Mixing hot copy with high fashion, Brenda plunged from one thrilling adventure to another, sassing her tough-talking editor, Mr. Livwright, and sometimes filing her copy with the only person left in the newsroom, the cleaning woman.
As World War II raged, Brenda did her part, parachuting into action with every red hair in place.
''Most comics, the main characters are heroes, guys, and they don't write for women," Miss Messick said in a 2002 interview. ''I was a woman so I was writing for women and I think that's what put her over."
Brenda would later come under fire for being too preoccupied with her looks and her men and too far removed from the routine of real newspaperwomen: city council meetings and supermarket openings.
''I used to get letters from girl reporters saying that their lives were nowhere near as exciting as Brenda's," Miss Messick told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1986. ''I told them that if I made Brenda's life like theirs, nobody would read it."
Young women looked at Brenda and dreamed of adventure. Young men liked the strip, too, and quite a few, thinking they were dealing with one of the boys, asked ''Dale" for private sketches of Brenda in sexier poses than a family newspaper could bear. Miss Messick obliged once by sending back a saucy picture of Brenda in a barrel going over Niagara Falls. Attached was a note: ''Is this daring enough?"
Born in South Bend, Ind., on April 11, 1906, Miss Messick studied art and got a job at one greeting card company and then another, working on her strips at night.
Her break came when her work came to the attention of publisher Joseph M. Patterson. Patterson, reputed to be no fan of women cartoonists, wouldn't take the slot for daily publication but it began running in the Sunday comics in 1940.
The name came from a 1930s debutante; she borrowed the figure and flowing red hair from film star Rita Hayworth.
