Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet

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Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet is a comic strip by Peter Zale about a technically adept young woman who works at a technology firm. Helen is a "tyrannical genius", a woman too young and too smart and too messed up by her precocity to ever live a normal life.

Zale drew her as a buxom blonde bombshell, essentially casting her against the "dumb blonde" stereotype. Her looks, though, meant almost nothing to her, and her femininity only occurred to her as an afterthought and was usually applied with more aggressiveness than any man had ever seen, mostly upon her on-again/off-again boyfriend Spencer Green, a character Zale purloined from a strip he syndicated with the College Press in the early 90s.

Helen's programming skills and warped use of them led to being defined as a modern day mad scientist. Such things as making artificial intelligences without thinking it odd are common throughout the series

An early friendship with Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Mike Peters pushed Zale into strip cartooning and away from his first love, comic books. He published his first continuing comic strips in The Chicago Maroon while an undergraduate at The University of Chicago.

"Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet" started as an online-only comic in June 1996. The strip grew in popularity, receiving write-ups in such publications as The New York Times, HOW..., The Cleveland Plain Dealer and was finally syndicated by Tribune Media in 2000 simultaneous with McGraw-Hill's publishing a collection of Zale's Helen cartoons called Techies Unite.

Peter Zale went on sabbatical from writing the strip on December 26th, 2005 to finish his MBA studies.

Note: As of 2/2/2008, hew strips are being posted again at Peter Zale's website.