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! (more…)