Customer Reviews

Little Lulu Color Special

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John Stanley's Dell Little Lulu Comics are some of the most popular comics in history, and Dark Horse's recent decision to reprint them vies with The Complete Peanuts as the comics publishing event of the century. The Dark Horse series, currently up to twelve books, reprints the comics in black and white with color covers. Even the Another Rainbow hardback reprint volumes were black and white with included color covers. Here at last is the first all color volume, and it's a Lulu!

Little Lulu Color Special reprints twenty six stories random from Dell's Marge's Little Lulu comics numbers 4 through 86. Since they're not being released in order, this leaves plenty of room for future volumes. Remember when comics were a quarter? Neither do I, but this is almost as good, with Amazon bringing the price down under 50 cents per story. Of course then you got a whole comic for that. But there are tradeoffs. Instead of newsprint, here's a high-quality 10 X 7 inch over 200 pages bound volume with clearer printing than the comics ever had. These are the same comics, though; you can still see the mistakes common in the Dell and later Western Publishing reprints.

These comics were the inspiration for CINAR's The Little Lulu Show cartoon seen on HBO Family, with Lulu initially voiced by Tracey Uhlman (and now on DVD). Many show episodes were based on the John Stanley stories, and many of those stories are in this book, including "The Green Girl" and "Boy Canon Ball". Thanks to Dark Horse, fun comics are back, and heralding their return, the queen of them all: Little Lulu.

Finally! After 11 volumes of classic Little Lulu stories in black and white, Dark Horse has released a "Color Special" of stories reprinted from issues as early as Little Lulu #4, ending with a tale from Little Lulu #86. Except for Tubby's little cousin Chubby no longer being a mini-Tubby (in this Dark Horse release he's inexplicably blonde instead of red haired like Tub), I have no argument with this issue. "Witch Hazel" stories abound (including "The Witches Picnic" from Little Lulu #75, one of my all-time faves) and there's a sampling of "Spider" stories, wherein Tubby acts as a detective to clear an innocent Lulu of blame for some misdeed committed -- usually -- by her dad.

There is no other comic I can think of that can be read over and over for sheer pleasure than Stanley's Little Lulus. Brilliant writing, clever plotting, and funny gags abound. Except for Carl Barks, who wrote and illustrated the magnificent Donald Duck comics, John Stanley was without peer in comics for juveniles.

This "Color Special" reprints some of the stories from Dark Horse's series of Little Lulu books, but in color rather than black and white. The color improves the stories, especially in cases where color is integral to the story, like the one where Lulu accidentally dyes her skin green. Little Lulu is generally considered to be the best comic book about a little girl ever. This book provides solid evidence in favor of that belief.

the book reproduced the actual size of the original comic book. the color is vividly reproduced in all pages compared with the other harveytoon re released cartoon characters with bigger size book but mostly in black and white but cheaper in price. this book is highly recommended to those who would like to reminisce their childhood memories.