Dale Messick, who died Tuesday in California, created “Brenda Starr, Reporter,” the widely syndicated comic strip that provided an early taste of girl power in a male-dominated medium.

A tall, buxom, self-possessed redhead with a quick mind, a taste for adventure, and a limitless budget for couture, Brenda Starr was a subversive inspiration to generations of young women. Messick developed and drew the strip for 40 years, during which time her heroine filed her stories from around the world, jumped from airplanes, escaped from any number of villains’ clutches, and had whirlwind romances. Her body was drawn from Rita Hayworth’s, and her name was taken from a famed debutante. When Starr finally married her longtime beau in 1977, the mysterious eye-patch wearing Basil St. John, President Ford sent congratulations.

Whenever the feisty Messick was asked what lay beneath Basil St. John’s patch, she answered, “A hole that goes all the way through his head.”

Despite protesting on occasion that Brenda Starr had “everything I don’t have” – money, red hair, and curves – Messick had gumption to spare. If she didn’t jump out of a plane herself, she did manage to support herself and her parents through the Depression, to push her way into the male-dominated career of cartoonist, and to stay at the top of her profession for decades. Asked in 1953 how she plotted the action for “Brenda Starr,” Messick said, “Does anybody in real life ever know what anybody is going to do next? Look at me. I just got myself a new husband and at my age!” (She was 42, but like her first marriage, it didn’t last.)

Messick dyed her hair red to match Brenda Starr’s, and she named her daughter Starr; somehow, the “girl reporter” was more than just a fantasy for the Depression-era cartoonist. She told the Los Angeles Times in 1999, “I was married twice, divorced twice, had a bad car accident and a baby, and never missed a deadline in 43 years.”

Messick grew up in Indiana, the daughter of an art teacher and part-time sign painter and his milliner wife; each parent’s profession surfaced in “Brenda Starr.” Messick produced illustrated stories from an early age, and often said she was influenced by the work of Nell Brinkley, whose graceful flapper-era drawings appeared in many Hearst publications. After attending art school in Chicago, she found early employment painting bathing beauties for the Orange Crush Company. After that, Messick worked for several years at a Chicago greeting-card company and quit when her boss reduced her pay. She soon found work at a New York card company and had the Brenda Starr-like experience of flying there in an eight seat plane, an exotic way to travel in 1934. She said the pilot let her steer.

In New York, Messick found instant success crafting greeting cards and helped support her parents by sending them half her weekly salary. She found it much harder to break into the cartooning business, despite working on prospective titles like “Mimi the Mermaid,” “Peg and Pudy, the Struglettes,” and “Streamline Babies.” She attributed her lack of success to her sex – editors were more interested in dating her than in hiring her – so she changed her name from the original Dalia to the more ambiguous Dale and applied for positions by mailing her work to the syndicates. According to the Tribune Company, though, she was eventually hired, in 1940, only after an in-person interview.

Joseph Medill Patterson, founder of the Daily News and head of the Tribune syndicate, supposedly had an animus against female cartoonists, and it was only when the syndicate began producing a weekly Sunday comics insert that he finally bought “Brenda Starr.” Messick had originally proposed a strip about a lady pirate.

“Brenda Starr” went on to become a daily comic in 1945, but wasn’t featured in the Daily News until after Patterson’s death in 1946. But the girl reporter was already being noticed during World War II, when independent women were doing men’s jobs, and being represented that way by characters like Rosie the Riveter.

Brenda Starr kept the censors on their feet. As years went by, she appeared in a bikini with increasing frequency, and the syndicate always erased the navel. When she was depicted smoking a polka-dot cigar, the strip was booted from some Texas newspapers and, to Messick’s delight, (temporarily) banned in Boston. At its height, “Brenda Starr” appeared in 250 newspapers.

Not content to stay in New York, Messick outfitted a silver Gulfstream mobile home as a drawing studio, and lived peripatetically. Her adventures, said her daughter, became fodder for the strip. Eventually, Messick settled in Chicago.

She professed to abhor realism – Messick said she kept the action scenes short so Brenda Starr could change clothes frequently, and Starr’s curves befitted Barbie’s – and when the strip was taken over by others in the 1980s, Messick was not always pleased. “She looks more like she works at a bank,” Messick complained to the Sonoma Independent. “No glamour, no curves, no fashion, but it’s still going pretty good.” Her most devastating swipe was delivered to the Washington Times; “The strip today is … a little more … realistic.”

It is certainly more topical. Recently, the strip has featured characters based on Fox television personalities. “That moral values stuff?” the wife of a character reputedly based on Bill O’Reilly tells Brenda Starr, “He doesn’t believe it. He just knows it sells.”

After retiring, Messick drew occasional panels and often appeared at gallery shows that included her work as cartoons came to be seen as an art form. When the film version of Brenda Starr appeared in 1992, made by Dodi Fayed, Princess Diana’s lover, and starring Brooke Shields in “Bob Mackie” as Brenda, Messick helped plug it, although she was under no illusions about the film’s value. “Let me tell you, the movie was so bad it never even won the ‘Worst Movie of the Year Award,'” she told the Sonoma Independent. “Don’t see it.”

As was true of most cartoonists of her era, Messick had no ownership stake in her creation and subsisted on a meager pension from the syndicate. She enjoyed her later years, often sailing with a boyfriend and riding a Harley Davidson motorcycle. In recent years, slowed by a stroke, she lived with her daughter and grand children in California. Unable to color her hair red – she developed an allergy to the dye – she sported a magnificent coif and often appeared in luxuriant furs. “I look better in furs than a bikini,” she explained.

Dale Messick

Born Dalia Messick on April 11, 1906, in South Bend, Ind.; died Tuesday in Penngrove, Calif.; survived by a daughter, Starr Rohrman, and two grandchildren.