Carl Ed

Carl Frank Ludwig Ed (July 16, 1890 – October 10, 1959) was a comic strip artist best known as the creator of Harold Teen. His name is pronounced eed.

Born in Moline, Illinois, Ed graduated from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. He was 22 years old when he worked on the baseball strip Big Ben in 1912.

Returning to Rock Island, he signed on as a reporter with the Rock Island Argus, where he was soon promoted to sports editor and then became the newspaper's city editor, while also drawing another baseball strip, Luke McGlook, the Bush League Bearcat (aka Luke McGluke), distributed by the World Color Syndicate. He moved on to Chicago as a sports cartoonist on the Chicago American where he also drew the strip The Tener Alley Gang.

Harold Teen begins

He drew samples for a strip titled Seventeen, loosely based on Booth Tarkington's successful novel Seventeen. After publisher Patterson renamed it Harold Teen, it debuted in the New York Daily News during February 1919. Asked in the late 1930s why he had started the strip, Ed answered, "Twenty years ago, there was no comic strip on adolescence. I thought every well-balanced comic sheet should have one."