Little Lulu, Vol. 7: Lulu's Umbrella Service

 A recent visit to a rather large area used book store uncovered this treasure. It's always fun to find something that you didn't even know existed. It's even better when you find it for a fantastic price and in excellent condition.

Dark Horse's compendium of the complete run of Dell/ Gold Key Little Lulu comic titles was published in the early 2000s. There are 29 volumes! And just my luck (in terms of trying to get the rest of the series), they've been out of print for quite a while. Believe me; if there were more books available for the price I paid for this one, I would have bought up the whole lot. 

I just wish that these were in color. Instead, these volumes are given the Essential Marvel treatment, being published in black and white to make them more affordable. However, there are at least 3 stories in which having color is vital to being able to understand the action better. I had the same issue with Showcase Presents Green Lantern volumes 1-3 because you have a superhero whose main weakness is the color yellow but you can't tell what is that hue because there's no colors to be seen.

My enjoyment of Little Lulu is a lot like a child and their palette as they mature. As a kid, Lulu and friends just weren't my style. But now as I enter middle age, I appreciate the subtle humor of innocent Lulu Moppet. I cackle at the absurd approach to life Tubby has,  especially when he assumes his role as 'the World's Greatest Detective!' Lulu's fairy tales to Alvin shows childhood naivety mixed with the brilliance of the creative mind. The children in these pages are truthfully how the children I teach and interact with every day: they hear things wrong, they think they are always right and they lack the ability to ask adults for wisdom. Any nuggets of insight are provided by their peers. 

Thank goodness I don't have to teach them!

The genius behind these stories is John Stanley. Another comic creator that it took me decades to appreciate. As a young, YOUNG comic book collector, I tended to favor the artists who used more complex lines and shadows. I went for realism. Yet I find in today's troubled world, simplicity is best. If only I could find more of these editions without having to take out a small loan.

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 9 out of 10.

This is Little Lulu by Marge

I've really grown to become a fan of Little Lulu in the past couple of years. I credit A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics for that. As a kid, I just couldn't appreciate it's brilliance. That's because cartoonist John Stanley knew how to write as kids think and talk. Little Lulu and her pals have brilliant ideas. They just lack years of experience and wisdom for those ideas to always work properly. But when one of those ideas succeeds, it's absolute genius!

This 1956 Dell First Edition book features work from Stanley as well as Little Lulu creator Marjorie 'Marge' Henderson Buell. You can tell which works are the works of whom. Buell's Little Lulu is taller, thinner and has pupils. Marge's strips are also generally one panel jokes and done in pantomimes or minimum dialogue. John Stanley's Little Lulu is shorter, more cartoonish and full of masterful dialogue. Plus her best friend bears the name Tubby instead of Joe.

This book and it's reprinted content was written during a time when cartoonists, especially comic book creators, didn't receive billing for their work. Buell managed to keep credit as Lulu's creator after she gave up illustrating the strip with the birth of her first child, by becoming the franchise's creative consultant. I know for sure that one story is the work of John Stanley thanks to the Smithsonian book. It's a favorite of mine, starring Tubby as his super sleuth alter ego, the Spider, suspecting that the reason Little Lulu's father shaved his mustache is because he's on the run from the police!

The rest of this book is material that I've never encountered before. There's a variety of seasonal stories involving Valentine's Day, Christmas and Halloween. The best story of this bunch involves Lulu hosting a ghost party where everyone dresses as ghosts. One kid mentions that he's not wearing anything under his sheet and that's a plot device that leads to hijinks that made me chuckle so much. I was laughing at such a frequency at this yarn that I peaked my wife's attention by wanting to know what was so darn funny.

Finding this book was an absolute fluke. I was looking through a pile of old Archie digests and this book just happened to be stuck in the middle of the pile. The selling price was a little bit higher than I would normally pay. But I happened to purchase it with trade credit. One thing is for sure, I want more Little Lulu and Tubby adventures. I think I might be searching for a treasury on Amazon in the very near future. Getting a complete run of these works might complete with my search for Carl Barks, Don Rosa and Will Eisner omnibuses.

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 10 out of 10 stars.

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.

Marge's Little Lulu #166

I haven't really been a fan of Little Lulu. However, thanks to their addition to the Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics and a classic treasury of holiday comics by YOe Books, I've warmed up to Lulu and her friends. 

I found this 1963 Gold Key book at an antique store over the Summer. There were about 5 Little Lulu comics and while I had those good experiences recently with the property, none of those books were crying out for me to buy them until I got to the last book in the pile- THIS ONE! At 80 pages, there are about a dozen comics stories along with 2 prose tales, all starring Little Lulu. All but one story was set leading up-to or during Christmas. The lone story that wasn't a holiday tale did involve snow. Add the piece about 'Christmases Around the World' on the inside covers of this issue and the whole book was full of festive winter fun!

In the snow story and another set in the Arctic circle, Lulu tells little brat Alvin some of her patented fairy tales with a twist. Lulu's best friend Tubby has some dumb lucky with a dried-out Christmas tree and a missing 50-cent piece in a couple of stories. However, Tub is at his hilarious best when his detective alter-ego, the Spider, solves the mystery of Lulu's missing stocking. 

Lulu is known to be a little selfish and her greed almost comes to bear when she is gifted a new dolly for Christmas. However, Lulu overcomes her green-eyed monster when she runs into a poor little girl whose family can't afford gifts for the holidays, by giving her that prized doll. Yet even that story has a heartwarming twist.

The one thing missing from Lulu's 'Christmas Diary' is her battle of the sexes with Tubby. Tubby and his pals have a club house that bears a sign warning 'No Girls Allowed'. That sexist policy often sees Lulu leading her fellow girlfriends to challenge the boys segregation from the fairer sex. I'm guessing with Santa's arrival being so close at hand, the two best frenemies were able to put away their differences in order to not wind up with lumps of coal in their stockings. 

This was an enjoyable read. A fast read. I was probably done with it in less than a half hour. Yet, this was a nice way to enjoy the holidays set during a seemingly simpler, innocent time. I know of one more Christmas themed Little Lulu comic book out there. It's on my wish list and I hope to find it some day. If I'm lucky, there might be a few more Little Lulu holiday classics that I didn't even know existed. 

Onward to the hunt!

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 9 out of 10 stars.