(Witch Hazel: get it? Lulu was not averse to puns.) Witch Hazel was a formidable adversary, but the “Little Lulu” avatar always won out in the end, through a mixture of inventiveness, deviousness, and trickery-joining a long list of female heroines from folktales and epics-and, more recently, novels-who have done the same. Her tales featured a poor little girl identical to Lulu who picked beebleberries and sold them, but frequently ran afoul of a wicked witch called Hazel. The episodes I remember most clearly were those in which Lulu resorts to tale-spinning in order to soothe the savage breast of the pesky and persistent Alvin. Move over, Jane Eyre!īut most of all Lulu was a storyteller. One could therefore be little, and a girl, and nonetheless the title character. And, in an age somewhat devoid of female title characters, she was the title character. She had other, better things to do, and anyway, she-being the title character-was smarter, so there. The eternal problem of the boys’ clubhouse-not being let into it, that is-was treated by her, by and large, with a phnuh. She was little, as was I, but this did not stop her for an instant. (This failed to happen.)īut Lulu had a few other things going for her, in my eyes. Whereas Lulu and I were all set! Soon I would surely get a job selling that new consumer item, Kleenex, just like her. Curly hair went in and out of fashion-Twiggy was to get revenge on behalf of the straight-haired in the late nineteen-sixties-but, in the Shirley Temple-dominated nineteen-forties, curls were at a premium, and it was horrifying for me to witness the Torquemada-like tortures inflicted on my friends’ heads by their mothers: their hair was twisted up in damp rags and secured with bobby pins at night, producing, in the morning, a few limp spirals of hair that would quickly wilt. The things Lulu and her pals and frenemies got up to behind the backs of their oblivious parents were close to our own experiences, and being able to think your way out of a tight spot you’d got yourself into was a skill we all wished to have.īut Lulu had a special significance for me, because she had curls and so did I. They were read by boys as well as girls-bratty kids were universally appealing to bratty kids, which all of us were, some of the time, in those years when kids were allowed to roam freely as long as they came home before dark. The comics were read and reread they were also traded.Īmong those collected and traded at our place were “Little Lulu”s. On Saturday mornings, groups of children would congregate around the stashes of comics that had been collected to have comic-book orgies. Comics were one of the main sources of entertainment for children then: there was not yet much television, and, although there were Saturday matinées, most films were for adults. ![]() ![]() I grew up in the golden age of comics: the nineteen-forties, and most particularly, the five years immediately after the end of the Second World War. Three panels from “Marge’s Little Lulu: Tubby’s Travels.” Courtesy Classic Media, LLC and Drawn & Quarterly.
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