Remember when comic strips starring women gave them little to do, save
dressing up, courting around and living with relatives who wanted nothing more
than to see them married off?

In 1920, the face of female comic strip
stars changed with the debut of Martin Branner’s Winnie Winkle the
Breadwinner. The title pretty much says it all. Those four little words
alone reassured readers that they were in for something quite different than
Rosie’s Beau or Polly and Her Pals.

We suspect, though,
that they had no idea just how complex this comic would become. At its
inception, Winnie was single. But while many of her contemporaries were off in
search of romance or acting as pinups for military troops, Winnie led a quiet
life, working to support her retired and aging parents.

This facet made
her very relateable to the day’s labor force, as the care of many elderly
relatives fell to their able-bodied descendants. As a result, Winnie and her
daily won an audience.

Two years later, she inherited another dependent,
an adopted brother named Perry Winkle. When the strip became a Sunday feature,
Perry took a prominent position in story arcs.

It would be another 14
years before she married, finally deciding to wed an engineer, Will Wright. But
just when it seemed the strip would bow to convention, Winnie’s husband went
missing during a tour of service in WWII–while she was expecting her firstborn.
Will never returned, making Winnie the very first comic strip widow in U.S.
history.

She had to work again, following the birth of her twins. So she
embarked on a career in fashion design, well into her 30s. Branner found an
opportunity to make the strip interactive by soliciting fashion designs from
fans and crediting them when their designs were selected for the strip.

Branner suffered a stroke in 1960 and was unable to continue on with
Winnie Winkle. But the strip endured under the efforts of several new
contributors, including Max Von Bibber and Frank Bolle. When it ran in its last
paper in 1996, Winnie Winkle had survived over seven decades of change.