How wide is Brenda Starr’s cousin Abretha Breez? Based on the cover to Brenda Starr #6, so wide she can’t even fit through the kitchen door to get more cake!

Brenda Starr, created by Dale Messick, is a newspaper reporter always on the trail of a scoop. Think Lois Lane in a world without Superman. She started out in a comic strip of the same name in 1940, then moved on to comic books in 1947. But it seems (at least based on the content of this story) as if cousin Abretha didn’t debut until the comic’s January 1949 issue.

And continuing with my look at how women with body types society had deemed unacceptable were depicted in yesterday’s comics (you can find the previous installment here, plus links to the ones before that), let’s check it out!

After an infuriating day dealing with harassment from the idiot men at her newspaper (she might as well be working with Don Draper and Pete Campbell), Brenda heads home hoping to relax, where she finds her cousin Abretha, whom she hasn’t seen since they were kids. And in that time, Abretha has apparently … changed.

And not only is she now, as Brenda puts it, “big” … she’s also hungry.

But why is Abretha so hungry, when there was plenty of food in the house?

That’s right! She’s so large, she can’t even fit in the kitchen where the food is! (Later in the issue, she’s referred to as weighing 250 pounds, which based on her height and the stereotypical way she’s drawn, has got to be a low estimate.)

The two women later meet a man named Everett Diggin, who due to the naming conventions of comics turns out to operate a steam shovel. (Diggin … steam shovel … get it?) It also turns out that while Abretha has fallen for Everett, Everett has fallen for Brenda.

We’re told that Everett insults poor Abretha to her face, though that’s never pictured, only reported.

Brenda gets the idea (right at the moment while she’s for some unknown reason lounging in her underwear) that Abretha might get her man if only “she would just lose a ton or two”—

—so Brenda drags her to Happyland Amusement Park and into the House of Mirrors, so she can see what she’d look like thin.

This attempt at motivation works about as well as you’d expect …

Now here’s where the story turns weird in a way that has nothing to do with Abretha’s weight. It’s revealed that the reason Abretha came to the big city was to fulfill her dream of becoming a great singer. Only (according to Brenda) “she’s torn between two great loves, Everett Diggin and food.”

Brenda decides that if she can convince Diggin to lift Abretha in the air on his steam shovel, all those who crowd around to watch him work (and yes, there are always lots of people pictured around the construction site) will hear her sing while she dangles in midair and then … what? The end game is never quite clear.

Well, Everett lifts and Abretha sings, and there’s even a photographer around to snap a photo of the event so a story can run in Brenda’s paper. Which I guess is meant to create publicity which will help Abretha fulfill her dreams.

So … does this stunt bring Abretha fame and fortune? Does Everett Diggins hear her voice and fall under her spell?

We never find out—at least not this issue—because the story ends one panel later, with Brenda punning, “There’ll be no keeping Abretha down now!” So there’s really no closure to this story, which means there’s no moral either.

I guess it could be worse, though, because having no moral is far better than ending with a bad one. Yes, the story contains insults, and yes, the character is treated in a cliched way, but unlike some of the earlier comics I’ve shared, there’s far less nastiness, and the ultimate message isn’t that thinness equals happiness or that overweight women are destined to be lonely and unwanted.

And who needs closure, if that’s the form it’s going to take?