Little Lulu by John Stanley (No. 59)

Little Lulu (1945-1959)

by John Stanley

REVIEW BY GARY GROTH:

(from The 100 Best Comics of the Century! in The Comics Journal #210, 1999)

John Stanley's Little Lulu may be the best children's comic ever published. (By children, I mean, ages four through eight approximately, for whom no one apparently is capable of writing comics today.) The cast of characters - the kids Lulu, Tubby, Iggy, Willy, Annie, Gloria, Alvin, the adults McNabbem, the Moppets, the fantasy characters Witch Hazel and Little Itch, and I would include even, or especially, the ubiquitous, almost onomatopoeic exclamations YOW! and PHOOEY! - are as rich an ensemble as Schulz's better known Peanuts gang. And like Peanuts, the format of Lulu is both formally rigid but versatile enough to accommodate an infinite number of imaginative variations on a theme. 

The children are not, however, metaphors for adults or adult behaviour. Instead, Stanley's kids, much like Hal Roach's Our Gang cast, are considerably more autonomous than their real life counterparts could ever hope to be, while brilliantly maintaining their fidelity to the impulses, cruelties and nutty logic that governs childhood.

Visually, Stanley's work is a masterpiece of compositional precision and formal clarity, rivalling, in its own way, that of Shelly Mayer or Alex Toth. Stanley managed, in stories no fewer than four pages and no more than eight, to achieve a flawless graphic flow, choosing exactly the right composition and scene for each successive panel. Stanley's style is the US equivalent of Herge's clean line - the drawing is just as impeccable, but less fussed over and more histrionic, particularly the facial expressions, which are usually delineated by appropriately shaped and exaggerated black holes.

Thematically, I'm pleased to report that there was no sanctimonious, William Bennett-style goodie-two-shoes moralising, the sine qua non of children's entertainment these days. Quite the opposite, if anything: Tubby is usually cheerfully unrepentant or downright clueless when one of his idiotic schemes backfires and blows up in his face. Lulu often triumphs in the end by demonstrating even greater deviousness than her opponent, and when she tells Alvin one of her fables designed to impart a moral lesson, Alvin usually gets it exactly wrong (Alvin, Spare That [Family] Tree, September 1959, for example). Nor is the series exactly non-violent: in one story Lulu punches out Tubby and Willy, in another, she is almost cooked and eaten, and in yet a third she systematically stalks and shoots the boys with perfume from a water-pistol. None of this is offensive or exploitative. The complicated plots (reminiscent of the staples of Hollywood's screwball comedies with their mistaken identities, fake assumptions, and likably oblivious characters) combined with irony make these stories far more sophisticated than they actually look, which is practically the definition of good children's stories.

QUILLERMO DEL TORO:
(via Twitter, 6 January 2022)
The D&Q editions are superb. I own the entire John Stanley Little Lulu and these new volumes are still a must. So beautiful. Little Lulu: The Little Girl Who Could Talk to Trees – Drawn & Quarterly.

FURTHER READING:

John Stanley at D&Q

John Stanley at Fantagraphics Books

TCJ Review: Little Lulu - Working Girl

TCJ Interview: Bill Schelly - Comics Scholar & John Stanley Biographer