Nell Brinkley (1886–1944)

Nell Brinkley was born in Denver, Colorado. She dropped out of high school at about age 17 and began working as an artist for the Denver Times and created book illustrations. In 1907, William Randolph Hearst recruited her to move to New York City to work as an illustrator for his newspaper The New York Journal American. She did some reporting and wrote entertainment reviews before her line-drawn illustrations began to be published in Hearst newspapers and magazines nationwide. Unlike the "Gibson girls," depictions of the ideal feminine beauty in high society, the "Brinkley girls" depicted breezy, curly-haired working women pursuing both careers and romance. Behind her illustrations, Brinkley was a feminist. In a 1918 series called "Uncle Sam's Schoolgirls," her illustrations were accompanied by her criticisms on women's working conditions, inequality in pay, and the housing crisis during World War I. She became known as the "Queen of Comics" during her nearly 40-year career. Brinkley's full-page color art from 1913-1940, including her earliest adventure series, Golden Eyes and Her Hero, Bill; her romantic series, Betty and Billy and Their Love Through the Ages; her flapper comics from the 1920s; her 1937 pulp magazine-inspired Heroines of Today; and some of her unpublished paintings, were collected in a volume called The Brinkley Girls, published in 2009. In 1920, Brinkley married Bruce McRae Jr., a newspaper reporter, with whom she had a son before the couple divorced.