Dale Messick

“I felt that women were not being treated fairly. I wanted to show a woman who could do anything.”

“I was a woman doing a man's job, and I was in the way.”

“I wanted to be a greeting card artist, but I got turned down.”

“I had to change my name from Dalia to Dale, because I was a woman and they wouldn't look at my work.”

“Brenda was a glamour girl. And I was never very glamorous, but I was a good artist.”

“I gave her my red hair and my big feet.”

“They told me a woman couldn't draw a strip like that. They said it was too adventurous. It was a man's strip.”

“I got a letter from a man who said he had this idea for a woman reporter. I had been trying to sell a strip about a woman bandit.”

“I had the greatest job in the world.”

“When I started, the men resented me. They wouldn't even say hello.”

“I didn't think of myself as a feminist. I just thought of myself as a person who had a right to a job.”

“I had to make Brenda so beautiful and her clothes so exquisite that the men who read the comics would be interested, and the women would be interested in the clothes.”

“I was the first woman to do an adventure strip. I was the first to have a woman as a main character.”

“Brenda had a baby out of wedlock, and nobody even noticed.”