Marjorie Henderson Buell
| Marge | |
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Marge working on a sketch of her most famous character, Little Lulu
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| Born | Marjorie Lyman Henderson December 11, 1904 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Died | May 30, 1993 (aged 88) Elyria, Ohio |
| Nationality | American |
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Notable works
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Little Lulu |
Marjorie Henderson Buell (December 11, 1904–May 30, 1993; née Marjorie Lyman Henderson) was an American cartoonist who worked under the pen name Marge. She was best known as the creator of Little Lulu.
Marjorie Lyman Henderson was born in 1904 in Philadelphia. Homeschooled until she was 11 or 12, she and her two sisters had a talent for art.
At 16 she sold her first cartoon to the Public Ledger. Her work appeared in humor magazines and other periodicals, including Collier's, Judge, Life. She also created illustrations for Country Gentleman and Ladies' Home Journal. By the late 1920s she worked under the name "Marge" and had a syndicated comic strip, The Boy Friend, her first syndicated comic strip, which ran from 1925 through 1926. This and another strip of hers, Dashing Dot, both featuring female leads. Marge was friends with Oz author Ruth Plumly Thompson and illustrated her fantasy novel King Kojo (1933).
In 1934 The Saturday Evening Post requested Buell to create a strip to replace Carl Anderson's Henry. Buell created a little girl character in place of Henry's little boy as she believed "a girl could get away with more fresh stunts that in a boy would seem boorish". The first single-panel instalment ran in the Post on February 23, 1935; in it, Lulu appears as a flower girl at a wedding and strews the aisle with banana peels. The single-panel strip continued in the Post until the December 30, 1944, issue, and continued from then as a regular comic strip. Buell retained the rights, unusual for the time. Buell marketed Little Lulu widely throughout the 1940s. Buell herself ceased drawing the strip in 1947, and in 1950 Little Lulu became a daily syndicated by Chicago Tribune–New York News Syndicate and ran until 1969. After she stopped drawing the strip, Buell herself only drew Lulu for the lucrative Kleenex advertisements.
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