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Brenda Starr Reporter is Hired (June 30)

On this day in pop culture history, Brenda Starr appeared on the funny pages. She later appeared in her own movie – twice.

June 30, 2026

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Dale Messick’s Brenda Starr Reporter comic strip was a hit from the first strip which debuted on this day in 1940. But it was a long road to get there. In 1986, Brooke Shields played the heroine for a Brenda Star movie, but it didn’t open in theaters until six years later!

1940 – Brenda Starr Becomes an Ace Reporter

Brenda Starr comic strip — *(Wikipedia)*

During the mid 1920s, when Dalia Messick had just graduated from high school, she submitted her first comic strip, Weegee, but was rejected. Messick later attended the Art Institute of Chicago and then landed a job where she would design greeting cards. By the 1930s, she submitted three more comic strips: Mimi the Mermaid, Peg & Pudy and Streamline Babies. This time she signed her name as “Dale” in hopes that the editors wouldn’t reject a male cartoonist, but they did. In 1940, Messick tried one more time with a character created as a “girl bandit” that went by the name of Brenda Starr. The character of Brenda Starr was modeled after Rita Hayworth and named after Brenda Frazier, a popular debutante.

Joseph Medill Patterson, the Chicago Tribune-New York News chief syndicate, said that he had only worked with one other female cartoonist and was not interested in hiring another one. However, his assistant found the drawings that were tossed in the trash and convinced Dalia to try again by making Starr a reporter instead. Patterson agreed to run the strip, but only in the Sunday comic book supplement which was printed on this day in 1940. It was soon moved to the weekend paper and by October 1945, the strip it became a daily comic syndicated in many newspapers.

Timothy Dalton and Brooke Shields in the movie "Brenda Starr". — Timothy Dalton and Brooke Shields in *Brenda Starr. (TVDB)*

Brenda Goes to the Movies

Messick retired in 1980, but as for Brenda Starr, she was the subject of two movies. In 1945, Columbia Pictures released the Brenda Starr, Reporter serial which starred Joan Woodbury as Starr and Syd Saylor as her photographer, Chuck Allen. Brooke Shields played the character for a 1986 movie, but it didn’t arrive in theaters until 1992 due to distribution rights. The movie also starred Timothy Dalton and Tony Peck. Though Shield loved making the movie, it bombed. As for the comic strip, Brenda Starr called it quits on January 2, 2011. But that isn’t all…

In 2003, a full-length play entitled Reporter Girl about the life and times of Dale Messick was first performed at The American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco in 2003. It made it to Off-Off-Broadway in 2004. The play was written by Messick’s granddaughter, Laura Rohrman.

1936 – ‘Gone with the Wind’ is Published

The original book cover for "Gone with the Wind." — *(Wikimedia Commons)*

In 1926, Margaret Mitchell, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal, was forced to quit her job in order to recover from a series of injuries. With a little too much time on her hands, she sat down and in her one-bedroom apartment that she shared with her husband and wrote one of America’s best-selling novels of all time, Gone with the Wind. It was published on this day in 1936. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937 and of course, the story became the basis for the 1939 blockbuster movie. Many years later, the sequel Scarlett, written by Alexandra Ripley, was published in 1992.