Friday, November 10, 2006

Little Lulu Goes to Harvard

The Little Lulu papers have found a home at the Schlesinger Library. Emerson scholar Lawrence Buell and his brother donate a "slice of Americana."

(A girl who "deserves a place beside the likes of Emma Goldman, Amelia Earhart, and Harriet Beecher Stowe," should get a little space on Fuse #8, don't you think?)

3 comments:

fusenumber8 said...

I dunno. I definitely read Lulu when I was a kid, but she always struck me as a little too similar to Sluggo and Nancy. Is that wrong of me to say?

Julie said...

Hey there! There are similarities, and for a while John Stanley illustrated both Nancy and Lulu.

I've never been a big Nancy fan (although Bushmiller's Nancy Eats Food looks pretty great), so I can't say just how different Lulu is from Nancy. My husband says that Nancy comics are "more of a gag, while the Lulus are complex stories." And you have to go farther back than the 60s to get to the best Lulus.

They're chocked-full with backward social messages, but Lulu always manages to come out on top.

My husband is a Lulu collector. Lulu has a lot of male fans – the slapstick appeals to the Three Stooges enthusiast, but there's also the intricate, character-driven storyline too. (How do I insert Venn diagram here?) Plus Stanley's covers, and most of Tripp's drawings are wonderful.

Julie said...

Nancy Eats Food