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Penny, created by Harry Haenigsen, was a fairly long running comic strip about a teenage girl, the eponymous Penny. Haenigsen created the strip in 1943 at the suggestion of the wife of the New York Herald Tribune's publisher. It seemed she was tired of seeing so many comic strips about boys, and asked for one about a girl. Haenigsen was already drawing a comic strip about a teenage boy, called Our Bill, so he did something similar, but with a girl. Both strips are about as authentically mid-century teenager as you can get, and Haenigsen did his level best to keep them that way. To make sure the slang terms he used in the strip were current, he hung out at soda fountains and often invited groups of neighborhood kids to his house on weekends. He even invented some of his own slang terms rather than use ones that he knew were out of date. He was assisted on art duties by Bill Hoest, who took up a majority of the workload after Haenigsen sustained a serious injury in 1965. The strip unfortunately ended in 1970 after Hoest left to start his own strip, The Lockhorns.

This particular strip highlights some Haenigsen's wonderful art style. He's clearly trying to imitate the style of various Christmas cards, but it still has the dynamic look of his regular panels, so you're not quite sure what's going on until you reach the last panel. My only criticism of the strip is that Penny doesn't necessarily look like a teenage girl as much as an adult woman playing a teenage girl in a 1950's movie. Much like those movies, though, there's enough charm to it that you don't really think about it too much.