Little Lulu

Macron, ‘le petit roi’, has been making pronouncements that make one think, along with equally stupid pronouncements by Polish, English and even Swedish leaders, that Europe will soon go to war with Russia.

As Gonzalo Lira used to say before the Ukrainian government assassinated him, during its death throes the Beast is kicking left and right. It is hard to know whether these death throes will trigger a nuclear war or whether the Beast will simply drop dead after the fuss it is making. But since it’s not clear that we’ll see the end of the world as the mortally wounded Beast drops dead, why not revisit the photo albums of our childhoods, or what we read as children? In times of urgency, it is refreshing to look back on our golden years…

A week ago I discovered that an American uploaded lots and lots of Little Lulu stories on his website. I’ve set out to remember my golden years by re-reading them, but before doing so since last week I re-read the thirty or so surviving issues that I still have at home. I started collecting them in the late 1960s and had a large collection, most of which was lost due to family trouble.

The first thing that struck me now that I reread is that there is a big difference between the various illustrators of the stories (more than three or maybe four I guess). Although signed by ‘Marge’, the author was actually an Aryan male, John Stanley (pic left). True, Lulu is based on a character created by Marge Buell in 1935, a woman who finished writing her bichromatic newspaper comic strips in 1947. But the Lulu that would become famous was the one created in full colour by Stanley. Marge’s strips were metamorphosed into a magazine, with very funny drawings in the 1950s by Stanley.

One of my surviving issues even lost the cover and is in a deteriorated but readable state. If I had known how to preserve them as a child, I would have put each comic in plastic bags. In one of the leafed-out stories I read recently, I was struck by the fact that all of Lulu’s schoolmates—dozens of them in one of the stories apparently drawn by Stanley—were white, and in the supermarket in the same leafed-out issue all the ladies were white.

The stories were ideal for children of the time: when the West was much saner than it is today. There is an interview on YouTube with Frank M. Young who, on being diagnosed with cancer, wanted to reminisce about his old days through an anthology published in 2019 of the early issues of Little Lulu. It was thanks to Young that I learned that Stanley worked on Little Lulu until the late 1950s when he burned out. Stanley had written thousands pages of stories of which he himself had illustrated about 700: fourteen years of constant work.

The fact that Stanley signed as ‘Marge’ when he was the sole author is symptomatic of the incipient feminism that would grow like a cancer in his country. But the 1950s didn’t seem treacherous. Many years ago I told one of the few racist friends I had in Mexico that the United States seemed to me ‘a big Germany’ in a territorial sense. Those were times when I hadn’t heard that white Americans had betrayed each other. When I was reading Little Lulu in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I didn’t perceive the betrayal, even though in one of the stories, at a costume party, Lulu dressed up as Abraham Lincoln because she admired him. But with all the characters being white, how could the child that I was harbour suspicions?

It would be interesting if other boomers like me would read this post and tell me that they too had been fans, as children, of Little Lulu… For the moment I would just like to share my inner experiences about a couple stories now that I reread several stories out of the hundreds I read as a child.

The first is a story I read, or rather was told by my dad as I seem to barely remember, when I was about seven years old. I was with my parents in the port of Veracruz and I remember my dad buying the magazine that contained the story in which poor Lulu loses her shadow.

For connoisseurs of the magazine, one of the curiosities of the comic was ‘the story within the story’. When Lulu’s very small neighbour Alvin misbehaved, Lulu would tell him a story to calm him down: a story that always featured a poor girl, who Stanley drew as Lulu herself, albeit in raggedy clothes. My seven-year-old memory is that in the story Lulu told Alvin, a shadow seller passed by in a carriage of shadows lost by their owners. It was an incredible feeling to read the whole story so many decades after reading it for the first time.

But the biggest shock came with what I had a feeling was my favourite story. In the story ‘The Shadow of a Man-eater’ from a special issue devoted to Lulu’s best friend Tubby, the memory I was left with was something of a teenage story, not a children’s story like the typical Lulu tales (as the story is).

The only thing I remembered with any clarity was the image below. But my—now I see wrong—memory was that Tubby had a sleepless night at Wilbur van Snobbe’s house and there he had seen the shadow of the lion. I didn’t remember that it had happened in his own house (it had been in the house of the rich van Snobbe where there had been a jewel robbery).

I didn’t remember any of the plot until yesterday when I reread the story so many decades after I first read it. The only thing I remembered was that the lions weren’t real and that Tubby was trying to solve a case because he liked to play detective. Yesterday when I reread the story I remembered some details, but in my memory those details weren’t associated with the lion story. It seems that the only thing that stuck in my memory was the image above: the moment of suspense that I experienced more than half a century ago was what registered in my mind!

I find it healthy to recreate the distant past of our lives: especially to evoke the times when everything seemed to be going well for the white race, when children’s comics seemed to be written in an ethnostate where not a single character of colour appeared.