They got tired, that’s all, or mostly all. Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich and her drawing partner June Brigman decided in early December to stop producing Brenda Starr, and Tribune Media Services, which owns the strip, seized the opportunity to end its syndication. Last June, TMS took out of its comics line-up the other redhead, Annie, a remnant of Harold Gray’s plucky waif strip, Little Orphan Annie. The final Brenda Starr will run on Jan. 2, a Saturday, finishing the week and ending the nearly 70-year run of one of the medium’s most venerable (and venerated) efforts, undoubtedly the longest-lived newspaper adventure strip with an eponymous heroine and the most famous strip created and produced by a woman cartoonist, Dale Messick, who was fiercely feminine if not so much fashionably feminist.
