Iggy knows what women want

One day, Willy, Tubby and Iggy are arguing over which of them Lulu likes the best, and Iggy's pretty sure it's him, for the following reason:

To put Lulu's affections to the test, the boy's do the most logical thing: They sit on a rock and wait for the tide to come in and trap them. You see, the only sea-worthy vessel nearby is a tub large enough to carry Lulu and one other kid, so obviously whoever she decides to rescue first is the one she likes the best.

While calling for help, Iggy reminds Lulu of his likeable attributes:

I don't know, Ig; I'm not that tall, and am relatively helpless, and the girls I've managed to trick into dating me over the years usually don't find my lack of height or helplessness to be among my better qualities.

But perhaps there is some merit to Iggy's theory, since Lulu ultimately rescues the little dog who was hanging out with the boys throughout this story simply to be there for the punchline:

And that dog is even smaller and more helpless than Iggy.

So perhaps that's at least one girl who finds littleness and helplessness attractive. Or maybe she just dislikes boys; particularly ones who play pranks on her, like these three do earlier in the story.

This particular story can be found in Little Lulu Vol. 14: Queen Lulu, which also includes a beach story called "The Earwich" in which little shit Alvin buries a sleeping man in sand to tickle his feet, tickles the man's foot when he's dangling upside down from a lifeguard station, and then totally beaches—and thus presumably kills—a whale. I couldn't scan it without breaking the spine of my book but, damn, don't fuck with Alvin; the collateral damage alone is staggering.

Tubby + Hobos = Comedy Gold

There's only one way to improve upon the inherent hilarity of Tubby, and that's to have him dress up like a hobo, complete with bindle:

Four Things I Learned From Little Lulu Color Special

If I would have taken the time to flip through a copy of the Little Lulu Color Special in a shop, I probably wouldn't have purchased it, as the stories within are the same ones available in Dark Horse's black-and-white reprints, only presented larger and in full-color. But I ordered it sight unseen from the Internet. (Don't worry, local comics dealers—I was only adding it to an order of a prose book to qualify for free shipping!) Not that it was a complete waste of time and money. I did learn a few things from it. Well, four things.


1.) That old witch Hazel, the villain of the stupid, boring-ass stories Lulu tells Alvin occasionally, has green skin, like the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz.


2.)Lulu's hat doesn't match her dress. It's yellow, not red!
This honestly shocked me. I was sure it was red.


3.) Willy Wilkins apparently started dying his hair at one point:




4.) Tubby's cousin Chubby isn't a slightly smaller identical version of him after all; Chubby's hair is lighter:

I am going to talk a lot about Tubby now

It may have taken me a while to get around to actually trying out the John Stanley and Irving Tripp Little Lulu comics (which Dark Horse has been handily reprinting the hell out of) but man, once I did, I was hooked.

I know I sung their praises a bit in that previous post, but I thought maybe it would be a little more helpful to show how good they are here. So tonight I’d like to take a little time to talk about what exactly it is that makes Stanley and Tripp’s version of Little Lulu so great.

It’s Tubby. Tubby Thompkins. He’s Lulu Moppet’s neighbor and best (boy) friend, a clever little boy who plays at detective, is something of a master of disguise and is a greedy little glutton, which accounts for his…expansive physical appearance, which is made even funnier by his little coat, his tiny little sailor cap and the fact that he is named “Tubby.”

It’s not a nickname—it’s his name. His parents, his friends’ parents, his teachers, his principal, cops, local shopkeepers, they all call him “Tubby.”

Now, not to try and get all deep on you or anything here, but one of the things I like about the Little Lulu-iverse is it’s a fictional world in which there no clear winners and clear losers. Like, Charlie Brown is always getting dumped on; his sad-sack, never-gets-to-kick-a-football, always-loses-his-clothes-on-the-pitcher’s-mound, can’t-fly-a-kite, rejected-by-the-little-red-haired-girl lot in life is his whole deal.

But Tubby, like most of the Little Lulu characters, is neither a winner nor a loser. Sometimes he gets the better of his friends and foes—and everyone in the comic is both Tubby’s friend and his foe, depending on the story and situation—and sometimes they get the better of him. Often times he’ll bust Lulu’s dad Mr. Moppet for some petty domestic crime, getting him in hot water with his wife and daughter, but sometimes Mr. Moppet calls Tubby’s parents to get special permission to spank the little so-and-so.

And then there’s the art. Tripp, who provides the finished art over Stanley’s layouts, is one of those fantastic cartoonists who can do so much with so little. Each panel is full of simple designs, and the characters themselves are but two dots and a dozen lines or so, but they are so vibrant and expressive.

Especially Tubby. Here are some of Tubby’s many moods, as delineated by Tripp…


...happy...


...angry...


...psychotically angry...


...self-satisfied...


...in a drawer, and so on.

Let's take a look at what you could call a Tubby solo story (True fact: If Lulu wasn't even in Little Lulu, it would still rule). This one appears in Little Lulu Vol. 18: The Expert, the most recent of the Dark Horse trades.

Behold, comedy genius:


What the hell? Tubby's just sitting on his stoop, (angrily) minding his own business, and Wilbur and Gloria just walk up, look at him, and bust out laughing? Damn, that's weird.

Having enjoyed their context-free laugh at Tubby's expense, the curly-haired couple are off to their next stop, which gives Tub a clue as to why they might have been laughing at him...


Iggy thinks that's a good idea for a baby hippo's name.

Tubby, obviously, disagrees, and sees a real problem here:


It leaves him with but one recourse:

I love that second panel, in which the tubby kid named Tubby expresses that he never liked the name "Tubby" and never thought it suited him. See, I've wondered just why on earth his parents named him "Tubby"—was he a giant baby or what?—and it's nice to see him thinking about the issue for himself at long last.

Now, I'm not sure why he wants a "fancy" name, particularly that of "Lancelot," but it was the '50s, so maybe boys considered "fancy" to be a good quality in boys' names back then.

Now, the biggest hurdle in changing one's name is in getting everybody who knew you by your old name to quit calling you y it, which is never easy. Tub's first stop is to visit the fellows in his club, whom everyone refers to as the fellers, which I find charming.

Anyway, the respond exactly the way a group of little boys would respond if their portly friend told them he's chaning his name to Lancelot:


Please note the fits of hysterics this causes among the fellers and, in panel three, Tubby's perfectly cool, zen-like calm in reacting to their jeers...

...with persuasive violence.


He only relents when they've learned their lesson and start addressing him as Lancelot. However, Annie missed out on the lesson, and has the same reaction as the fellers:

When he finally heads home, he sees the kids have all done his bidding well, even if children struggle with the pronuciation a bit.


Heh. "Empty-lot." That kills me.

Well, regardless, at least everyone knows not to call Tubby "Tubby" any more. I guess he sure showed Gloria and Wilbur, huh? I can't wait until he sees them again. Oh hey, here they come now...

Ha ha! And thus Tubby suffers the very fate he spent the entire story hoping to avoid! And, on top of that, he loses his ice cream.

But the very best part about the ending? It means that the scene at the beginning, in which Wilbur and Gloria just strolled up, regarded Tubby, and pointed and laughted at him...

...they really were just laughing at him for absolutely no reason.

Don’t ever watch this cartoon. It’s dismal.

Having caught Little Lulu fever after finally giving Dark Horse’s winning collections of the series a try (something I’d put off doing for pretty much ever), I hit up all my local libraries to find as many Little Lulus as I could.

While searching their catalogs, I came across something odd, the DVD at the right.

It collects an HBO/Cinar-produced Little Lulu cartoon from 1995. I was highly suspicious of such an endeavor, based on the image on the cover alone—Tubby and Lulu were wearing their 1950s gear, but were striking odd, unnatural, more current poses that seemed somehow…off.

But what the hell, I thought, there’s no risk in borrowing it from a library, and I was curious how they would have modernized the world of Little Lulu and what the various characters would sound like and so forth.

Well, as it turns out, it’s awful. Just awful. And a pretty unusual project all around. But mostly just awful. Unusually awful, even.

Here’s the opening theme:



As you can see, they’ve got the John Stanley/Irving Tripp version of the character designs down pat. The expressions, the costumes, the movements, the shapes of the characters faces and hands—it was a little disconcerting how perfectly they managed to replicate the characters (Lulu actually has a pretty long history of animated adaptations, and this version hews closest to the designs seen in the Dark Horse reprints).

That theme song may sound a little old fashioned, and there’s a good reason for it—it is. It’s almost the exact same song that used to play before the old Famous Studios Little Lulu shorts from the 1940s. The one change? “Though you’re wild as any Zulu and you’re just as hard to tame” becomes “Though you’re wild you know it’s true, Lu, and you’re very hard to tame.”

The episodes collected on the DVD were divided into about three short stories, each of which was a scene-for-scene adaptation of one of the stories from the old Dell comics that Dark Horse is collecting. Even short gag skits between the stories—called “Lulu Bites”—were in some cases lifted directly from the comics. There were some minor changes here and there to fudge the fact that it wasn’t the mid-50’s any more, but the fidelity to the source material was remarkable.

Now, I don’t know if that’s exactly a good thing. It’s certainly something I’m not used to seeing in American animation. I have this problem with anime based on manga and manga based on anime, or any property that exists in both formats really—whichever version I experience first tends to taint the version I experience second, so that I hate the one I experience second, no matter how much I might love the one I experienced firest. At least with television anime; film versions tend to differ more dramatically.

So many anime series are so closely based on the manga, that, if I’ve seen the anime first, then I find the manga stories insufferably boring (and can sometimes have difficulty not hearing the voice actors’ voice in my head while reading their dialogue). Or if I’ve read the manga first, then the anime seems horribly boring, as a story I’ve already read at my own pace is slowly played out to fill a particular time slot (Dragon Ball Z is probably the worst offender of this ever created; it takes, what, two hours to read Goku and Gohan’s adventures on Namek, but some 98 days to watch the goddam cartoon version of the sequence?)

Anyway, that’s what watching Little Lulu was like. In most cases, I had already read the stories the cartoons were so rigorously replicating, so there were no surprises, beyond the changes in minor things to disguise the setting.

What I found most odd about the whole thing was the Seinfeld influence, which is about as random an influence for a Little Lulu show as I can imagine.

Each episode opens with Lulu on a stage, performing incredibly unfunny stand-up before a “live” audience providing canned laughter, laughter that always swells to cheering applause as her routine reaches its climax. The jokes are all incredibly weak—I felt sad seeing how many writers were involved with creating these sequences while watching the credits of Stanley and Tripp—the kind of jokes little kids might tell, only too polished for the insane non sequitirs that real little kids seem to delight in passing off as jokes. The audience seems to consist of adults though.

Sometimes the jokes will refer thematically to the story elements in the episode, a la Seinfeld, but just as often they won’t. It’s been about a week since I watched it, and I still haven’t come up with a rationale for why the producers decided a few Seinfeld homages/rip-offs per episode would be the best way to re-package these 40-year-old stories.

I mean, I know Seinfeld was pretty popular back in the '90s, but did kids love it too? What the hell?

Here's one of those awful sequences:



Ugh.

It did sate my curiosity regarding how Little Lulu would play as a cartoon though, I guess. Tracey Ullman provided her voice at one point, later replaced by Jane Woods (I believe all the episodes I saw were voiced by Woods, but I’m not sure). Lulu’s voice is pretty grown-up and irritatingly sassy throughout, kind of like Babs Bunny from Tiny Toons (Ooohhh how I hate that Babs Bunny!)

I’m not terribly fond of Tubby’s voice either, but it does sound nice and…well, fat, I guess. (If that makes sense; you can, like, hear the fat in his voice).

I think I preferred the 1940’s cartoon Lulu voice better though:




And, speaking of old-school Lulu cartoons, here’s one with some sweet Tubby action in it:



Lulu’s voice sounds younger and cuter, and Tubby sounds less fat, yet more obnoxious. Both of them sure are full of jokes at the expense of Native Americans though…sheesh. (And, as an Italian-American, I suppose I should maybe be offended by the portrayal of Christopher-a Columbus, “America, we-a discover-a you!”).

Catching up on comics everyone else in the entire world has already read

Like most everybody, I really like to be on top of things when it comes to pop culture, or at least the elements of it I’m interested in. I like to see movies the weekend they’re released (if I haven’t already seen ‘em for review purposes), I like to hear about the cool bands before they sign their big record contracts and appear on Letterman or Saturday Night Live, and, whenever possible, I like to read comics and graphic novels on Wednesday afternoons.

However, there’s certainly something to be said for coming to something—particularly serial entertainment like comic strips, books or TV series—long after the rest of the world. Sure, it might mean that you can’t always participate in the water cooler conversations at work the next day, and you might lose some with-it points or geek cred, but, on the other hand, the thing you’ve been missing out on for years has had time to pile up, so that when you’re ready for it, there is a lot of it to be enjoyed.

For example, my lack of interest in/ability to afford premium channels meant I missed Curb Your Enthusiasm until five seasons of it were available on DVD, but I could watch it pretty much all at once—an episode or two or three a day. I was too young to “get”Twin Peaks when it was on TV, but on DVD, I could follow the entire Laura Palmer investigation in the course of a week or three. The instant gratification that comes from being able to watch, say, Neon Genesis Evangelion or Boston Legal without having to wait for commercials, week’s between episodes or new seasons to start is a wonderful, wonderful pleasure.

The same goes for comics. Some of my favorite reading experiences have involved catching up on completed series I’ve never read a bit of, like Preacher, which I didn’t even start reading until after the last issue shipped, or Starman, which I started reading in trade as the last arc was winding down in the monthlies. It’s a neat feeling, knowing the cliffhanger between stories or volumes will last only as long as you allow it to, and being able to read a single, complete, several thousand pages long story in the course of a few weeks, you know?

This past month, I’ve set myself to catching up on a few comics, of varying kinds and off varying degrees of my being way behind of. The four comics below have pretty much nothing in common, except from the fact that they’re all things I took a little too long to sample for myself, and that I’m cramming them all into the same long-winded post.

The first is the biggest work, and the one I was farthest behind on and, not coincidentally, the one I’m the most embarrassed—hell, ashamed—it took me so long to experience and appreciate. Particularly considering that one of my jobs and one of my—I don’t know, what is this site? A hobby?—hobbies is talking about comics.

But here goes: I never really read Achewood until the dawn of the new year.

(Ray, Onstad and Roast Beef, in an image that ran with this Onion AV Club interview)

I have an excuse, of course, but it may not sound like a very good one, particularly since I’m making it on a web log, but I’m a straight-up old-fashioned Luddite, and have a pretty strong aversion to web comics. The problem with web comics, you see, are that they’re on the web. And thus reading them involves using a computer, and that’s something I associate with work, not comics reading.

As much time as I spend in front of computer screens, when I want to read a comic, I want it to be something I can hold in my hands, or take in the bathroom or bathtub with me. I want it to be something I don’t mind eating while reading, or falling asleep with my face on. And I’d like it to be something that won’t give me cancer or hurt my eyes.

My resistance to computers is slowly breaking down, of course.

There was a time (the late ‘90s), when I still did all my writing with pen and paper, and would later transcribe it on my typewriter, or, later, a computer, although I’ve since learned to write right on the keyboard.

I used to read newspapers, now I get all my news from the computer.

And the fact that none of the papers around me carry some of my favorite comic strips has slowly gotten me used to reading strips online.

The other thing that kept me from Achewood was that it was a little overwhelming—look at how much information there is available on the page and, also, that I didn’t have a clue what it was about.

I’ve heard about how awesome it was for a long time, of course, and would occasionally follow links back to it. I remember the Comic Sans strip making the rounds, for example, and the one about Ray’s nephew's little pants, but I was having some conceptual difficulties.

Why was it called “Achewood,” for example? What were the various animals…bears or cats? Why did Todd not have any features? If he was a squirrel and Roast Beef was a cat, how come Todd was so much smaller, as if Beef were human-sized? And how come everything is scale to the cats, except when it’s not? And what’s up with that all-white, angel thing that’s sometimes with Todd? If Phillipe is only five, why doesn’t he live with his mom?

I tried reading several strips in a row on a couple of occasions to make them make sense, but these questions still bugged me. (I’ve similarly tried to force myself to enjoy a lot of newspaper strips over the years in this same way; like, “If I just read Mary Worth long enough to know who everyone is, it will eventually start being entertaining.” It never worked).

Okay, yes, these are all stupid-ass questions, and, looking back, I can see thinking about these things casts me in the befuddled old man role of, say, my grandfather trying to make sense of an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force he’s just walked in on, or, I don’t know, Walt Disney’s grandfather having his mind blown by his grandson’s day job (“Why isn’t that duck wearing any pants? Why’s the mouse have pants, but not shirt?”)

The critical mass of critical praise Achewood and its creator Chris Onstad was racking up as ’07 turned into ’08 inspired me to give it another try and this time really work at it. It was ultimately Lev Grossman’s top ten list for Time that framed it in a way that dispelled all my lingering confusions:



Achewood defies categorization or description, but a brief, futile attempt at a synopsis would go something like this: A bunch of cats, some robots, a bear and an otter who's 5 years old, live together in a fictional neighborhood called Achewood, which you might usefully think of as a grown-up, suburban, stoned version of Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood.



Man, it was light bulb city after I read that description, and armed with that and Dirk Deppey’s statement in his best-of the year list that “Achewood’s strengths are also its biggest drawback, as you really won't get much of the humor without reading six months or so of archived strips,” I returned to achewood.com, clicked on the “Jump To Story Arc” buttons, and spent the better part of my January evenings reading every goddamned strip I could.

And now ? Well, I’ve seen the light. I hate to even waste anybody’s time here talking up Onstad’s strip, particularly since I’m apparently one of the last people with an interest in comics and a web connection to get into it, but it truly is an incredible achievement in sequential art, serial narrative and funny-ass jokes.

It’s almost scary how fully-realized Onstad’s world is—I mean, ten of his characters have blogs that update more regularly than most comics blogs—and how realistic all of his characters are, despite the fact that they may be, for example, a cat in a thong Speedo and sunglasses, or a squirrel with a drug problem and a tiny little van.

It’s as powerful an argument as you can make for comic strips, I think, regarding the idea that spending a little bit of time on a regular basis with the fictional characters slowly, gradually increases the effectiveness of the entire endeavor. For an extreme example, think of Peanuts—some of us have been reading it our entire lives; some people have read it for fifty years. That shit all added up, to the point where Snoopy could just walk on-panel and you’d crack a smile.

And Onstad’s not working with every day things like dogs and kids, he’s working with a bunch of cats, teddy bears and robots; that is, rather than starting with the familiar and making it more and more familiar, he’s starting with the out-there and making it seem everyday.

If he quit making Achewood tomorrow, I imagine comics historians would look back on it as an astonishing achievement. If he keeps it up as long as Bill Watterson did Calvin and Hobbes or Schulz did Peanuts? My God, man. Future histories of comics are going to have a lot to say about Achewood.

Me, I’m insanely late to the party, but I don’t much mind—after all, I got to spend the last month or so reading them all at once, and it’s made for a great last month or so.

I’m only a few months rather than a few years late when it comes to reading Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (Levine Books) which is, I’m sure you’ve heard elsewhere, really, really good.

I’m not sure if it would have cracked my top ten from last year if I’d managed to read it before December 31st, but it definitely would have made it into the bigger, to-be-considered-for-best-of-the-year list. Tan did an incredible job telling the rather oft-told, classic immigrant story, using essentially the American version of the experience, albeit by inventing a bewilderingly alien culture to plunge the reader into, making the experience easily relatable to American readers, despite the fantastic nature of so much of the story.

I’m of two minds about the art. The designs of the new land our immigrant hero starts his new life in are incredible, and after reading it, I quickly started over, just following Tan’s linework, and sitting in mute amazement at the way he shaped all those little marks into such incredible images. (The pages of the giants with the vacuum guns are really haunting; check ‘em out below).



At the same time, I didn’t much care for the human characters. The expressions often seemed too much like photographs, as if they were more photo than drawing. They’re exceptional drawings, but, as a matter of personal aesthetic taste, I find drawings that look too realistic off-putting sometimes. I do see how this served the story well though, putting all of the fantasy elements in sharper relief.


On the eve of a recent Wednesday, a couple of bloggers mentioned how incredible it was that Dark Horse Comics’ reprint program of the old Little Lulu comics had reached Volume 18 already. Clearly, it’s a publishing initiative that’s working pretty damn well, and it’s high time I at least gave the comics a look.

I checked one out from my local library more out of curiosity than anything else, and I was immediately hooked, racing through all the volumes they carried (Vols. 7, 12 and 13) and then pointing my browser to the next nearest library to find more. Not only are they well-made, fun comics, they’re incredibly addictive (And at the standard manga price point of only $9.99 per volume, they’re a pretty good value, too).

John Stanley and Irving Tripp’s cartooning is incredible and, like those Essential and Showcase Presents reprint volumes, I think the black and white format really accentuates that (although, I should note, the Little Lulu collections are on higher quality paper).

While the character designs of the kids and their parents are sharp, what I really dig about the cartooning is the random adults passing through the panels, the passersby and their reactions to the outsize emotions of the kids and their often strange behavior.

And the expressions on the characters’ faces are just amazing. They all have plain old dots for eyes, but Stanely and Tripp wring an amazing amount of emotion out of them, by merely adding slanted eyebrows, just like you learned to draw mad people when you were a little kid. (Mike Sterling had a great post accentuating the kids’ angry faces recently).

The childhood that Little Lulu, Tubby and the gang share is one I have no real first-hand experience with, and I suspect neither do my parents—I’m removed from it by more than one generation, if it ever actually existed. It seems to be the same golden neighborhood childhood you see in Peanuts, Dennis the Menace and some of the old Archie comics.

And yet I still felt a tinge of nostalgia while reading it. Maybe it’s nostalgia for those other works that the Little Lulu comics reminded me of, or maybe it’s that no matter how different the specifics of their childhoods vs. my own, Stanley, Irving and company capture the essential relationships and emotions of being a little kid.

As much as I enjoyed the kids’ adventures—particularly those involving Tubby as a detective busting Lulu’s dad for some crime, real or imagined—I hate the chapters in which Lulu tells stories to little pest character Alvin. I don’t know why, exactly, as these often give Stanley and Tripp the opportunity to draw dragons, dinosaurs, giants, monsters and the like, but they bug the hell out of me, and I have a hard time getting through them. Maybe it’s the often redundant narration, or just the lack of Tubby action, but I don’t cotton to the imaginary story sequences.

Finally, I finally got around to reading Death Note Vol. 1 (Viz), fully realizing I’m, like, years behind on this multimedia juggernaut. It’s popularity alone always made me curious about it, but there always seemed to be a manga series I was more interested in, and so I just managed to not read it until a couple weeks ago.

Having done so, I’m a little surprised to hear it’s supported a dozen volumes, as the premise doesn’t immediately seem like it would lend itself to too long a series—although I suspect there’s quite a bit of growth possibility in extending the mythology involving the death gods and other character’s touching Light’s notebook.

And I can also see exactly why it’s so popular. Light is a fairly unique-ish protagonist for a manga series (or, you know, any kind of serial fiction), and the fact that it’s so hard to root for or against him (or any of the other characters in the first volume) makes it a very interesting read.

It also has a set of simple “rules” governing it, like a lot of the more popular manga/anime imports (Cardcaptor Sakura, Dragon Ball, Yu-Gi-Oh!, etc.), and is pretty damn suspenseful. By the time I finished the first volume, I was really curious about what happened next, and how the high-stake game of wits between Light and “L” turned out.

Now I think I’m going to go look into this “Watchman” book by Alan Moore and Dave something-or-other I’ve heard so much about…