Harold Teen

Carl Ed's Harold Teen did something no strip had really done before: it made the American teenager a subject worth a daily comic. Arriving as Jazz-Age youth culture was exploding into national visibility, the strip followed Harold and his friends through the rituals of high-school life, the soda fountain, the crushes, the dances, the slang, capturing a distinctly modern adolescence that adults were only beginning to notice as its own world. Ed had an ear for teen lingo and a feel for the fads that swept through young lives, and the strip both reflected and helped popularize the emerging idea of teenagers as a culture unto themselves, with their own language, styles, and social codes. That matters enormously for what came later. The teen comic became one of the medium's most durable forms, and the whole tradition of youth-centered comics, from later newspaper teens to the humor comic books that followed, traces back to this early recognition that adolescence was rich comic territory. Harold Teen was there first, charting the soda-fountain generation and proving that the funny pages could belong to the young.