By Shaenon K. Garrity
There are some comics publishing projects that you have to regard with a certain wondering gratitude, because you know they can't be making much money for the publisher in today's market, so they must exist simply to bring more wonderful comics into our lives. Admittedly, sometimes gratitude is mixed with other emotions, as when Viz puts out 19 volumes of
Ultimate Muscle: The Kinnikuman Legacy. (Full disclosure: I'm partly responsible for this, and I like
Ultimate Muscle. There just isn't enough overlap between manga fans and fans of pro wrestling, more's the pity.) But when it's Dark Horse putting out 19 volumes of
Little Lulu, there's no conflict; you just want to shake Mike Richardson's hand and buy him a big ice-cream soda.
The thing about the
Little Lulu reprint project is that, brilliant as
Little Lulu is, no one really needs 19 volumes of it. It's a very repetitive comic. The adventures of Lulu Moppet, Tubby Tompkins, and their many small neighbors were published in a time when kids read their comics and threw them away; a month later, they were ready for more of the same. John Stanley and his nameless assistants worked out a series of reliable formulas which play out, often with only slight variations, in issue after issue after issue:
Boys vs. Girls. The one everyone knows. The neighborhood boys, in their clubhouse with "No Girls Allowed" emblazoned proudly on the side, plot to trick, humiliate, and/or exploit the girls, or possibly just Lulu. The girls are fooled at first, then catch on and turn the tables on the boys. Alternately (the less satisfying iteration), Lulu remains clueless and simply lucks her way out, like Mr. Magoo. Very rarely, it's the girls who instigate the feud and get schooled by the boys. This formula allows for plenty of variation: one day Lulu will send Tubby and his friends into a haunted house and steal all their pants, and the next day Wilber Van Snobbe will hide in a hollowed-out snowman and pretend to be "Santa's Snowman" who rats to Santa Claus about the girls' naughty behavior. Yes, in the later issues the schemes get a little weird.
A subgenre involves Lulu trying to gain membership into the boys' club by carrying out impossible and ridiculous tasks set by the boys. She actually succeeds on several occasions, which are conveniently forgotten by everyone, including Lulu, by the next storyline. These stories are useful preparation for a young woman's life, especially if she enters the comics industry.
The West Side Gang. When not plotting against the girls, Tubby and his gang mix it up with the much tougher West Side Gang. Like the "Boys vs. Girls" stories, these battles can develop in any number of ways. Usually Tubby and his friends triumph through some kind of trickery, although on at least one occasion Tubby was able to beat up the entire West Side Gang simply through the power of positive thinking.
Tubby the Detective. These follow a brutally strict formula. A mystery occurs at the Moppet house, like a broken shaving brush or the cat getting sick. Lulu has been accused and spanked. Tubby volunteers to solve the mystery with his detective kit and assumes the crimefighting identity of The Spider. He immediately suspects Lulu's father (in one story, he accuses her mother, but this was a hideous aberration). Tubby's detective work invariably a) leaves a trail of destruction through the house, and b) involves Tubby donning an unconvincing disguise. About 90% of the time, it turns out that Mr. Moppet actually was the culprit. The rest of the time, it was usually Tubby himself. As similar as all the Detective Tubby stories are, there's something comfortable and reassuring about the formula. Plus, there's the suspense of seeing whether Tubby will dress in drag again.
The Truant Officer. Wikipedia says that Lulu's school had two truant officers, the earlier Mr. Googins and the later and more amusingly named McNabbem, and I see no reason to doubt this. The truant-officer stories are straight-up slapstick chases, like "Tom and Jerry" cartoons without the redeeming ultraviolence and cruelty. Lulu has to leave school for some reason, is mistaken for a hooky player, and gets chased all over town. That's pretty much it. If I don't sound too enthusiastic about these, well, I'm equally meh about "Tom and Jerry."
Lulu Tells a Story. Lulu makes up a story to entertain Alvin, the little boy next door. The story is always about a poor little girl who looks like Lulu; the antagonist is frequently the wicked Witch Hazel. Although there are some gems (like the story reprinted in
The Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics, wherein Alvin pole-sits and forces Lulu to tell a story about a rich little boy for once), it's hard not to groan inwardly a little when one of these stories comes up in the rotation. Maybe the problem is that they're too accurate: most of them really do capture a young kid's storytelling style, which means they're meandering collections of random events with little payoff. Some of the gags are clever; it's a running joke that Lulu's description of events in the captions is more flattering and self-serving than what we see on-panel. Also, Alvin usually likes these stories even less than the reader, which helps.
Lulu's Dreams. Lulu goes on a fantastic adventure that turns out to be a dream. Like the stories for Alvin, these can get pretty surreal. Like "the rug next to Lulu's bed turns into a pond and a fishing line with a lollipop on the end pops out and Lulu sticks it in her mouth and gets reeled underwater by a fish-man who tries to cook her for supper but she escapes by finding a sunken ship with a figurehead that looks exactly like her and putting the figurehead in the frying pan in her place" surreal.
Not that all
Little Lulu stories follow the formulas. There's just enough repetition that, when you read the collections, things start to feel a little familiar. But there's plenty else going on. Lulu was created by a woman,
Saturday Evening Post cartoonist Marge Henderson Buell, and the comic book nicely emulates Marge's crisp, geometric magazine-cartooning style. But John Stanley and his team were men, and it's probably not surprising that Tubby and the boys constantly threaten to upstage Lulu and her doll-carriage-pushing friends. Although Tubby was unable to carry his own spinoff comic for long, the Tubby-centric stories in
Little Lulu are some of the best, and many of them feel autobiographical. When Tubby saves up his pennies to eat at a diner on the outskirts of town because real live truck drivers eat there, and he eagerly asks every man at the counter if he's a truck driver until—joy of joys!—a bunch of truck drivers come in and sit down
right next to him, the story transcends the formulas of kids' gag comics and becomes a perfect moment drawn from life.
Life that doesn't exist anymore, really. The kids in
Little Lulu have the kind of freedom modern middle-class American kids can hardly imagine: they have the run of the town, they play in the woods unsupervised, they pick up stray dogs and skate on thin ice and run errands for local shopkeeps that take them into the homes of friendly strangers. In one story, Lulu and Tubby play mountain climber and scale the outside of a brownstone with ropes tied around their waists. In another, Tubby teaches the West Side Gang "riding the pookle," which involves swimming for miles through an underground drainage pipe. (It's a ruse, of course; you know Tubby.) Kids today could never do anything remotely this dangerous. And if they did, you couldn't draw a comic about it. The Scholastic Book Club would have your ass on a platter.
No one absolutely needs more than one or two volumes of
Little Lulu. And yet I've got 15 of them. Repetitive as they are, they're just that good. And there's something to be said for a winning formula. I don't ask for my Cadbury's Creme Eggs to occasionally contain pickles or Cheddar cheese, and I don't ask for Lulu to stop trying to get into that clubhouse.
In conclusion (and with apologies to Tom Spurgeon), here are my five favorite aspects of
Little Lulu:
1. The ubiquitous sound effect for crying: "
BAW!"
2. Tubby's acquisition of a cousin who looks exactly like a smaller version of himself and is named Chubby. This is pure genius.
3. The phrase "riding the pookle."
4. The shaggy, apparently headless little dog Lulu periodically adopts.
5. The absolutely staggering number of times Tubby winds up in drag.
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The Girls of Shonen MangaShaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2008
