Hey there--it's Ariel Bordeaux here, and I'll be blogging periodically through this fall as the Guest Curator of the Grace Comics Showcase.
Thanks to Heidi "Scoop" MacDonald at The Beat, by way of Trina Robbins, I've just learned of the existence and recent passing of a cartoonist named Hilda Terry.
I'm very sorry to inform you that pioneer woman cartoonist Hilda Terry passed away on October 13. Hilda’s strip, Teena, ran in national newspapers from 1941 - 1966, after which she became a pioneer computer animator, animating baseball scoreboards for the Mets, for which she won a National Cartoonist Society award. There’s a little irony there, since Hilda was responsible for breaking the gender barrier of the NCS, which up till 1950 was a male-only organization. Hilda’s husband, the late cartoonist Gregory D’Allessio, submitted Hilda’s name for membership, and the ensuing fight between members about whether or not to open up their membership finally ended with Hilda being accepted into the society a year later, after which she submitted the names of all her women cartoonist friends, thus breaking the gender barrier. -Trina Robbins
Ninety-something Hilda Terry maintained a website which includes her essays about a myriad of topics including politics, religion and the paranormal. She was apparently a bit of an eccentric, but in a totally awesome wise woman witchy kind of way. A woman after my own heart, whom I hope to meet on the astral plane someday.