Little Lulu: The World's Best Comic Book One-Shot (Free Comic Book Day 2019)

I don't think I would have given Little Lulu and her portly pal Tubby the time of day if it wasn't for two sources. First was the writings of Fred Hembeck in his massive omnibus. In his collection of writings, Hembeck fondly reminisces of the comic strip quite often. I felt if it's good enough for Mr. Hembeck, whom I actually play a music trivia game against online, then it's good enough for me. Only I didn't have any Little Lulu stuff on hand to read.

Then I was reunited with a copy of the 1981 museum quality collection: A Smithsonian Book of Comics. There was a bunch of Little Lulu and Tubby stories. All of them hilarious! While I did feel that there was more of them than some of the other characters and artists to be fairly represented in that volume, I didn't run into a single stinker of the comic strip creation from the artist known as Marge.

This Free Comic Book Day offering from Drawn and Quarterly is yet another comic that I meant to provide the members of my school's comic book club and lost within the cluttered mire of my backseat. As we're on a road trip this week, I had to get the car completely cleaned out and that's when I ran into this. 

Little Lulu: The World's Best Comic Book is an assortment of strips and stories taken from Drawn and Quarterly's 2019 and earlier line of Little Lulu and Tubby treasuries. The works of artist John Stanley are featured in this issue. Next to Marge, Stanley is perhaps the franchise's most well known cartoonist. He's Little Lulu's Carl Barks. I've read some of Stanley's non-Lulu material and wasn't blown away by it. Those works felt too childish for me. But here, it felt like I was taken back to the 1940s where kids had free range of the neighborhood and creativity and imagination at play was what kept children occupied compared to the soul sucking TV, video games and cell phones of today.

The best story is the opener in which Lulu looks forward to scaring Tubby with the new mask she bought. Only Tubby has one too. In fact, it seems that all of the kids in town have the same mask!

Another memorable adventure sees Tubby trying to find gold with a divining rod. It's got a lot of great one liners. Some fantastic observations that only come from the mouths of precocious babes. And a heartwarming ending. 

I'm really thinking that I'm going to take advantage of some of these collections, if I can ever find them for a fantastic deal. John Stanley really knows how to write dialogue like a child. He's got that innocence mixed with heavy doses of cynicism and prosecution like Harper Lee did so masterfully in To Kill A Mockingbird. I can see now why he's considered a legend of comic book cartooning!

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 10 out of 10 stars.