LITTLE LULU and TUBBY ANNUAL #2.

Well, I lucked out and nabbed the second LITTLE LULU & TUBBY ANNUAL. Now I've got them both.

Front cover. Stories all written and illustrated by John Stanley.

Back cover. From the days when the back cover had to have gag art, too.

Recent Additions

Here are some recent additions to my comic book collection. Been heading into some non-Silver Age stuff because I've been able to nab some good deals.

I have been after this book for ages! You can see why Disney hand-picked Carl Barks to be in charge of the comic book versions of his Ducks. Barks had some strange quirks in his style and the way he portrayed supporting characters, but his grasp of anatomy and brilliant story-telling ability made him the single greatest Disney comic book artist.

Four Color #456. It's actually Uncle Scrooge #2. Of all of Barks' creations, Scrooge is one of the finest and most realized of his characters. Every American kid admired capitalist bastards, and Scrooge was one of the best. A flinty old curmudgeon but with just the barest glint of a human heart under that greedy exterior.

I loved these Little Lulu comics when I was a kid. And the best of them were the Dell Giants, and the best of these were the ones with Halloween themes.

I'm slowly completing my Strange Tales collection. I don't need a whole lot more of them, and I have the hardest to find issues already. Just filling in the gaps at this point.

Final Creation from A Comics Great

In 1971 a comic book appeared from the fading publisher Gold Key. O.G. WHIZ, created, written, and illustrated by John Stanley was the swan-song for that creator. He had earned a living for a couple of decades in the comic book industry by parceling out charming and witty and very funny stories for children. Alas, his work had been for the children of earlier times and his was an old-fashioned style for a more innocent time.

Stanley's great days had been when there were lots of comic books being produced from many publishers. In those days there were all kinds of comics; this was the era when comic book did not automatically mean: superheroes. He flourished in a milieu of Casper the Friendly Ghost, Donald Duck, Porky Pig, Hot Stuff the Little Devil, The Lone Ranger, Dick Tracy, Tarzan, Little Lulu...

Little Lulu was Stanley's great work. For many years he created amazing stories of the adventures of the old magazine character created by Marjorie Henderson Buell, but brought out of the pages of Saturday Evening Post to millions of children as the comic book character published by Dell Comics and then Gold Key. John Stanley became one of the most influential comic creators during the years when he was doing his various Little Lulu stories, spinning off title after title as the sales ballooned.

Alas, this kind of thing fell by the wayside as the years progressed. TV killed off the comic book industry as surely as it did the fiction pulps of the day. Little Lulu faded away. But every so often Stanley would be called upon to put his magic id to work creating something new, something possibly successful for the shrinking market of children's comics.

And the last thing that he did was the title O.G. WHIZ, the stories of a child placed in charge (as President and Chariman of the Board) to Tikkletoy Company. The first issue is all John Stanley, awash with his fantastic and very funny renderings. However, the following issues of the book were merely written by Stanley, with a few of the stories blessed with his layouts but finished by someone else. While the stories are entertaining in those latter issues, the magic of Stanley's brush was gone.

With the cancellation of O.G. WHIZ, Stanley faded from the comic book marketplace. He ended his days working for a silk screen printing firm. Apparently he was bitter toward the comic book industry in his latter days because he never received any royalties for the many stories that were created by Stanley. It is a common and sad story in the industry.

O.G. WHIZ #1, from the fading days of Gold Key Comics.

Melvin Again!

When I was a kid I loved this guy's work. His name was John Stanley and I was attracted to every comic book that he wrote and illustrated. Toward the end of his career he would mainly create, plot, write, and do what are called breakdowns--bare bones illustrations over which other artists could do the drawing and inking. But even his breakdowns held a measure of real humor that appealed to the kid I was.

This brilliant comic was contracted by Dell to capitalize on the then-current popularity of monsters--most notably the humorous monster take characterized by productions such as The Munsters, and The Addams Family TV shows. And also influenced--culturally, at least--by the light-hearted editorial slant of Forrest J. Ackerman's FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND Magazine.

I've read that Stanley never really got the appreciation he so deserved during most of his working life in comics. This is a real shame, because his work connected not just with me, but with probably millions of other kids who read his books. He also wrote and illustrated the popular LITTLE LULU and TUBBY comics that once commanded an important presence on newsstand shelves for so many years. It wasn't just hordes of little boys who were reading his comics, but vast crowds of little girls, too.

If you want to learn how to write a kid's comic, then study the work of John Stanley on LITTLE LULU and TUBBY comics.