We're almost to the end, folks... according to Frank Young's STANLEY STORIES, John Stanley's long run on LITTLE LULU ended with issue #135, and this latest volume of LULU stories brings us up to LULU #129 (March 1959). I'm figuring that the next collection will be the last one, and it might not even be a "full package," since other creators apparently contributed to #134 and #135. It's become easy to take these volumes for granted, but, as one who'd had very little prior exposure to Stanley's LULU work, I really do appreciate Dark Horse's bringing it back into common circulation -- and in a portable, reader-friendly format, to boot.Our latest package o' fun contains the usual ration of high-quality storytelling, plus, somewhat to my surprise, a couple of additional appearances by the cute little French girl, Fifi (whose last name, we learn here, is Fromage). GeoX thought that he had seen Fifi in other stories, and I'm happy to see his hypothesis verified. The final story in #129, the TUBBY tale "Big Dog," guest-stars The Little Men from Mars, who were, I believe, regularly featured in the TUBBY title. I don't recall seeing them in LULU before, however. Stanley obviously felt that people who read TUBBY were likely to read LULU and vice versa, which is solid puck in the eye to the notion that LULU was a "girls' comic" and TUBBY a "boy's comic."
Some good news on the Lulu reprint front: apparently in addition to the regular series, Stanley also wrote the giant-sized Dell specials, and Dark Horse is reprinting them. Wikipedia claims there were sixteen of these; some of the later ones may have been after Stanley's tenure, but still--I would imagine this means another half-dozen volumes, anyway. Huzzah!
ReplyDeleteGeo,
ReplyDeleteHuzzah indeed. Of course, there is always STANLEY STORIES blog for a regular dose of Stanley's work.
Chris