars themselves, she said.

That was no doubt because comic strip writers and artists also were men, she said. In fact, Messick switched her first name from Dalia to Dale to avoid bias as she tried to break into comics.

Schmich, born in 1953, recalls reading “Brenda Starr” as a youngster, when the excitement of Sunday morning was spreading the comics out on the floor.

As Schmich got older, she lost track of the funny pages, as people do.

That’s why, back in 1985 when she was working at the Orlando Sentinel, and an editor asked her if she wanted to meet with the features syndicate people — in one hour — about a job as the new writer for “Brenda Starr,” she rushed to the racks of newspapers in the lobby and read all the strips she could in 60 minutes.

“How could you say ‘No?’” she says.

“Something this ridiculous crosses your path and you’re not going to pick it up?”

When Schmich took over the strip, Starr seemed stuck in the 1950s. “My mission was to bring Brenda into the 1980s. But there were limits to how I could manipulate Brenda Starr. She just pushed back.”

Starr could be less ditzy, she could cry less, she could obsess less about men. But she still couldn’t grow suddenly stoic or forsake her love life.

Brigman sought out and won the drawing job 15 years ago after hearing that Fradon wanted to retire. She, too, had read “Brenda Starr” growing up, and she connected with Schmich’s tweaking of the Starr character. She liked that Starr “still had sparkly eyes but wasn’t quite as starry-eyed,” that she was more about career and less about shopping.

Brigman decided to dress Starr in less-frilly outfits, more suits with boot-cut pants and a lower waist line.

“But one thing stayed the same,” she says. “She always had the classic pearl necklace and matching earrings.”