Marge (cartoonist)
Encyclopedia
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
cartoonist
Cartoonist
A cartoonist is a person who specializes in drawing cartoons. This work is usually humorous, mainly created for entertainment, political commentary or advertising...
who worked under the pen name
Pen name
A pen name, nom de plume, or literary double, is a pseudonym adopted by an author. A pen name may be used to make the author's name more distinctive, to disguise his or her gender, to distance an author from some or all of his or her works, to protect the author from retribution for his or her...
Marge. She was best known as the creator of Little Lulu
Little Lulu
"Little Lulu" is the nickname for Lulu Moppett, a comic strip character created in the mid-1930s by Marjorie Henderson Buell. The character debuted in The Saturday Evening Post on February 23, 1935 in a single panel, appearing as a flower girl at a wedding and strewing the aisle with banana peels...
.
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is a U.S. state that is located in the Northeastern and Mid-Atlantic regions of the United States. The state borders Delaware and Maryland to the south, West Virginia to the southwest, Ohio to the west, New York and Ontario, Canada, to the north, and New Jersey to...
, Buell was 16 when her first cartoon
Cartoon
A cartoon is a form of two-dimensional illustrated visual art. While the specific definition has changed over time, modern usage refers to a typically non-realistic or semi-realistic drawing or painting intended for satire, caricature, or humor, or to the artistic style of such works...
was published. In 1925, she created her first syndicated
Print syndication
Print syndication distributes news articles, columns, comic strips and other features to newspapers, magazines and websites. They offer reprint rights and grant permissions to other parties for republishing content of which they own/represent copyrights....
comic strip
Comic strip
A comic strip is a sequence of drawings arranged in interrelated panels to display brief humor or form a narrative, often serialized, with text in balloons and captions....
, The Boy Friend, which ran through 1926. Marge was friends with Oz
Land of Oz
Oz is a fantasy region containing four lands under the rule of one monarch.It was first introduced in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, one of many fantasy countries that he created for his books. It achieved a popularity that none of his other works attained, and after four years, he...
author Ruth Plumly Thompson
Ruth Plumly Thompson
Ruth Plumly Thompson was an American writer of children's stories.-Life and work:An avid reader of Baum's books and a lifelong children's writer, Thompson was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and began her writing career in 1914 when she took a job with the Philadelphia Public Ledger; she wrote...
and illustrated her fantasy novel King Kojo (1933).
Little Lulu begins
Hired by The Saturday Evening PostThe Saturday Evening Post
The Saturday Evening Post is a bimonthly American magazine. It was published weekly under this title from 1897 until 1969, and quarterly and then bimonthly from 1971.-History:...
in 1934, her first Little Lulu drawing appeared on the back page of that weekly in 1935. Little Lulu replaced Carl Anderson's Henry
Henry (comic)
Henry is a comic strip created in 1932 by Carl Anderson. The title character is a young bald boy who is mute...
, which had been picked up for distribution by King Features Syndicate
King Features Syndicate
King Features Syndicate, a print syndication company owned by The Hearst Corporation, distributes about 150 comic strips, newspaper columns, editorial cartoons, puzzles and games to nearly 5000 newspapers worldwide...
. Little Lulu was created as a result of Anderson's success, as noted by Schlesinger Library curator Kathryn Allamong Jacob:
- Lulu was born in 1935, when The Saturday Evening Post asked Buell to create a successor to the magazine’s Henry—Carl Anderson’s stout, mute little boy—who was moving on to national syndication. The result was Little Lulu, the resourceful, equally silent (at first) little girl whose loopy curls were reminiscent of the artist’s own as a girl. Buell explained to a reporter, “I wanted a girl because a girl could get away with more fresh stunts that in a small boy would seem boorish.”
In 1935, she married C. Addison Buell. The couple had two sons, Fred and Larry
Lawrence Buell
Lawrence Buell is the current Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University, specialist on antebellum American literature and a pioneer of Ecocriticism...
, and lived in Malvern, Pennsylvania
Malvern, Pennsylvania
Malvern is a borough in Chester County, Pennsylvania, United States. The population was 2,998 at the 2010 census. The main road through the borough is King Street, although the borough is also bordered by Paoli Pike on the south, and is near US 30 on the north. The primary cross street is Warren...
.
The Little Lulu panel continued to run weekly in The Saturday Evening Post until December 30, 1944. Buell retained the rights, unusual for the time. In 1950, Little Lulu
Little Lulu
"Little Lulu" is the nickname for Lulu Moppett, a comic strip character created in the mid-1930s by Marjorie Henderson Buell. The character debuted in The Saturday Evening Post on February 23, 1935 in a single panel, appearing as a flower girl at a wedding and strewing the aisle with banana peels...
became a daily syndicated comic strip. Buell marketed Little Lulu widely throughout the 1940s. The character appeared in comic books, animated cartoons, greeting cards and more.
Little Lulu comic books, popular internationally, were translated into Arabic, Dutch
Dutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
, Finnish
Finnish language
Finnish is the language spoken by the majority of the population in Finland Primarily for use by restaurant menus and by ethnic Finns outside Finland. It is one of the two official languages of Finland and an official minority language in Sweden. In Sweden, both standard Finnish and Meänkieli, a...
, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, Norwegian
Norwegian language
Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants .These Scandinavian languages together with the Faroese language...
, Portuguese
Portuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, Swedish
Swedish language
Swedish is a North Germanic language, spoken by approximately 10 million people, predominantly in Sweden and parts of Finland, especially along its coast and on the Åland islands. It is largely mutually intelligible with Norwegian and Danish...
and Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
.
Illustrations
Buell also did illustrations for Country GentlemanCountry Gentleman
Country Gentleman was an agricultural magazine founded in 1831 in Rochester, NY by Luther Tucker. The magazine was purchased by Curtis Publishing Company in 1911. Curtis redirected the magazine to address the business side of farming, which was largely ignored by the agricultural magazines of the...
, Ladies' Home Journal
Ladies' Home Journal
Ladies' Home Journal is an American magazine which first appeared on February 16, 1883, and eventually became one of the leading women's magazines of the 20th century in the United States...
and Collier's
Collier's Weekly
Collier's Weekly was an American magazine founded by Peter Fenelon Collier and published from 1888 to 1957. With the passage of decades, the title was shortened to Collier's....
. Buell stopped drawing Little Lulu in 1947, and the work was continued by others, while she kept creative control. Sketching and writing of the Little Lulu comic book series was taken on by John Stanley
John Stanley (comics)
John Stanley was a comic book creator, best known for writing Little Lulu from 1945 to 1959. While mostly known for scripting, Stanley also was an accomplished artist who drew many of his stories, including the earliest Little Lulu issues. His specialty was humorous stories, both with licensed...
, who later drew Nancy and Sluggo. Buell sold her Little Lulu rights to Western Publishing
Western Publishing
Western Publishing, also known as Western Printing and Lithographing Company was a Racine, Wisconsin firm responsible for publishing the Little Golden Books. Western Publishing also produced children's books and family-related entertainment products as Golden Books Family Entertainment...
when she retired in 1971.
She died of lymphoma
Lymphoma
Lymphoma is a cancer in the lymphatic cells of the immune system. Typically, lymphomas present as a solid tumor of lymphoid cells. Treatment might involve chemotherapy and in some cases radiotherapy and/or bone marrow transplantation, and can be curable depending on the histology, type, and stage...
in Elyria, Ohio
Elyria, Ohio
-Community:Elyria has an extensive, although financially burdened, community food pantry and "Hot Meals" program administered through the Second Harvest Food Bank and several churches Elyria is served by Elyria Memorial Hospital.-Recreation and parks:...
in 1993.
In 2003, an original 1930s watercolor of Little Lulu by Buell brought $584.00 on eBay
EBay
eBay Inc. is an American internet consumer-to-consumer corporation that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide...
.
Archives
In July 2006, Buell's family donated the “Marge Papers” to the Schlesinger LibrarySchlesinger Library
The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America is a research library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. According to Nancy F...
at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. The papers include a collection of fan mail, comic books, scrapbooks of high points in Lulu’s history and a complete set of the newspaper cartoons. Buell's son Larry
Lawrence Buell
Lawrence Buell is the current Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University, specialist on antebellum American literature and a pioneer of Ecocriticism...
is a professor of American Literature at Harvard, and her son Fred is a professor of English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
at Queens College.
Sources
- Taylhardat, Karim. La Pequeña Lulu/The Little Lulu & M. Henderson, Madrid, Spain: Ediciones Sinsentido, 2007.