Little Lulu Age
A little more than seven years old and a little less than nine

Little Lulu Friends
Tubby Tompkins
Annie Inch
Alvin Jones
Iggy Inch
Gloria Darling
Wilbur Van Snobbe
Willy Wilkins

Little Lulu Parents
Mr. George Moppet
Mrs. Martha Moppet

In Peeksil, New York there is a girl named Lulu Moppet. She and her gang of friends are always getting into trouble, solving mysteries, studying, doing something at school, or just hanging out. Lulu's father George is always sitting on the couch watching television, and bribing Lulu with money to do his duties, although Martha (Lulu's mom) always catches him. Lulu's best friend Annie is as smart as Lulu and helps Lulu in her plans to get revenge on Tubby and the fellers. Then there is Iggie, Tubby, Willie, Eddie, and Alvin who are members of The East Side Club and there are the rich couple Wilbur Van Snobbe and Gloria Darling.

Lulu first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post for February 23, 1935, and ran there until the end of 1944. The editors noodled out the name and come out with "Little Lulu"  Mrs. Buell essentially added apple-cheeked little girl with corkscrew curls and a red dress to the button eyes and up-turned nose. The new characters was a silent and resourceful and slightly anti-authoritarian. Her mischief, as displayed in a weekly panel, often bordered on the malicious. "I wanted a girl," Marge told a newspaper interviewer five years later, "because a girl could get away with more fresh stunts that in a small boy would seem boorish. Lulu's curls, I guess, were reminiscent of the way my hair looked when I was a youngster, but her face and the dress were just accidents." Christened "Little Lulu Moppet" by the Post editors, this child (who was, Marge later said, a little more than seven years old and a little less than nine).

In her inaugural appearance, Lulu is a member of the wedding party, a picture of innocence who leads the bridesmaids down the aisle scattering not rose petals but banana peels behind her as she goes; the bridesmaid immediately behind Lulu is slipping and falling, but Lulu displays a perfectly innocent expression. Lulu's subversive tendencies were revealed in deadpan pantomime over the next few weeks. In her third appearance, she stands in a line of men to attend a theatrical event for "Men Only," wearing a phony moustache. In another she brings a cat to a dog show. 

In sitting for a family photograph, she grimaces and frowns while all the rest of the family smiles. Sometimes Lulu is simply clever or inventive. Lining up to take the required cold shower before entering the swimming pool, she wears rain gear and carries an umbrella. To take her pet dog on the trolley, she drapes the animal across her shoulders like the woman next to her who is wearing a fox fur. Lulu is often an irritant to her male playmates. She enters the boys' model airplane flying contest with a bird disguised as a model airplane. But Lulu's forte as a conscience-free scamp is usually without sexist bias. She puts an "I.O.U." in the collection plate at church. Standing next to a fisherman being photographed with his catch, Lulu holds her catch aloft--an old boot. She wears muddy galoshes to a shoe-shine stand. In a library festooned with "Silence" signs, she blows her nose loudly. 

At first, Lulu seemed more nine years old than seven: she had the long, spindly legs of a teenager. But as the years rolled by, Marge made the moppet cuter by shortening her legs and stature and making her head proportionately larger, so that the character was more infantlike and, thus, more appealing. By the end of the feature's run in the Post, Lulu often acted in four-panel comic strips, two panels stacked on another two in the shape of a square single-panel cartoon.

Lulu was almost immediately a hit. Lulu's success as a promotional ploy resulted in her most remembered role: in 1944 Marge signed a contract for Lulu to star in advertising cartoons for Kleenex tissues. 

The last Lulu cartoon in the Post was published on 30 December 1944, but Lulu continued to appear in the magazine--in Kleenex ads, which, for the next fifteen years, made Lulu nearly ubiquitous in newspapers and magazines and on billboards and display cards in trolleys and subways and department stores, even, in 1949 and 1957, in an electronic display in New York's Times Square.

A few months after Lulu left the Post, she made her debut in a comic book. That first issue of Little Lulu was written and drawn by a cartoonist name John Stanley. At first, Stanley's conception of Lulu herself owed quite a bit to Marge'. But Stanley working with Marge's supervisory consent, Stanley refined Lulu's personality somewhat, making her feistier and more assertive and giving her fatboyfriend the name Tubby Tompkins (Marge had called the character "Joe"). Faced with the need for stories with plots, Stanley created the necessary conflict by pitting Lulu against her male playmates; no longer just mischievous, Lulu emerged as a crusading feminist (before the term had been invented), besting the boys at every turn.