Marge (cartoonist)

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Marjorie Henderson Buell (December 11, 1904–May 30, 1993) was an American cartoonist and the creator of Little Lulu. She worked under the pen name "Marge".

Born Marjorie Lyman Henderson in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1904, Buell was 16 when her first cartoon was published.

In 1925 she created her first syndicated comic strip, The Boy Friend, which ran through 1926. Marge was friends with Oz author Ruth Plumly Thompson, and illustrated her unrelated fantasy novel, King Kojo, in 1933. In 1934 she was hired by The Saturday Evening Post. Her Lulu drawing first appeared on the back page of that famous magazine in 1935. That same year, she married C. Addison Buell. The couple had two sons, Fred and Larry, and lived in Malvern, PA.

In 1944, Little Lulu -- to which Buell retained the rights, unusual for the time -- became a daily syndicated comic strip. Buell marketed Lulu widely throughout the 40s. Lulu appeared in comic books, cartoons, greeting cards and much more. Her comic books, popular internationally, were translated into Arabic, Finnish, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Greek. She also did illustrations for Country Gentleman, Ladies Home Journal and Collier's.

Buell stopped drawing Little Lulu for the Post in 1947; after that point her work was continued by others, while she kept creative control. Sketching and writing of the Lulu comic book series was taken on by John Stanley, who later drew Nancy and Sluggo. Buell sold her Lulu rights to Western Publishing when she retired in 1971. "Marge" died of lymphoma in Elyria, Ohio in 1993.

In 2003, an original 1930s watercolor of Little Lulu by Marjorie Henderson Buell brought $584.00 on eBay.

In July 2006, Buell's family donated the “Marge Papers,” to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard. The papers include a collection of fan letters, comic books, scrapbooks of high points in Lulu’s history, and a complete set of the newspaper cartoons. Buell's son Larry is a professor of American Literature at Harvard; Fred is a professor of English at Queens College.