Small House of Everything

Small House of Everything

Saturday, April 12, 2025

BRENDA STARR #3 (NOVEMBER 1948)

This past Thursday was National siblings Day and I got to thinking about my sister Linda, who passed away a dozen years ago.

Linda was a typical girl as a child, giggling over boys, dishing it with her girlfriends.  He loved horses, cut out the paper dolls from the Sunday funnies, and was enthralled with Brenda Starr

Brenda Starr, Girl Reporter (a.k.a. Brenda Starr) was a newspaper comic strip that began on June 30, 1940 for the Chicago Tribune-New York News syndication.  It was originally to feature Brenda as a "girl bandit," whose looks were modeled after Rita Hayworth.  The syndicate chief, Joseph Medill Patterson, rejected it because the artist Dahlia Messick (signing herself "Dale" in hopes of preventing her to be viewed as a woman) was...a woman; Patterson's comment was, he "had a woman cartoonist once...wanted no more of them."  Patterson's assistant, Millie Slott, saw the discarded strip and urged Messick to make the heroine a girl reporter.  For some reason, Patterson then accepted the comic strip, but he refused to have it run in the Chicago Tribune's daily paper. or to have it syndicated in the New York Daily News.  Instead, Patterson ran the strip in the Chicago paper's Sunday edition only.  The Daily News fianally carried the strip in 1948, two years after Pattison's death.

Even then, things did not go smoothly for the plucky girl reporter or her creator and writer.  Editors often altered the strip if Brenda showed a bit too much cleavage or a navel, or if they deemed something entirely innocent to be suggestive.  Didn't matter.  by then, Brenda Starr was the idol of millions of teenage girls who thrilled to he adventures and her romances.

One long-running romance was with the Mystery Man -- dashingly handsome with a black eyepatch.  He was Basil St. John, who would pop in and out if the strip, ever in search of the elusive black orchid needed for his "formula."  Eventually, Brenda and Basil would marry, have a a child -- a girl named Starr Twinkle St. Clair, get divorced, he would marry talk show hostess Wanda Fonda and they have a son, Sage St. Clair, get divorced, then Basil would hook up with Brenda again, while Brenda and Wanda became good friends.  Life can be complicated in Comicstripland.

Brenda was too popular not to be ignored by Hollywood.  A 1945 serial featured Joan Woodbury as Brenda.  Jill St. john played Brenda in a 1976 television movie.  A 1976 television pilot featuring Sherry Jackson, alas, did not sell.  And a movie filmed in 1986 with Brooke Shields and Timothy Dalton was held up due to legal concerns and not released until 1992 to universal disdain.  And a 2006 effort to create a television movie or series starring Jenna Mattison died aborning.

Brenda made to the comic books several times, first by Four Star Publications in 1947, then by Superior Publishing in 1948, followed by Charlton Comics in 1955, and finally by Dell Publishing in 1963.  The Brenda Starr comic strip itself ended on January 2, 2011.  Brenda got a commemorative postage stamp in 1995.

Issue #3 of the Superior Publishing title features a three-part story taking Brenda to Sun Valley for a two-week, all expenses paid vacation.  Whee!  Just before she is scheduled to leave for the airport, a handsome man plants a kiss on Brenda at a New Year's Eve part, something that Brenda keeps reliving during the entire flight.  Arriving at Sun Valley, she stops by the local newspaper -- the Cloud -- and meets Flurry Snow, the assistant to editor Larry Nickles.  Flurry takes Brenda to a ski resort to meet Nickles, and -- sonofagun! -- he's the mystery man who kissed her at the New Year's Eve party.  It turns out that Nickles was the man who arranged for Brenda's "vacation"; he wants Brenda to add a little pizazz to his paper for the next two weeks.

Brenda, Nickles and Flurry investigate a lodge owned by "a queer old duck who calls himself 'Professor Squell'."  Flurry enteggs Walters, sendsrs the lodge and does not return.  Then Nickles enters the lodge and does not return.  Brenda then rushes to the newspaper office and offers $1000 to anyone who can enter the lodge and come out again.  Many take up the offer; none come out. Brenda is locked up for perpetrating a hoax.  Word of the mystery reaches Brenda's own paper, and her editor, Muggs Walters, sends reporter Tom Taylor (Brenda's original love interest) to Sun Valley to help her out.  Before Tom arrives, Brenda herself enters the lodge...and does not come out.

Holy sizzling copy!  What is going on?  Is Brenda safe?  What about all the other people who have disappeared?  More importantly, what kind of sensational story has Brenda gotten herself into this time?

You're just going to have to read the comic book to find out.

https://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=27374

(I hope you are looking down and enjoying this story, Linda.)

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