Comic-strip cancelled after 70 years...

The nosey Chicago redhead who's been getting in everyone's hair since 1940 and spawned four screen adaptations is to file her last story on January 2nd 2011. Tribune Media Services have announced that the syndicated strip about an enterprising female journalist has had its day, and is closing her 70-year stint in over 250 newspapers.

Starr is the third female comic-strip character to get axed in recent times, along with 'Annie' and 'Cathy'. The cancellation of the strip is apparently due to the demise of comics as a marketable presence in newspapers (and in the decline of newspapers in itself...?) Tribune Media Services marketing director
Jan Guszynski says: "In its current form, and given the number of newspapers it is in, we chose not to go forward."

One argument for the increasing irrelevance of a 'goil reporter' comic strip is the public perception that women now form a majority in the ranks of journalists - a false impression arguably conveyed by their admittedly greater presence as anchors and presenters. A look at this report reveals that women working full-time in daily US newspapers total about 15,200, or 36.62 percent of the newsroom staffers. That's almost certainly a considerable upgrade from the statistics in the 'Lois Lane' era in which Brenda Starr was created (by Dale Messick for the Chicago Tribune Syndicate in June 1940, against editorial opposition to the idea of a comic strip 'created by a woman'), but not quite the X-chromosome 'check-mate' that shallow TV-news policists might have had us imagining.

Brenda Starr was adapted four times over its life-cycle: with Joan Woodbury as Brenda Starr, Reporter (1945); Jill St.John as Brenda Starr (US TV 1976); Brooke Shields as Brenda Starr (1989); and Sherry Jackson's unsold television pilot in 1979.

Writer Mary Schmich has written Brenda Starr for the last 25 years, and commented "I don't think the character is dead. But the comic strip in this form is."

The Wrap

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