Overlooked No More: Hilda Terry, Who Cracked the Code of Teen Culture
She understood teenagers before pop culture knew what to do with them, depicting them in cartoons as romantics, snobs, dreamers and social climbers.
(This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.)
The cartoonist Hilda Terry understood teenage girls before American popular culture could figure them out.
Starting in the 1930s, she drew them not as the sweet little sisters, dutiful daughters or romantic supporting players that filled so many newspaper strips at the time, but as schemers, romantics, snobs, lovesick dreamers and social climbers. They obsessed about boys and clothes and parties, because, really, what else mattered?
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