Remember Brenda Starr’s cousin Abretha Breez, a woman mocked for being too large to fit through a kitchen door to get more cake? As you may recall, she had a crush on steam shovel operator Everett Diggin, which didn’t work out, since the guy had a crush on Brenda. Was Abretha able to find a soulmate, or was she destined to forever be held up as an example of a woman too overweight to ever be seen as desirable?

We seem to find our answer in Brenda Starr #9 (July 1949), though you never know—since I was unable to find anything but the covers to issues #7 and #8, there could have been answers there as well.

The lead story in this issue begins with Brenda and Abretha heading off to an auction at a Chinese antique shop, where Brenda wins two bookends for a buck. But something’s up with those bookends, because a latecomer offers Brenda $100 for them. She refuses, of course (or there wouldn’t be a story), so the man offers her $200! But Brenda turns him down again. And why would she refuse $200 in 1949, which is apparently the equivalent of $1,948.64 today?

“I’m a typical woman,” she says. “If anybody else wants it, I’m determined to keep it.”

Since we can read the guy’s thoughts, we know something’s up, because he gripes that “she’s walking off with a fortune and she doesn’t know.”

Brenda then leaves Abretha alone with the bookends because she wants to “run over to a couple of shops and see some of the new gowns.”

I’ll leave it to others to explicate the meaning of Brenda’s cliched behavior so far, because I’m more concerned with the treatment of Abretha—who I’m happy to say in this story now looks like more a human being rather than the caricature she was before. (more…)

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…)